[07/31/20]
This begins what feels at the moment may be the most difficult portion of this whole effort. Arguably, this first section is a recapitulation of everything I’ve written to date, but I intend for it to take a different course. We shall have to see how that works out. But we do hit a number of difficult topics as we begin to consider the nature of revealed religion. After all, if it is revealed, it is rather binding, isn’t it? If it is revealed, then we have need to set aside personal preferences, and we ought reasonably to expect wide, even wholesale agreement on the subject matter. But historically, any such wholesale agreement has been conspicuously absent.
We may tend to view this lack of agreement as a particularly modern development, or even a matter that arose because of the Reformation, and the rise of Protestantism. But that would be a gross over-simplification of the historical record. The early councils of the Church, which long predated any branch of the Protestant movements, were made necessary precisely because wholesale agreement was lacking. Arguably, if we go back to the days of the Apostles, we already see a distinct absence of wholesale agreement in the ministries of Peter and Paul. Let me be exceedingly clear here. I am not saying, nor do I believe that there is a doctrinal divide between Petrine Christianity and Pauline Christianity, nor ought there to be any sort of divide between the Jewish and Gentile practice of the Christian faith. I personally find the idea of a Petrine doctrine versus a Pauline doctrine versus a Johannine doctrine completely at odds with the overarching concept of revealed religion.
Again, if it is revealed, then whatever man has managed to make of it, it begins as the direct expression of God Himself. God being Truth, and Truth being as uncontradictory and unchanging as God, it cannot be that there are multiple systems of belief out there that, in spite of their clear and obvious differences, all give full expression to Truth. I have my doubts that we can find even one such system which, as practiced, has managed to give full expression to Truth. This does nothing to diminish the value and necessity of Truth and of a deep, soul and spirit touching concern for Truth on our own part. I would simply say that it is rather like the process of sanctification for us; an ongoing process of realigning our thoughts, our words, and our deeds to draw closer to that perfection of Truth and Holiness day by day. It is not, as experience must bear out in each one of us, a constant progression in the right direction, but suffers ups and downs, setbacks that may give us cause for concern at certain points in our personal walk.
The same can be said of the Church as a whole. There, too, understanding and progress have not always made the gains one might hope, but oftentimes, the Church has been beset by such falsities and doubts as have set her back for long ages. Fortunately for all, neither the Church as a whole, nor the Christian as an individual, rest on the success of their own efforts and perfections for final hope and salvation. Both rest wholly and solely upon the Rock, Christ Jesus.
1. Defining Religion
A. Faith and Doctrine
[08/01/20]
So, what is religion? The initial thoughts put forth on that question in Buck’s Theological Dictionary are helpful here. He begins with the derivation of the word, which derivation is actually in question. He points us to Cicero, who derives the word from rilegere, a verb meaning to reconsider. But then, we also have Servius deriving it from religare, to bind fast. I might suggest that the sum of it is that both roots have their place in the understanding of religion. On the one hand, there is the call to be a diligent student of what constitutes the worship of God. On the other there is the reverence that comes of recognizing the superiority of God. I should say the two go hand in hand. One cannot fully appreciate the superiority of God without exerting the effort of studious consideration of what He has revealed about Himself, which is to say, devotion to understanding Scripture. At the same time, such a devotion to understanding Scripture, and what it tells us about God could hardly matter to us all that much without a sense of God’s godhood, His supremacy and power.
That article goes on to distinguish natural and revealed religion, the first being that which is available to reason, and the second being that which must come of divine inspiration or revelation. Here, the author observes something akin to what I have observed above, that it cannot be an either/or. It cannot have been wholly revealed religion that brought about the continuance of faith, but neither could natural religion have come to full understanding and appreciation of our fallen nature and of the grace of God who saves without God revealing Himself to us.
This, although I read the article subsequent to roughing in the outline for this section on revealed religion, neatly encapsulates the thought of the present subhead regarding faith and doctrine. Here we have two facets of religion that are on occasion proposed as being at odds one with another. Those who are particularly enamored of faith, or at least their idea and conception of faith, look upon doctrine as something akin to the dead letter of the Law. They see the contrast of Law and Spirit, and suppose that one could restate it as doctrine and faith, and having done so, the choice of faith over doctrine seems quite obviously the only proper course. But the whole chain of thought depends on a false equivalence and therefore results in a false conclusion.
I suppose we shall have to attempt a few more definitions here. What is faith? Well, we can boil it down to the simplest of things and say that faith is believing. But then we must consider what it is that is believed, and if it is believed, why so? To be sure, faith does indicate belief. But belief takes many forms and may look upon a particular set of circumstances, events, or whatever sort of data with greatly varied result. The Christian looks at the data of current events, it is to be hoped, rather differently than would an atheist, a Muslim, or even a Jew. Pretty much any worldview man might adopt expresses faith of some sort. It is belief in something as explaining the world around him. It is the set of filters by which he interprets the events of life. And whatever that worldview may be, whatever set of beliefs define it, we may readily suppose that the man possessed of that worldview has full confidence in the rightness of it. This holds, however wrong he may in fact be, and because of his confidence in the rightness of it, every event and circumstance will tend to confirm it to his thinking because every event and circumstance has been filtered and interpreted through that worldview. Having been thus processed, of course it complies.
We are no less at risk of such false confirmation in our thinking. However much we may profess Christian faith, we profess very little of substance in doing so. It’s an empty and rather pointless profession without some definition given to the content of faith. Well, then: We believe. That’s wonderful. What do we believe? We believe there is a God. Yes, and so does a large swath of the world’s populace; arguably even the atheist, although he effectively posits himself as filling the role. Oh, but we believe there is a God and His name is Jesus Christ. Well and good. One might ask why you believe that. On what basis do you conclude that this is the case? Well! He is revealed in the Bible! Scripture says… But on what basis do you conclude that Scripture is of any more significance than, say, the Koran, or even ‘War and Peace’? What about all those other claimants to being part of this Bible you uphold. They appear to speak of this same God whose name is Jesus Christ. Why are they rejected and these selected texts upheld?
You know, you work through these questions and more and more who claim a Christian faith begin to prove that their claims are misplaced. For those that remain, it becomes equally clear that belief rests on something more than just, “it is written.” That’s a good marker for those who believe, and where it is written – and, I must insist, properly understood – we ought to find our religion tending toward the Servius definition, and accounting that which is written as binding upon us. But you don’t get there just by seeing words on the page. You have first to have assigned significance to the presence of that page, and you must apply God-given intelligence both to read with any comprehension those words you find written and to arrive at proper understanding of them.
What I come down to, then, which may have been obvious from the outset, is that faith requires doctrine as much as doctrine requires faith. However much one may decry the very idea of doctrine, and account a divisive and even killing concept, the fact is that you have doctrines. If you believe, you believe something. If you have faith, that faith has some definition. However hazy the definition may be, and however difficult for you to put into words, the fact is there is something upon which faith is founded, and that something constitutes doctrine. That doctrine may be right or wrong, and your faith well-founded or entirely spurious, but the connection of faith and doctrine remains. It cannot be otherwise.
As I have said, this whole exercise of “What I Believe” has been an effort to set forth the doctrines which define my faith. I’m not sure how well I’ve done in that regard, for I know too well my tendency to wander down various trails of thought. But hopefully I have at least managed to convey, even by these mental excursions, what it is that defines my faith, my worldview. But don’t suppose it stops with something so parochial as worldview. A faith built solely upon the results of reason has not yet achieved religion properly. Going back to Buck’s article, we are stuck at natural religion. We have observed the world around us, and for my purposes, let that world for the moment include in its scope that which we find written in the Scriptures, and reached a set of conclusions. We have, perhaps, arranged a moral framework for ourselves. But, as is so widely the issue of our present day, our moral framework is as yet no more than opinion.
It should be quite evident from observing the world around us that it is entirely possible for one to read the Bible quite thoroughly, and with a reasonable, even a pronounced understanding of the points it conveys, and yet not arrive at faith. The folks who would teach the Bible as Literature, or who go through such a course, may come to some appreciation of the text on its artistic merits, may even find its moral proposals to their liking, and yet fail entirely to come to faith. They may discover in its pages certain habits they think it might prove beneficial to adopt. But God remains far from them.
What of us? What if we discover that for all that we have committed ourselves to the study of Scripture and Scripture’s message for mankind, we have in fact reached false conclusions about God and man? What if, in the end, our faith is as founded on falsehoods as everybody else? And on what basis shall we make such determination? After all, if this is really about God and man, and the God revealed in Scripture is so utterly and unopposably powerful as He is shown to be, then we have great reason to be concerned. If this God revealed in the Bible is not in fact the true God, then we ought to be rather energized to cast it aside and seek elsewhere for the God Who is true God. After all, said being must surely be exceedingly offended by our rejection of Him for this fabrication of ours.
[08/02/20]
So, here is our working definition of religion. Religion consists in faith believing in that set of beliefs contained in sound doctrine. Religion is neither dead nor alive, but simply a term by which we address the whole system of our beliefs. If there is a system to our beliefs, then to be sure, there are doctrines by which we could describe that system. Even if there be no system, still our beliefs, to be believed, must be capable of being stated, and when those beliefs are stated, what has been stated are our doctrines. In simple truth, it is impossible to have belief without doctrine, for without doctrine, there is, quite simply, nothing to believe.
The question then becomes on what basis do we believe what we believe, and is that basis sound? For all that the source of the thought is quite possibly one of the least promising sources for anything approaching serious truth, I still come back to a bit of verse from a band from my misspent youth. “If you’re a believer, what do you believe? Why do you believe it?” Honestly, it’s entirely insufficient to profess faith or belief. Everybody believes something and has faith in what they believe. That alone is of no value whatsoever. The lunatic is entirely convinced of his fantasy world, and believes it utterly. That doesn’t make it reality. Those suffering from sexual dysphoria, or even species dysphoria do not, for all their depth of conviction to the contrary, make themselves other than what they are by nature. They may have full faith in their being trapped in the wrong body, or what have you, but it remains no nearer the truth for all their faith.
The Christian faith, which is to say, the Christian religion, is founded upon those things we found recorded in the Scriptures contained in the Bible. It is established on the premise that what we find therein is found therein because the God Who Is saw fit to have it recorded there, and has seen to it, through the course of history, that despite the worst efforts of man and devil, that record has remained intact for each succeeding generation. One may well ask on what basis we would make such a claim for a set of writings that are clearly the product of men like ourselves. One simple answer is that the resultant material is shockingly consistent. Unlike other proposed religious texts, it does not require one to hold one view of truth in certain circumstances, only to have those truths rejected in other circumstances. It does not present a changing truth, but Truth Unchanging.
Another telling feature, I think, is that these texts do not paint an unrealistic view of the heroes of the faith. The greatest men and women we find to be wholly human in their failings and their victories. The Bible does not insist that we view mankind, or individual men in any light other than their real nature. Neither does it present us with a God of the like we might imagine for ourselves. Compare the god of the Bible to those gods which populated the ancient mythologies, and we find something quite distinct. He is fearsome in power, yes, but not to be feared abjectly. There is a holy fear, but it is not a cringing fear. It is a reverent awe, which is something completely different. Yes, God is all-powerful, and yes, He is so utterly holy as to be unwilling to tolerate the presence of sin in the least. But He is also utterly faithful to His own, utterly loving, and shockingly merciful.
One could reasonably imagine a god fashioned by man who is in essence raw power personified. There are plenty of historical examples of such idols. One could imagine a god fashioned with the sole purpose of backing some human power. Think, for example, of the gods of Egypt, and the way they served to promote Pharaoh himself as a god. One could imagine a god who is all beneficence all the time, an ATM god along the lines of the ideas promoted by the prosperity gospel movement. Indeed, we discover all manner of gods imagined by man, and more than enough of them propped up as representing the Christian God, but by and large, these prove to be mere idols, and not even idols of clay. They lack even that much substance.
But the God Who is presented in the Bible is entirely other. He is, by His own admission, not of the sort that would recommend Himself to our attention. From long before His advent as the Man Christ Jesus, we hear of Him. “He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him” (Isa 53:3). We discover a God who is not ashamed to confess His part in calamity. “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these” (Isa 45:7). Compare and contrast that to the gods of the surrounding nations in that day. Each of these purported gods had their domain, their realm of influence, and no more. One might have a god of light, but there would be another in charge of darkness. One god might bring benefit, but another would deal with calamity. Face it, to our thinking, these are such opposites as ought not to be conceivable as belonging to one being. Of course, if we look at our own condition with open eyes, we discover that we, too, in our far lesser fashion, contain these same conflicting forces.
But this God is faithful – utterly faithful. He puts forth covenants with His own, and then undertakes to uphold them by the word of His own power, knowing them beyond the capacity of those He accepts as His own. The whole course of Scripture reveals this to be the story. The entirety of the message is that you can’t, and therefore, God has. “Truly I have spoken; truly I will bring it to pass. I have planned it, surely I will do it” (Isa 46:11). In that specific instance, the message is one of corrective punishment on a grand scale, but the same applies to the message of salvation.
If I might try and return to my main point, the Bible presents us with a great deal of data upon which to act. It does not, in and of itself, guarantee belief, but it is powerful to produce belief in those to whom God extends His favor. But again, one can read the text and reach myriad false conclusions. This comes of our fallen nature, and our desire to conform religion to our own preferences. It requires diligence and effort to maintain the mindset willing to learn from God as He has revealed Himself in these pages. It requires care to see clear of our preferences to the truth of the message that is being presented to us.
Faith that does not undertake such effort is at risk of being little more than wishful thinking. Careful attention to the doctrines of Scripture without faith is nothing more than a philosophical exercise in moralizing. The system of religion, the religion that constitutes true worship of the True God, must have both. “Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (Heb 11:6). But believe He is what? Who? How is He to be sought? If He has detailed the answers to these questions, surely our seeking of Him must follow His directions. Surely our worship of Him must be shaped by His instructions. Surely our faith must be built upon those doctrines He proclaims.
That instruction which He has provided includes these words. “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the word of truth” (2Ti 2:15). What is the word of truth? It is the message of Scripture, which is the Word of God. But observe that it requires accurate handling. This is as I have been attempting to make plain: The Word mishandled is the devil’s work. We have many who suppose that the capacity to fish out a verse that appears to support their cause is enough to declare that cause biblical. Any attempt such as this one I am undertaking is ever at risk of taking the same sort of approach, or being accused of having done so. But context matters. I admit that on occasion I have sprung a verse from its context to be applied to a different situation, but I trust I have not applied it to a different meaning.
The devil, as we see in the temptation of Christ at the outset of His ministry, is perfectly capable of fishing out verses to support his lies. I rather suspect he has a better ability to quote the text than any Christian has achieved. But quoting the text is insufficient if we have missed the point. Simply saying, “it says so in the Bible” is not enough, I’m afraid. We need to handle the text accurately, to understand the circumstance in which it is said, to understand the nature of the writing in which it is said, and to perceive how this fits as one piece with the whole of what God has revealed of Himself and of man. It requires, then, the effort of establishing and understanding doctrine combined with the eyes of faith, trained and tutored by God indwelling, to maintain a true faith in the true God.
And where such true faith is found, I dare say it shall be found producing at least a tendency towards true practice. James is quite right that faith without works is a dead and valueless faith (Jas 2:20, Jas 2:26). But this is not said in opposition to Paul’s message that man is saved by faith alone (Ro 1:17). After all, both James and Paul are relaying something more than opinion. They write under the authority and oversight of the Holy Spirit. When James says, “You see that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone” (Jas 2:24), the message must be held in harmony with the teaching of God through Paul. With that in view, we recognize that James is indicating much the same thing as Paul; that faith, where it is real, produces fruit. A faith that does not result in works cannot be faith such as revealed religion insists must be present in the believer. Here again we arrive back at doctrine, for it is doctrine that defines for us what works are good, what fruit is expected, what this life of the redeemed is supposed to look like.
The summation of this section is, then, that revealed religion combines faith and doctrine, requires faith and doctrine in full harmony one with the other. It proposes a set of truths, declaring those truths to be revealed by God and therefore necessary to believe. It presents manifold evidences by which to back its claims. It presents God at work in history, a history quite confirmable by those nearer to events when these various texts were written. The Pentateuch, for example, was written for a generation that had known Moses. The historical books covering the monarchy of Israel were written in a day when the kings and priests and prophets and events were still relatively recent history. The record of Jesus in the Gospels was presented to the world when hundreds, if not thousands of witnesses were yet present to point out any errors. The epistles address people who were, for the most part at least, quite familiar with the author of the epistle. They had known the author, observed his life practice in their midst. They could, if they so chose, compare notes with other church bodies. I think of Paul’s message to the Corinthians. “Only, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk. And thus I direct in all the churches” (1Co 7:17). “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints” (1Co 14:33). “Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I directed the churches of Galatia, so do you also” (1Co 16:1). It is one faith, in one God, establishing one people for the one purpose of worshiping Him Who Was, and Who Is, and Who is to come.
