But first we must pause long enough to pay attention to a point—a biblical point much neglected today—even more radical than the insistence that Christianity is not a culture-religion. And that is that Christianity is not a religion, period.
Not a Religion!
If we take the Bible to be the primary witness to the heart and core of this faith (and in the tradition of classical Protestantism that is certainly what we should do), we must realize that this collection of writings, accumulated over a period of a thousand years, contains an extraordinarily consistent and often intense quarrel with religion. The prophets of the older Testament waged a continuing struggle against religion, both outside and (even more vehemently) inside their own religious community.
I hate, I despise your festivals
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . .
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice role down like waters . . . (Amos 5:21–22, RSV)
The bitterest opponents of Jesus, and the ones he himself frequently singled out for censor, were those regarded by his society as being the most religious of all. Jesus’s quarrel with the scribes and Pharisees has nothing to do with their being Jewish—that is a vicious fiction of later interpreters, perhaps already beginning with certain strains in the New Testament itself. Jesus himself was Jewish (Christians cannot say that too often!). His criticism of these superreligious ones (criticism strictly in line with the whole prophetic tradition of Israel) rather is at base a criticism of the characteristic tendencies of religion as such, especially when it has hardened into dogma and ritual and moral codes and is made the acid test of human worth and belonging.
“The message of the Bible,” the young Karl Barth was moved to say (because, as minister in a Swiss village that loved to think itself impeccably religious, he knew all about Protestant smugness!) “is that God hates religion.” What we must say about religion, Barth writes, is “that it is the one great concern of godless man.”4 Barth included in his voluminous Church Dogmatics a whole section (about thirty long pages of small print!) titled “Religion as Unbelief”5—a piece of theological reflection comparable to Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom. Religion, Barth wrote—
is a grasping . . . [M]an [sic!] tries to grasp at truth [by] himself . . . But in that case he does not do what he has to do when the truth comes to him. He does not believe. If he did, he would listen; but in religion he talks. If he did, he would accept a gift; but in religion he takes something for himself. If he did, he would let God Himself intercede for God; but in religion he ventures to grasp at God.6
Paul Tillich, though he often disagreed with Barth, was very close to the Swiss theologian in this warning about the wiles of religion. In a sermon titled “The Yoke of Religion,” based on the Scripture text, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden . . . take my yoke upon you,” (Matthew 11:28, KJV), Tillich argues that the burden Jesus wants to take from us is “the burden of religion.” He continues:
We are all permanently in danger of abusing Jesus by stating that He is the founder of a new religion, and the bringer of another, more refined, and more enslaving law. And so we see in all Christian Churches the toiling and labouring of people who are called Christians, serious Christians, under innumerable laws which they cannot fulfill, from which they flee, to which they return, or which they replace by other laws. This is the yoke from which Jesus wants to liberate us. He is more than a priest or a prophet or a religious genius. These all subject us to religion. He frees us from religion. They make new religious laws; He overcomes the religious law . . .
We call Jesus the Christ not because He brought a new religion, but because He is the end of religion, above religion and irreligion, above Christianity and non-Christianity. We spread his call because it is the call to every [person] in every period to receive the New Being, that hidden saving power in our existence, which takes from us labor and burden, and gives rest to our souls.7
It is true that Tillich, elsewhere, is able to use the term religion in a more neutral or sometimes even a positive way, namely, as human striving for meaning and deliverance to which the revelation in Christ comes as answer. But the answer—the gospel or (as he more often calls it) “the Christian message”—is at the same time an answer to the quest of religion and a critique of that quest. Like Barth and most others belonging to the great renewal of Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century that is called (not very instructively) neo-orthodoxy,8 Tillich finds religion at best ambiguous and at worst (as in this sermon) a terrible “burden” under which humankind labors.
Indeed, this kind of distinction between faith and religion became one of twentieth-century Protestantism’s most important insights. One wonders today, when in our many university departments of religion we have so much to say on the subject, whatever happened to this critique of the whole phenomenon! Dietrich Bonhoeffer was another who frequently drew upon this critique and the need to differentiate religion from faith. Bonhoeffer acknowledged that Karl Barth was “the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion—and that [he said] remains his really great merit.”9 Religion, Bonhoeffer believed, is not at all what Christianity at its kerygmatic core is about. “Jesus,” he writes, “does not call [people] to a new religion, but to life.”10 Following an exegetical tradition dating back to the early church, he contrasts the account of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts with the myth of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Babel is the Bible’s most dramatic symbolic depiction of the religious impulse—the impulse, as Barth called it, of “grasping” after the ultimate, the struggle for possession and securitas. In that myth, it will be remembered, human beings, terrified by the precariousness of their creaturehood (well, human creaturehood is precarious; the Bible does not make light of that!), reach up after divine transcendence in a pathetic yet futile effort to secure the future. Their absurd tower—the prototype of many towers!—is an attempt, as it were, to get hold of and control the Controller. What they get instead is a still greater consciousness of their finitude and vulnerability: intent upon possessing divinity, they end in an even greater failure of humanity. Their communality is destroyed, and they cannot communicate with one another any longer. By contrast, Bonhoeffer saw, Pentecost, the beginnings of the Christian movement, does not depict human beings grasping after the Absolute but the reverse: it depicts the Spirit of God grasping and transforming human beings. Babel, the religious quest, ends in greater human alienation; Pentecost, the birth of faith, effects reconciliation among those, even, who cannot fully understand one another.11
Why, we may ask, is it important for us today to revisit and reclaim this neo-orthodox critique of religion—not just of culture-religion, but of religion as such? In the first place, I would say, we should do so because the critique is not just a twentieth-century theological invention but a courageous attempt to recover a genuine and unavoidable biblical theme—a biblical theme marginalized and lost sight of, for the most part, as soon as the Christian religion took upon itself the role of religious establishment. A religion that wants to incorporate and commend itself to everyone cannot afford to be self-critical. It must be promotional, upbeat, positive! During the Christendom ages, whenever biblical