I’m off to Warsaw, Poland for a week of dialogue conversations between the Catholic Church and the Baptist World Alliance, on the theme of ‘The dynamic of the Gospel: towards a common witness’. It is my privilege to co-chair this process. This will be our third meeting and I will present a paper called ‘The challenge of faith beyond religion’. Here I would like to share the conclusion and an appendix to this paper, as it struck me as specially pertinent to this season of Advent, when we look beyond the often depressing realities of the current world to the possibility of God’s new way opening up before us. This was the ethos of the New Testament and the very early church: a condition that the crucified Jesus would somehow ‘return’ or again open up the transforming and radical ways he dealt with people and situations, including the crippling practices of formal religion.
The challenge of faith beyond religion:
Conclusion:
All these elements invite us to see the community of God beyond what we have known and named as ‘the Church’. They also call us to see a community that is much broader than human life: the creator has placed us in community with the animals, mountains and rivers, oceans and skies, not to mention stars and galaxies. To be at home, living at peace with the whole creation is the invitation of the Spirit and some at least are finding the dynamic of the Gospel leading them towards this vision of life.
Such might be the way of faith, to learn from the Spirit both within and beyond the Church.
This is what it might mean to explore a faith beyond ‘religion’. Such exploration will require all the fundamental elements of Spiritual Direction and discernment. These elements might be named as seeing, judging, testifying, praying and acting.
- Our common witness, in response to the decline of ‘religion’ but in the dynamic presence of the Spirit, will involve watching and seeing, as Jesus often called his followers to do.[1]
In seeing, it is essential to do more than ‘merely’ see. It is to see with insight and that means to judge or to make sense of what is offered to us. It is to ‘discern the spirits’ or to rightly divide the word of God, not being blown around by every small wind of ‘doctrine’ or what might sound like it.
2. Having thus discerned the Spirit’s presence, gifts and invitation, we might then testify to that presence and share with others its invitation. Here, characteristically, faith tells a story, and in so doing others contribute to our insight, and maybe help us to test its validity and meaning.
3. Together, we might pray in thanksgiving and in supplication for all that is needed, to respond in faithfulness, with resources and with all due care for what needs to be done.
4. Finally, then, we might act, to join with what the Spirit is already doing.
These activities of discernment and response are involved in the exploration of faith beyond religion. They are what it might mean to work out a ‘non-religious’ interpretation not just of Christian concepts but of Christian life-style, in a rich diversity of situations and contexts.
Appendix
I propose that central to the faith that will live beyond religion are three fundamental elements.
The first of these is a radical, personal and communal commitment to participating in the life and mission of the Spirit in the world. The decline in formal religion and church as we have known it is not the decline in God’s presence in the world. It is a mistake to imagine that the breath of God is somehow withdrawn or the wisdom of the Spirit is absent. The primary challenge of faith beyond religion is to learn again to see, to discern the mission of the Spirit in the world today and to engage with and participate in that.
What this means will vary within contexts, but it has this in common—that it does not mean that Christians have to introduce God’s presence into the world. Rather, here the conviction is that God is already present and active, seeking justice, leading into truth, sustaining and enabling people to flourish. The Spirit is everywhere inviting the whole creation to be at home, together with God.
If, however, the role of faith is not so much to create what God is doing but to join and participate in what God is doing, it is all the more important for people of faith to discern that, to see and to judge what and where this is taking place, and to engage actively in that mission of the Spirit. To be free for this engagement, participation, is at the heart of the idea of a ‘free church’. It is for this participation that the Spirit sets us free.
Secondly, it is vital to affirm that faith beyond religion is not a form of unbelief but is a positive commitment to faith in the salvation promised in the Gospel. The critical element in this faith is the recognition that the gospel stories are not merely ‘once upon a time’. What is recounted in the New Testament texts are stories not only of what happened but of what happens. To use but one theme, those who get into the boat with Jesus will encounter storms. This is Mark’s testimony—that the faith community will be threatened with death, again and again, and will be utterly dependent upon God’s power to calm the seas around it, and the anguish within as well.
Matthew’s Gospel similarly presents the gifts and challenges to the community open to receive them. The Torah becomes wisdom for the present, not merely what has been said in the past. There is food for the hungry and healing for those who have suffered long, comfort for the grieving and welcome for those strangers. All this is recounted in the Gospels as the presence of God’s reign, salvation breaking into the here and now.
The witness of faith beyond religion testifies to these as present realities, breaking into our world. Crucial to this faith, then, is a biblical hermeneutic which enables it to see the story of our faith as being as much about the present as about the past, as much about what God will do as what God has done, as much a gift to us from others, perhaps even from those who espouse no ‘religion’, as anything we may think we have to offer the world. Such faith will read the stories of the Gospel in order to discern the Good News of God already with us and evoking the ‘not yet’ of healing and hope. The Baptist theologian James McClendon expressed this hermeneutical principle, ‘This is that; then is now’. What we see in the biblical text is what is before us now.[2]
Thirdly, faith beyond religion expresses itself in an openness to the dimensions of community created by the Spirit, both in terms of self-conscious Christian identity and in other expressions of community.
This is perhaps the most radical implication of the ideas we have been exploring. The community of faith is not limited to or by the Church, though the Church can and does participate in it. In addition to other images of the Spirit’s mission within and beyond the Church, it may be helpful to consider the community of the Spirit in terms of a neighbourhood, with many homes and people seeking to live together in peace and mutual support. Those with such a vision will find themselves participating in local activity, ranging from interest groups to political activities, social support and caring agencies, and amidst these also those who gather to pray, to nurture one another in faith and hope and love. Diana Butler Bass’s survey of churches experiencing some level of renewal and growth, generally after decades of decline, has found that many are engaged with local community in new ways and not primarily in the form of people coming to worship or other church-run activities.[3] The people of the local church may offer facilities or support for these evocations of neighbourhood community life.
In his magisterial study of the possibilities for faith in a secular context, Charles Taylor sees many ‘nagging dissatisfactions with the modern moral order’, giving rise to ‘the search for adequate forms of spiritual life’.[4] This spirituality of quest ‘has its own kind of universalism, a sort of spontaneous and unreflective ecumenism, in which the coexistence of plural forms of spirituality and worship is taken for granted’.[5] Taylor uses the word ‘bricolage’ to describe this situation. Individuals and groups engage in something of a ‘collage’, drawing from various traditions and influences, to formulate their own distinctive ‘religion’ or spirituality. Implicit in this concept is the idea that it is continuously in process. It is a journey, not a fixed position, and within this journey a new openness to community or shared experience can be seen.[6]
This new ‘ecumenism’, then, is a form of faith that is not achieved through structural or institutional relationship, but rather through the practical participation of local groups and individuals in the shared experience of life together. It is about neighbourhood. At one stage in his exploration of a ‘religionless Christianity’, Bonhoeffer suggested that what was required was essentially two things: prayer and working for justice.[7] These elements may be considered too little, but they are essential to the idea of this new ecumenism. The justice to be sought, however, is not only economic or political justice but must also include ecological concern, the quest for neighbourhood within the earth. These elements, too, are dimensions of community sought by a faith beyond religion. They are both local and global.
I hasten to add, however, that if we engage meaningfully and not defensively with these possibilities, we shall also realise that this form of faith is not without history and it is not without the Church. Rather, this spiritual quest arises in response to the story and invitation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Church is called to participate in this quest for new community, humbling walking alongside its neighbours.
Perhaps the biggest challenge before us, however, is the contrast between the small community described earlier, amongst whom there were at least some who knew the Gospel stories and who also had some sense of what a church might be, and another generation most of whom have not learned any Gospel stories, do not know anything other than negative or disparaging media images of the Church and its ministers, and thus have little or nothing to work with in discerning the Spirit’s presence with them. Here there is both a challenge and an opportunity, for neighbours as story-tellers, who may invite people to discover that all around them there is a creative, inviting and redemptive spiritual reality.
Such faith beyond religion is, then, quite the opposite of those things Bonhoeffer saw as the characteristics of religion. It is rather a stance of humility, discipleship and witness—in short, the dynamic of the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.
[1] The references are many, but one very direct one is Mark 8.18, ‘You who have eyes, can you not see?’
[2] James McClendon, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: Ethics, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986, 31 – 34.
[3] Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the neighborhood church is transforming the faith, New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Some elements of the following discussion are drawn from Frank D Rees, ‘Beyond Religion: The Bad News, Other News, and the Good News’, The Pacific Journal of Baptist Research, Vol. 8, No. 2 (November 2013), 1 – 13.
[4] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007; 533.
[5] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 534.
[6] Graham Ward follows a similar line of analysis in his book True Religion, but he is less optimistic about many of the options emerging in what he calls the ‘re-enchantment’ of post-secular culture. First, Ward notes the way commercialization of religious ideas and sentiment can take bizarre and kitsch form, or on an opposite extreme, religious groups may retreat into confessionalism, with a focus on ‘theology’ that stands over against the culture rather than seeking harmony with it. Graham Ward, True Religion, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. See especially Chapter 4.
[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Thoughts on the day of the baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge’, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 8, English edition edited by John de Gruchy, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009; 383 – 390.
Thank you very much. I have been tottering along these lines for a while – caught between hating the boxed-in feeling of ‘certain religion’ and not wishing to be disloyal. However, the power and vitality of the Holy Spirit gives me confidence to keep tottering and keep reading and watching. With your comments I might now move off at the more even pace and see where your signpost and the Spirit are leading. Blessings of grace and thoughtfulness be yours.
Thank you Frank. What you say in this article really resonates with me.
Lovely to hear from you Catherine. We shall see how the paper goes next week. But obviously, like you, this is how I feel and think too.