But there is an even more important reason why this biblical and neo-orthodox critique of religion needs to be studied and reflected upon today, as part of our attempt, as Christians, to discover a way of living responsibly in the midst of a religiously pluralistic civilization. If and insofar as religion is inherently a kind of grasping, as Barth insisted, it follows that the religious impulse will also be inherently competitive and conflictual. A spiritual struggle motivated by the desire for permanence, certitude, and the possession of ultimate power and verity is not likely to manifest much openness to other claims to truth. To the contrary, it will in all likelihood manifest the kind of exclusiveness that guards its spiritual treasures zealously, and, having as it thinks wrested them from eternity, claims sole ownership of them. Its attitude will be some version of a pronouncement I heard recently from a true-believing Christian reflecting upon Islam: “If I’m right, they’re wrong.” But who can say “I’m right” with that kind of unwavering certitude? Who, coram Deo—standing in the presence of the living God—can attribute such finality to his or her own religious claims?
In introducing this study, I suggested that in all religions there are vulnerable spots—ideas, attitudes, or emphases that under certain sociohistorical conditions are bound to become flash points of conflict. But what we must conclude on the basis of the above analysis is that, at bottom, it is religion itself and as such that constitutes the greatest and most permanent point of friction. Since it concerns that which a community regards as ultimate, the religion of one culture is bound to look upon the religions of other cultures with suspicion and mistrust. In a global village where religious disputation no longer limits itself to quarrels within Christendom but spills over increasingly into the unprecedented meeting of world religions, all of them made newly insecure by their new proximity to and consciousness of one another, the greatest flash point of all is inseparable from the religious impulse as such; with its grasping after security, its scramble for the absolute, and its incapacity for self-doubt and dialogue with others, religion in the global village seems destined for a history of violence. The newly popular atheism of today understands this and capitalizes on it. It argues, with a kind of dogged logic, that the only way humankind can avoid the great catastrophes to which this situation points is by dispensing altogether with “the God delusion.” But Christians are called to embrace a greater realism than that! No one—and certainly not a bevy of smugly atheistic intellectuals—is going to rid homo sapiens of the religious impulse. Contrary to Bonhoeffer’s late musings about the disappearance of homo religiosus,12 it seems likely that human beings will continue to build their towers of Babel, world without end. Sometimes, perhaps especially in times of great insecurity, the religious quest will be dominant; at other times it will be weak or even peripheral. Sometimes it will be religious in the traditional sense; at other times it will be some secular ideology dressed up in what are essentially religious pretentions to finality. But Christians who consider the biblical critique of religion and the role of the Christ in relation to it will be able at least to maintain a critical perspective on religion—especially their own Christian religion! They will be delivered a little, as Tillich says, from the “burden” of religion, which is religion’s perennial temptation to take heaven by storm, to imagine itself above mere creaturehood, and to award itself the place of ultimacy.
And this critical perspective, this distancing ourselves from true-believing religion, is not only the condition without which there can be no significant interfaith dialogue, it is the condition without which the peace of the world from now on will never be sustained. Certainly we must meet one another, in this great new parliament of global religions, as persons of faith; but faith is not synonymous with religion. Probably faith never will be found apart from religion, some religion; but the biblically and theologically informed Christian will nevertheless be able to distinguish between what comes of faith and what comes of religion. And the greatest distinction of all, in this contrast, lies in the readiness of faith, unlike religion, to confess its incompleteness and insufficiency. By definition, faith is a deficiency, a lack, a not seeing (1 Corinthians 13:12), a longing that is made even more poignant by the fact that it is—tentatively, expectantly—in touch with the Ultimate. Authentic faith can never rest content with itself; it can never extinguish its own existential antithesis, doubt; it can never feel that it has arrived at its destination—that now it sees face to face and no longer “through a glass darkly.”
Listen to the way faith speaks, in a statement by one of the great Christian activists and lay theologians of our epoch, a French Protestant who was part of the Resistance, and who was so committed to the possibility of the reign of God that he did not stop with resistance but became the mayor of Bordeaux, thus demonstrating the Reformation insistence that true faith begets (as well as modesty) the courage to work for change. His name was Jacques Ellul, and this is how he described faith:
Faith is a terribly caustic substance, a burning acid. It puts to the test every element of my life and society; it spares nothing. It leads me ineluctably to question my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It‘s the surest road to realizing that ‘the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’13
Such faith, and not religion, is the prerequisite for dialogue between the religions today; and such dialogue is the prerequisite for civilization’s survival.
Culture-Religion and Prophetic Faith
This distinction between faith and religion, which (as I’ve noted) was one of the most important insights of the neo-orthodox school, always prevents me from saying straightforwardly, as people do in ordinary discourse, that Christianity is a religion. In its essence, at its kerygmatic heart—that is, as gospel—it is not. As Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and many others have insisted, Jesus did not come to add yet another religion to the world’s already exhaustive and exhausting religious agenda!
But of course in its historical pilgrimage Christianity has been, is universally described as being, and still even thinks of itself as . . . a religion: a religion that may be compared with other religions; a religion that itself bears all the earmarks of the religions grasping that the Bible and the most faithful theology call in question. As I have already suggested, it is in fact doubtful that one could find any instance or exemplification of Christianity, now or in the past, that did not combine in subtle and confusing ways Pentecost and Babel, faith and religion; and in all likelihood most of what has been called Christianity and continues to be designated such has more of Babel than of Pentecost in it! All the same, it is necessary for serious Christians to keep the distinction between faith and religion always in mind, and to apply it in very concrete and practical ways in the daily life of the church. Empirically speaking, Christianity may never be found apart from a combination of these two antithetical movements of the human spirit—grasping and being grasped, reaching after the absolute and being encountered by the unreachable absolute. But the Christian community that has lost the capacity intellectually and spiritually to distinguish the two at the level of thought and language will be a community in danger of losing its soul.
An important way in which theological scholars during the past century have tried to preserve this distinction is by contrasting two types of religion: culture-religion and prophetic religion. If we are to use the term religion at all to describe Christianity, I believe that something like that type of contrast must be maintained. It may be too daring—and for many too confusing—to say straightforwardly that Christianity is not a religion. But at least contemporary Christians should try to comprehend what it means when theologians insist that at its revelatory core, Christianity is not and ought not to be practiced as a ‘culture-religion.’
The term culture-religion came into prominence in North America in the 1960s, though its antecedents—particularly in German theologies—are much earlier. The term has a particular usefulness in our New World setting, where (as I claimed