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Health & Fitness

Imagine No Religion

An Episcopal pastor offers his thoughts on the future of Christianity as religion.

Where Is Religion Going? 

Consider how often you’ve heard people say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” While it’s hard to say exactly when this idea first originated, it seems to have come into widespread use in the mid-twentieth century. With the advent of Alcoholics Anonymous, this statement was used as a way its members described the spirituality of their Twelve-Step recovery program. Since that time, its usage has grown steadily until now it is used ubiquitously. 

Clearly, something is going on. Some people are beginning to turn away from the aspects of Christianity that they associate with organized religion— officially sanctioned beliefs, approved practices, rigid traditions—seeing them as irrelevant, unhelpful, or even damaging to their spiritual journeys. Yet many of the same people are appropriating some of those same beliefs, practices, and traditions informally and outside the auspices of the organized church. It is not unusual to hear un-churched or de-churched people speaking about their belief in God’s grace, their relationship with Christ, or their practice of centering prayer, monastic chant, or walking the labyrinth. Despite turning away from the religion, to which their families belonged, they don’t see themselves as less spiritual. If anything, they see themselves as more so, because they appropriated these things freely.

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Another sign that the current paradigm of Christianity is in epoch-making flux is the growing Emerging Church Movement. From across the denominational and nondenominational spectrum, groups are forming that reject the current definition of what it means to be church. They focus much less on the specific set of beliefs and practices that defines them and focus more on what is common to Christians across the theological spectrum and on the strengths that various Christian traditions might have to offer. 

This creative, cross-cutting way of exploring what it means to be church has given rise to the popular term “Generous Orthodoxy.” Interestingly, this was first coined by theologian Hans Frei in the 1980s to describe why he, an ordained Baptist minister, was drawn to the Anglican/Episcopal tradition that he eventually adopted. As Frei later put it:

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Split as we are, not so much into denominations as into schools of thought, [what] we need [is] a kind of generous orthodoxy that would have in it an element of liberalism—a voice such as the Christian Century—and an element of evangelicalism—the voice of Christianity Today. I don't know if there is a voice between those two, as a matter of fact. If there is, I would like to pursue it.” (Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative, 1993)


Ironically, while the term was originally coined by an Anglican in the 1980s, it was popularized by an evangelical in the late 1990s. Brian McLaren, then pastor of Cedar Ridge Church in Maryland, would use it to describe a way of approaching orthodoxy within evangelical Christianity that would become the Emerging Church Movement. 

Only recently have mainline denominations such as the Episcopal Church begun to warm up to the Emerging Church and its vision. Meanwhile, the boundaries of denominations have begun to blur. Rents are appearing in the fabric of the church over schools of thought about the nature of church that cut across denominational boundaries.

There is a dawning realization of the distinction between the organization that is called the church and the living organism that is the church. An organization that is called the church is a collection of individuals who cooperate within an agreed-upon structure to conduct business that achieves a common goal. The organism that is the church is a living thing with a vision built into it by God that constantly adapts its actions and its organization to bring that vision to life in each new generation. Organisms must have organization to survive, yet a particular organizational structure cannot ensure the survival of the organism. Ironically, to the extent the organization called the church insists upon having certainty of its own self-preservation, it drains away the vitality of the organism that is the church.

As religion falters, we are forced to let go of the certainty of self-preservation, and in its place to turn to more essential things that unite us. Just as we were required to shift our understanding of the love that remains when Christendom fell and the faith that remains when Foundationalism falls, so we must adapt our understanding of the hope that remains when religion ceases to make the most sense in our spiritual lives. What God is turning us toward is not a hope for a particular outcome, but a confidence that God will bring about the future that God wants. 

Moses at the burning bush was faced with the paradox of the bush that burned yet was not consumed. He realized with God-given clarity that he was standing on holy ground. Like Moses, we must wrestle with a new reality that defies complete understanding, and yet strive to understand it as well as we can so that we might teach it, preach it, and pass it on. Faith in the twenty-first century must adopt a paradoxical stance of both confidence and humility. 

The following are some thoughts about where this would leave us. 

  • Confident of Inspiration yet Skeptical of Perfect Understanding. 
  • Comprehending that the Heart of Orthodoxy is Love of Christ. 
  • Perceiving that the Purpose of Orthodoxy is Unity in the Essentials. 

We begin to appreciate that the church’s creedal statements of orthodoxy function more effectively as descriptions of the boundary criteria for our understanding of God, than they do as any precise definition of God’s nature. In fact, we have learned that it was the attempts of early church leaders to be too precise in their descriptions of the nature of God that got them into trouble. We should therefore be humble in our use of orthodoxy—using it as a tool to unify rather than as a weapon to exclude people. 

Indeed, what each of us thinks of as orthodoxy has at least as much to say about what we believe than what God holds to be essential truth. The more intuitively true something seems to us, the more likely we are to believe it to be universal truth. And it might be, but it could just as easily be merely a projection of our own comfortable assumptions. The longer our church has held something to be true, the more we are likely to believe that it must be eternal truth. And it might be, but it might simply be a belief that seemed reasonable at a certain time or that seemed to have universal application within a specific cultural situation.

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