Religion

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Traditionally, "natural theology" or "natural religion" denotes the theology or religion human reason, the light of nature, comes up with. Until the late 17th century, Cicero's work On the Nature of the Gods was considered a standard reference. While the existence of "natural religion" (and of numerous non-Christian positive religions as variations and elaborations of the philosophical abstraction "natural religion") is a fact, its meaning for Christian theology has become a matter of contention.

The following paragraphs, in a preparatory manner, shed some light on the biblical account of the origin of the true religion and of the false religions, of the true church, and false churches, and on the role of reason in all of this.


Contents

[edit] The Biblical Foundation

According to the Bible, true religion might be described as calling upon the name of the Lord, and upon his name alone (1 Ki. 18:24, cf. Ex. 20:3, 7; Psa. 148:13). At the same time it is clear from the Bible that true religion did not and does not originate in man’s own heart. In order to call upon the name of the Lord, there has to be faith. Faith, however, does not come from introspection but from hearing the Word of God, which therefore of course has to be made heard by preaching (cf. Rom. 10:13-17). In this way God himself makes his name known (Ex. 34:5-7; Acts 4:10-12; 1 Cor. 1:2). Thus, the preaching of God, in other words, the preached God himself, is the origin of the true religion.

According to the Bible, the true religion – the Church, as it were – has its origin in the paradise. When God according to Gen. 2:16f. preaches to Adam and lays his Word before him to freely eat from everything in the Garden except for the tree of knowledge, he in fact, as Luther put it, instituted the Church.[1] Adam’s obedience to God’s commandment not to eat from the tree is part of his external worship in return for the many gifts he receives from God. Part of this worship is also the praise, the thanksgiving, and the joy in the Lord. All this taken together indeed is the purest and simplest form of worship and religion, given by God himself to the first human being by his Word.[2]

Yet man was not content with this divine religio nudissima, purissima et simplicissima, "religion in its barest, purest, and simplest form" (AE 1:106). The question posed by the Serpent (Gen. 3:1), "Has God indeed said ...?" was indeed the first "pious question" in the sense that now false worship, impure religion came into being according to the pious ideas of man’s heart, apart from the preached Word; in this new religion man established himself as god and judge above the preached Word of God.[3] This self-worship of one creature instead of the Creator out of the desire to be wise, to have religious-ethical insight and judgment apart from the preached Word of God is easily expanded to worshiping other creatures, as Paul points out (Rom. 1:22f., 25),[4] with the ensuing moral depravity as God’s punishment (Rom. 1:24, 26-31, cf. Wis. 14:22-27).

Yet, again, God preached again to Adam and Eve after their rise above the preached God to the stage of Antichrist.[5] Thus true religion under the preached God is re-instituted, and Adam and Eve are re-humanized. This preaching is, because of the changed character of the addressees, different from the original sermon. Now the voice of God makes man afraid at first (Gen. 3:8, 10), because now its Law-element is not anymore simply an admonition along the lines of the "third use," so to speak; now it condemns and kills. By God’s mercy now the dimension of forgiveness of sins is added to the "aboriginal" Gospel, that is, to the Word of God proclaiming the goodness of God toward mankind, which Adam and Eve so clearly beheld in God’s creation as well. This promise of forgiveness and new, eternal life is based on the death and resurrection of the Son of God who walked in the Garden in the cool of the day, bruised but not crushed, as Moses says (Gen. 3:15).

Having eaten from the tree of knowledge, all humans now have knowledge of good and evil in their hearts (Gen. 3:22; Rom. 1:32; 2:14f.). Because of man’s becoming sinful, however, this knowledge, even if it is accompanied by the required deeds, is not sufficient to please God. It is part of man’s sinfulness not to acknowledge the impact of sin on all their deeds. This is shown in the incident of the sacrifice of the two sons of Adam and Eve, which is followed by the first attack of the Serpent condemned to the ground on the woman’s seed, the shepherd, by the tiller of the ground.[6] For the problem of Cain’s sacrifice that renders it unacceptable to the Lord is that it was done apart from the Word of God preached through Adam. Unlike Abel’s it was offered in sin, i.e., without faith in the future Messiah (Hebr. 11:4; 1 John 3:12, cf. Rom. 14:23).

As a punishment Cain is excommunicated from the true Church by God through Adam and condemned to the state he had brought himself into already, the unstable life without the certain mandate and promise of God, so that he now has to hide himself from the face of God. By doing so he replaces the preached God by the hidden God (Gen. 4:11f., 14, 16).[7] Adam, Eve, Seth, and Enosh, however, the true Church – from now on under the constant persecution of the false church (cf. Matt. 23:35) – gather around the comforting preached God and begin to call upon the name of the Lord. This means, they worship the Son of God according to the foundational First Table of the Ten Commandments (Gen. 4:26).[8]

From this time on there are always two groups among mankind:[9] Firstly, those who, instructed by the certain mandate and promise of God’s Biblical Word, call upon his name: called by name, they call him by name also.[10] Secondly, there are also always those who, separated from Christ, the Word, follow the distorted instincts of their hearts when confronted with the sublime in their lives, be it abundance and blessing, be it extreme scarcity and curse.[11] Israel is also in this sense paradigmatic for all humankind: after turning away from the preached God, it is handed over to the hidden God and his man-made surrogates (e.g., Deut. 4:27f.; 28:36, 64; 31:15-18; 32:15ff., esp. v. 20), even to a false law that kills even if kept (Ez. 20:25).[12]

[edit] Confessional Exposition

Problems show who one’s god is, upon whom or what one calls or, respectively, relies for the solution of one’s problems (LC I, 1-3).[13] The confessions acknowledge the innate desire of mankind to relate in some form to some kind of extra nos, even in the most depraved form of idolatry, that is, works righteousness (LC I, 17-23). Yet the ways part when it comes to dealing with a bad conscience caused by the generally known will of God (Ap IV, 7; LC III, 67).

The natural inclination will always be to do what men do when dealing with their peers, namely, to attempt to placate the god known from experience – one’s bad conscience – with (better) doing what his will requires, be it in the moral realm, be it in the cultic realm through sacrifices (Ap IV, 393-395). The unbelievers outside and inside the Church observe what the believers do as a fruit of their hidden faith and conclude based on their carnal reason that works and sacrifices are the way to obtain a propitious God, not the spontaneous response to having such a God through faith (Ap IV, 203-212, 265). Only the certain Word of the Gospel can liberate man from his ingrained enthusiasm of always wanting to seek God in his own heart, apart from the external and, in our times, Biblical Word and means of God; this individual pursuit of salvation certainly explains the large number of religions and "faiths" in the world after Adam well enough (Ap IV, 265f.; SA III,VIII, 5, 9f.).[14]

Those, however, to whom the saving name of the triune God is revealed through the Gospel in their baptism will faithfully call upon him alone in all the needs and thus give him the due honor (LC I, 63f., 70; III, 8; IV, 26f.).[15]

[edit] The Modern Discussion

The Biblical and confessional parts agree with each other as they distinguish between the true religion on the one hand and the false religions on the other. True religion was initiated by a verbal self-revelation (‘preaching’) of God in mandate and promise. False religions originate in the human being itself as it is confronted with the sublime in its environment. Thus, the latter have a chiefly experiential basis; due to the ambivalent character of human experience in the world – bad follows good in a seemingly random order – no certainty can be achieved as to the true disposition of God toward mankind.

[edit] Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher

In Schleiermacher’s theological system there is a fundamental shift regarding the basis of religion. Every external form of communication of the divine is considered inferior. Since Schleiermacher locates religion in the realm of sentiment or, respectively, feeling, verbal statements are ultimately inadequate to the Gefühl schlechthiniger Abhängigkeit ("feeling of utter dependence") – that is, piety (Frömmigkeit), the essence of all religions –, because they belong to a different category. When there are individual human beings necessary in certain revealed religions, then their task is to accurately communicate their inner self-consciousness as it is shaped by the experiential ‘revelation’ of the divine to make an impact on the self-consciousness of their hearer. A reference to some external event, e.g., a classic theophany, is considered superfluous.[16]

Tentatively assuming a development in the human self-consciousness, Schleiermacher claims a development in the religious realm also. The more human self-consciousness is able to relate to the world as a whole, the more it will also be able to relate to God as one (15.2). Therefore the worship of an individual item (= idolatry), not atheism – "nothing comes from nothing; and what is to develop in the soul of man already needs to have a germ in it originally" (§ 15.3) – is the lowest form of religion, (Christian) monotheism the highest. Yet this is not to say, according to Schleiermacher, that there was no origninal monotheism of at least a part of humankind.

Therefore, Christianity is to be understood in the context of, and in comparison with, the other religions, of which it is the highest form due to the purity of its monotheism.

[edit] Today

[edit] Paul Althaus

The Erlangen theologian sought to appropriate the heritage of Schleiermacher from a Lutheran perspective for an evaluation of the non-Christian religions. He, too, starts with the experience of God.[17] Similar to Schleiermacher, Althaus sees both truth and error in all religions. Their truth consists in the belief in a god. In this sense he can see the religions as part of God’s activity of sustaining the fallen creation (cf. Deut. 4:19). Their error consists in conceiving of God not as a person, in not placing the radical problem of sin at the center, and in not being based on God’s act in Jesus Christ (§ 16). It is first the Gospel – that is, God’s salvific activity in Christ, who is the eternal content in the at times contradictory historical form of the apostolic witness (§§ 18, 20) – that reveals where truth and error lie in the other religions (cf. § 4). It is also first the Gospel that redeems man from the ambivalence of the religious experience of the hidden God (§ 11).

Thus, in comparison to Schleiermacher, Althaus sees a clear break between Christianity and the other religions, although he too allows for an inner connection, namely, experience. This experience becomes also a criterion to distinguish between God’s and men’s word in the Biblical canon. The undermined Bible naturally raises the question whether genuine, that is, external certainty can ever be achieved, whether one, even when dealing with the deus praedicatus, can ever get beyond the ambivalent and ultimately deadly deus absconditus. After all, the one God also instituted the non-Christian religions.

[edit] Religious Sciences

Schleiermacher is also foundational for a religious-scientific approach to the world religions. Theo Sundermeier, e.g., attempts to vindicate non-Christian religions. They are not simply made up by humans, but have a transcendent source, which can be, and in fact is, experienced by man.[18] Human language is, of course, seen as incapable of fully expressing the depth of that experience (15). The common denominator of all religions built around these experiences consists in serving the purpose of ameliorating and stabilizing human life through cult/culture and ethics (35f.). Consequently, Sundermeier, not unlike Althaus, locates religions in the sphere of God’s activity of sustaining mankind. Religious science cannot answer the question where certain salvific truth is to be found (239ff.).

[edit] Critique

One can certainly say that religion fosters human life in communion, albeit not without qualifications. The question is, however, whether seeing the activity of God the Creator in non-Christian religions has a Biblical basis at all. Althaus refers to Deut. 4:19 – already Clement of Alexandria based his apologetic concept of God’s providential care for all humans at all times on this text[19] – and Gal. 4:1f. and interprets these and similar texts in the context of an evolutionary view of humanity (136f.), that resembles the approach of G. E. Lessing to religion.[20] It seems safe to say that God’s Law in the hearts of mankind is part of his contribution to sustain the world from collapsing prematurely. Similarly, through his activity of continually sustaining creation he did not leave himself without witness in the realm of nature. Yet it cannot be substantiated biblically that God actually "gave" idols to mankind. This simply would be self-contradictory.

Paul in fact seems to justify some kind of developmental approach to human history in Gal. 3:23-25; 4:1-3, 8f. Yet in light of the biblical record of human history this immaturity of humankind is primarily self-caused.[21] Its cause simply lies in turning away from the preached Word of God, be it the Son or the Bible. As seen in Cain, this makes out of God’s good Law a deadly prison, because in the mind of the sinner it only reinforces worshiping God by "good (religious) deeds" apart from the preached Law and Gospel.

[edit] Conclusion

Only the preached God is the "source" of true religion. Since he does not preach many different things but chiefly one person, Jesus Christ as the Savior of fallen mankind, there can only be one religion. In primarily relying on the admittedly fuzzy human experience of God, false religion within and outside of Christianity in fact deals with the ambivalent hidden God.[22] Since this is an encounter with the divine majesty outside of Christ it is ultimately against God’s will and therefore deadly. Christian theology must steer clear of this approach to "religious phenomena" to remain faithful to the certain Biblical Word of the preached and preaching God in Law and Gospel.

[edit] False Churches/World Religions

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ Cf. Luther's Works: American Edition (AE), vol. 1:103: "Here we have the establishment of the church before there was any government of the home and of the state; for Eve was not yet created. Moreover, the church is established without walls and without any pomp, in a very spacious and very delightful place." How did this take place? "In this passage the church is established, ... Here the Lord is preaching to Adam and setting the Word before him. ... if Adam had remained in innocence, this preaching would have been like a Bible for him and for all of us; and we would have had no need for paper, ink, pens, and that endless multitude of books which we require today, although we do not attain a thousandth part of that wisdom which Adam had in Paradise." (AE 1:105).
  2. ↑ Cf. AE 1:106: "But it is useful to note also that God gave Adam Word, worship, and religion in its barest, purest, and simplest form, in which there was nothing laborious, nothing elaborate. For He does not prescribe the slaughter of oxen, the burning of incense, vows, fastings, and other tortures of the body. Only this He wants: that he praise God, that he thank Him, that he rejoice in the Lord, and that he obey Him by not eating from the forbidden tree."
  3. ↑ Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Schöpfung und Fall, Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Werke (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1989), 3:98ff. In AE 1:161 Luther comments on Gen. 3:6: "This high and mighty wisdom, which makes an effort at the veneration and worship of God, was planted by Satan and by original sin into this wretched nature, so that after men have disregarded the Word which God set before them for their salvation, they might turn to their own thoughts." See also AE 1:147: "Unbelief is the source of all sins; when Satan brought about this unbelief by driving out or corrupting the Word, the rest was easy for him."
  4. ↑ Cf. AE 1:149, where Luther characterizes people as idolaters "not because they worship stones and pieces of wood, but because they give up the Word and worship their own thoughts"
  5. ↑ Cf. AE 33:139 based on 2 Thess. 2:14 where the (Byzantine) Majority Text has an "as god" beyond the Nestle-Aland text (see the New King James Version). This "as god" was the promise of Satan, Gen. 3:5.
  6. ↑ Luther, like Augustine, understands Abel and Cain as representatives of the two churches, the church of the hypocrites, seeking justification by works, and the Church of the believers, who are despised and sinful before the world (הבל (hbl) means vapor, breath), but honored and blameless before God because of their faith in the messias futurus, cf. AE 1:252-255 and Augustine, The City of God XV, 7, where he sees in Cain the archtypical behavior of citizen of the other city in that he performs acts of worship in order to use God to obtain some worldly good (uti Deo, frui mundo) instead of simply using worldly things to enjoy God (frui Deo, uti mundo).
  7. ↑ Cf. the important comments by Luther, AE 1:300f.: "Thus all the descendants of Cain were wandering and unsettled. They did not have the promise and command of God, and they were without any sure rule by which to live and to die. ... Seth, who was born later, as well as his descendants, had a definite promise, definite places, definite ceremonies for the worship of God, whereas, in contrast, Cain was a wanderer."
  8. ↑ Cf. AE 1:328.
  9. ↑ Cf. the nice summary in AE 27:145f.
  10. ↑ The Hebrew phrase קרא בשם (qara beshem) occurs not only in texts where humans rightfully worship God (with יהוה (Yhwh), e.g., Gen. 4:26; 12:8), but also when Israel is called back by name by the Lord (Isa. 43:1; 45:3; 48:1): his call precedes our calling.
  11. ↑ Cf. Acts 14:15-17, further Wis. 13:1-9. Acts 17:26f. express nicely the uncertain basis of such experiential worship. The question is thus not whether God is near to us; the question is whether he is near for us so that he can be grasped with certainty.
  12. ↑ Cf. Luther on Deut. 4:3 (AE 9:53): "Therefore in Scripture strange gods should not be so understood as if their worshipers wholly denied the name of the true God; yes, they most firmly claimed it for themselves, as we read in the prophets. But while retaining the name of the true God without the true knowledge of God (which flesh and man cannot have of themselves), they thought about God what seemed right to them. As though God could be shaped and changed according to the imaginations and notions of their heart, when He Himself cannot be shaped and changed! Therefore where there is no Word of God, there is no true knowledge of God; where there is no knowledge of God, there are godless ignorance, imaginations, and opinions about the true God, as though He were pleased by this and that which we choose strictly for ourselves."
  13. ↑ Luther, in his 1526 comments on Jonah 1:5 (cf. Psa. 107:23-32; Wis. 14:1-4), observes that reason does know God "as a being who is able to deliver from every evil. It follows from this that natural reason must concede that all that is good comes from God; for He who can save from every need and misfortune is also able to grant all that is good and that makes for happiness. That is as far as the natural light of reason sheds its rays—it regards God as kind, gracious, merciful, and benevolent. And that is indeed a bright light" (AE 19:54). Yet the two problems of reason, invincible for itself, consist in two things. Firstly, it does not know whether God actually wants to help, especially when experience says differently. Secondly, it invariably assigns divine honors to things that are not God (AE 19:54f.), cf. also AE 3:225 commenting on the experience of mercy and wrath in nature based on Acts 14:17, which, apart from God’s Word, leads one to think that they are given by chance (AE 5:138).
  14. ↑ Cf. AE 19:56: "Here you see where all idolatry comes from and why it is rightly called idol (Abgott) and superstition (Abglaube) and idolatry (Abgötterei); undoubtedly because such delusion draws us away from God (Ab-Gott) and alienates us from the true worship of God. ... For since everybody proposes to do something which he regards and believes to be pleasing to God and imagines that God is minded as he supposes He is—but in reality God is not pleased by this, and in reality God is not minded as each one supposes—it follows that as many idolatries must arise as there are illusions of that kind. Every idea of pleasing God comes into being except that of faith; this the Holy Ghost must inspire. ... There are innumerable types of idolatry; in fact, there are as many varieties as there are illusions and self-chosen concepts of pleasing God. All but faith in Christ come into this category." Commenting on John 1:18, Luther distinguishes between a knowledge of God derived from the Law and one derived from the Gospel. Reason's "legal knowledge" (AE 22:151, cf. SD V, 22) of God in and by itself only leads to either libertinism or works righteousness (AE 22:151f.). Only the Gospel – and here Luther clearly thinks of the Gospel in the wider sense, that is, the Word preached as Law and Gospel (cf. Ap IV, 62) – can lead to true knowledge of sinful man and saving God (AE 22:152f., cf. St. L. 5:484 (WA 40.2:327) on the true subject of theology). Yet this knowledge "does not grow up in our garden, and nature knows nothing at all about it" (ibid.). This "skill and wisdom" has to be revealed by the Son from the times of Adam and Eve (cf. AE 22:153-158 and Ap XII, 55).
  15. ↑ Cf. AE 26:395, commenting on Gal. 4:8f.: "Whoever falls from the doctrine of justification is ignorant of God and is an idolater. Therefore it is all the same whether he then returns to the Law or to the worship of idols; it is all the same whether he is called a monk or a Turk or a Jew or an Anabaptist."
  16. ↑ Cf. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube 1821-1822, ed. H. Peiter (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1984), 31-33 (§ 9). In the thesis of § 6 he states that it is necessary to take a point above Christianity to compare it with other ways of believing in order to arrive at what is common in all forms of (Christian) piety (“Das gemeinsame aller frommen Erregungen,” as he calls it in the thesis to § 9). This is possible because, according to Schleiermacher, there is truth even in error (§ 14.3).
  17. ↑ Cf. Paul Althaus, Die Christliche Wahrheit: Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, 7th, rev. ed. (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1966), § 11.
  18. ↑ Cf. Theo Sundermeier, Was ist Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext. Ein Studienbuch, (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser-Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999), 13, cf. also as a good summary his article "Religion, Religions," in Dictionary of Missions: Theology, History, Perspectives (Orbis: Maryknoll, 1997), 387ff.
  19. ↑ Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata VI, XIV. -- Luther, based on the context (cf. Deut. 4:15ff.), comes to the opposite conclusion and points out that God has given the sun, etc. to all mankind as a source of life and light. It is man’s wicked heart that makes idols out of them (cf. WA 28:554,25-35, also 555,16f.: "the creatures are created to serve us, but God did not establish them for us as gods;" and 555,26f.: "Know this from the chapter [i.e., Deut. 4] that Moses diligently fends off and steers lest they worship the sun and the moon."). In Deut. 29:26 (MT 25) the verb חלק (hlq) appears again: God did not assign (חלק) the foreign gods to Israel – could he have been the one assigning them to the nations? It seems then that Deut. 4:19 says in essence nothing else than what Paul states in Acts 14:17. The idolizing of creatures is severely criticized by the same in Rom. 1:23, 25; this is man’s godlessness preceding the divine punishment, i.e., his injustice (cf. Rom. 1:18 and 1:24, 26).
  20. ↑ Cf. his "Education of the Human Race," where he proposes an original monotheism, which was, since it was simply imparted and not won by experience, was lost as soon as human reason began to elaborate it: "it broke up the one immeasurable into many measurables. ... Hence naturally arose polytheism and idolatry." In response to this, God begins his reeducation of humanity with a single people, Israel (cf. Lessing’s Theological Writings, ed. H. Chadwick [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957], 83).
  21. ↑ It is, however, not self-caused in the sense of I. Kant’s famous definition of "enlightenment" from 1784 (The Philosophy of Kant: Immanual Kant’s Moral and Political Writings, ed. C. J. Friedrich [New York: Random House, 1949], 132): "Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. ... Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. ... It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!" Biblically it must be said that the "use of one’s intelligence without the guidance of another" is exactly the cause of false religion and, therefore, of "immaturity." To point to the independent use of one reason as the solution simply drives sinners deeper into sin: there is no self-caused maturity corresponding to man’s self-caused immaturity.
  22. ↑ Not surprisingly, consistent proponents of this approach speak, e.g., of the "many names of God" (J. Hick). This is nothing but a superficially Christianized form of Hinduism, according to which the one god reveals himself in many manifestations that are not seen as mutually exclusive (cf. H. v. Stietencron, "Hinduismus," in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 15:352). This evidently militates against Acts 4:12.
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