IS CHRISTIANITY A RELIGION?

Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? – Gal 3:3

Some words change in meaning over time. Several centuries ago, it’d be an insult to call someone “nice”, because that meant they were stupid! The same phenomenon is gradually happening to the term ‘religion’ today – at least among evangelicals.

Religion in itself is simply ‘devotion to God’. There’re many: Islam, Hinduism, Tao and, of course, Christianity. These are formal categorisations and to say one does not have any religion is understood to mean that one is an a-theist. In this sense, all Believers belong to the religion called “Christianity”.

However, as we saw yesterday, religion is more than a collection of beliefs; it is ultimately man’s attempt to remedy himself – on his own terms.

This comes in various forms: prayer, meditation, ablution, penance, pilgrimage, sacrifices, séances, etc. Simply put, any act that aims to substitute – or even add to – what the Creator Himself has provided as the solution to man’s sin, is religion. This is the sense in which many Believers are distancing themselves from the ‘religion’ of Christianity.

This dissociation is not new, however. Christianity itself started as a revolt by JEWS (the first disciples) against a pharisaic philosophy that had transformed a stopgap sacrificial system anticipating the Messiah into a full-blown, works-based religion.

Nevertheless, in less than 400 years, with the advent of the Catholic Church, Christianity itself had become steeped in its own tradition, ceremonies and rituals. It wasn’t until 1517 (exactly 500 years ago) that Luther, a Catholic priest, protested against this ‘religion’ (thus precipitating the ‘Protestant’ movement).

Fast-forward to the Church today and it seems the cycle has started again; Believers, mostly Evangelicals, are seeking to distance themselves from ‘religion’ for those very same reasons.

Will this vicious cycle ever stop? No. As long as people keep creating convoluted ways of ‘earning’ their right-standing and favour with God, it would only be a matter of time before whatever they come up with becomes another full-blown religion.

We need to search ourselves and our traditions regularly, and make sure that we’re not – like the Galatian Believers – slipping into ‘religion’ through the addition of other ‘requirements’ for God’s blessings and favour apart from Jesus and His finished work on the Cross.

AMEN.

More Blessings await you today; you’ll not miss them in Jesus’ Name.

GREG ELKAN