Nothing wrong with a faith comforting or guiding one through a rough patch, but I do think he raised an interesting issue. Has faith been boiled down into tenets that mostly make us feel good about ourselves? Or, to put it another way, has modern religion lost its ability to make us feel uncomfortable about parts of our lives?
Ironically, a day or so later I read a passage by the late Oswald Chambers, who said:
?The teaching of Jesus hits us where we live?.He educates us down to the last scruple. The Spirit of God unearths the spirit of self-vindication; He makes us sensitive to things we never thought of before.?
Now, I?m not asking you to get into the teachings of Jesus, if they are not part of your tradition. But I would like to hear your thought ?about this question:
CYNTHIA RIGBY, W.C. Brown Professor of Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Yes. ?Modern religion has lost its bite.
HOWARD COHEN,?Lecturer in Jewish/Christian Relations and member of Congregation Shearith Israel and Congregation Beth Torah, Dallas
Religion is a forest with many trees and every tree has numerous roots and branches.??Consequently, any general statement about ?religion? is a gross oversimplification.
That said, most religions try to balance the ?therapeutic? and the ?challenging? (or the ?priestly? and the ?prophetic,? to use the traditional language).??Religion ? which shares the same root as ?ligament? ? is that which ?binds people together.???It defines a community?s core identity ? it?s story, ways, and values.??Therefore it tends to be self-affirming, and to the degree it defines itself over against the rest of the world, may also become judgmental.??Taken too far, this impulse becomes a toxic shaming of those within and beyond the community, making God an eternal enemy.
The therapeutic side of religion emphasizes grace and reassures the community God is with them and for them.??Taken too far, this impulse may become an excuse for license and laziness.??Linked to the hyper-individualistic narcissism of our culture, it also contributes to the decline of community and service.??I suspect this result,especially in Western Christianity, is what Beha is noting about the religious atmosphere of the moment.
To be sure, Christians of all kinds are more sensitive to the therapeutic side of the faith and the toxic results of shame than ever before (though in some circles the habit continues of shaming others as a way of justifying themselves).??But in my experience most Christian communities of all kinds urge a moral code which includes healthy personal behavior and social responsibility (?righteousness? and ?justice,? to use the traditional language).
While we all struggle to maintain it, the right balance of the therapeutic and the challenging lead our communities to a healthy sense of self in relation to God, each other, and the world while calling forth our best selves.??On the other hand, both the therapeutic and the challenging impulses of religion are in many ways counter-cultural and subversive to the chapter and verse of much in our American culture, making the balance difficult to maintain.
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GORDON K. WRIGHT, ?Dallas attorney and a North Texas leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
I believe that in our modern times, many people have chosen to alter the place that religion holds in their lives. ?Once people often defined themselves in large measure by their faith, and their faith informed their actions relative to their daily lives. ?In our modern times, when so many people now compartmentalize their lives, many may view religion as a sort of buffet ? that which we need or want at a particular time becomes useful, the rest is postponed or ignored.
While I have couched this statement in terms of a modern issue, that challenge is not new. ?The scriptures are full of examples of people who lived long ago who struggled with the same challenge ? fully incorporating the teachings of their faith into their daily lives. ?Jesus invited the rich young man to give his wealth to the poor and to follow Him. ?This the young man could not do, and he went away, sorrowing.
For our religion to become powerful in blessing our lives and in helping us to serve others, we must choose to let our faith motivate and stretch us in all aspects of our lives. ?Jesus taught that we must lose ourselves to find ourselves. ?True religion requires much of its adherents.
In our modern world, where so many problems and challenges appear to be resolved without involvement of our faith or religion, I believe that it is imperative that we recognize the power of faith to make us into better people, and to enhance our gratitude and humility. ?We need to turn more fully to God; He has not changed and will bless us as we follow Him. ?We should choose to let our faith motivate us to change and to grow.
Whenever I find myself feeling that I am not as close to God as I want to be, I simply ask, ?Who moved?? ?The real question is what do we do with our faith. ?My faith can change me, if I choose to let it.
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RIC DEXTER,?Nichiren Buddhist area leader, Soka Gakkai-USA
Within the harsh realities of everyday life, people want to live with dignity and for their lives to have meaning. They make efforts toward that end. The product of these yearnings, these prayers, is religion. Religion was born from prayer.
Honest self-reflection leads people to see where they need to direct their prayer and possibly change their attitude and actions. This is a difficult process. Religion then must teach an attitude of life that shows how the more difficult path is the more fulfilling one and leads to those prayers being answered.
It can be an easier path to teach people to simply accept their suffering, and maybe even feel comfortable with their shortcomings. This idea is reflected in what has become a common expression. I often hear people say ?It is what it is.? with a resigned expression.??I prefer to regard that same situation with the attitude of ?We begin from here!?
With that attitude we can face those difficult situations or uncomfortable realizations about ourselves. We can use prayer to open our lives and our minds to the realization of paths we can take to change those things in our life.
Has religion lost its bite, or has the way religion is sometimes taught and often practiced taken the bite away?
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GEORGE MASON, Senior Pastor, Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas
Whether religion has lost its bite in the modern world depends upon what it sinks its teeth into. The question presumes, I think, that the religion is to speak prophetically to a world gone amok. And that is a theme of biblical religion. Certainly, faith is always in danger of being accommodated to the world. When it is, it loses its bite.
But two points here. First, biblical religion addresses Israel and the church more often than the world per se. When the church, for instance, is not holding itself accountable and only busies itself with the sins of the world, it loses its bite. Second, the Spirit of God is at work in the world, not just in the church. Sometimes the church loses its bite because it?s preoccupied with uncritical preservation of the status quo, when God may be doing a new thing that the church fails to see.
Being prophetic sometimes means slowing down and sometimes speeding up. It always means going to the heart of what is right and standing there no matter the consequences from inside or outside the church.
?
MATTHEW WILSON, Associate Professor of Political Science, Southern Methodist University
It is essential that faith be a balance between affirmation and challenge. ?On one hand, it is vitally important to remember that we are created by and in the image of a loving God, who calls us to salvation and eternal life. ?This love and this call exist no matter what we have done, no matter how far away from Him we have wandered.
If we truly believe this, how can our faith not be a source of joy and reassurance? ?At times in the past, Christianity?s emphasis on the pervasiveness of sin and on the necessity of penitence and mortification have obscured the fundamental joyfulness of the Christian message. ?The life of faith is a feast to be savored, not a gauntlet to be endured. ?To the extent that modern religion reminds us of this, it does a good service.
Alas, however, modern religion often goes much farther than this. ?In affirming our essential goodness and serving a therapeutic role, contemporary faith too often loses sight of the reality of sin and evil in the world ? or makes them grand abstractions for which we bear no personal responsibility.
Speaking from a Christian standpoint, to be true to the spirit of the Gospel, the Church must challenge its members to live holier lives, even when that challenge is difficult, inconvenient, unpopular, or contrary to prevailing social sensibilities. ?The same Christ who allowed Peter to witness the Transfiguration and who called him ?the rock? on which he would build his Church also told him to ?get behind me, Satan!? and rebuked him (and all of the disciples) for the meagerness of their faith. ?The same Christ who famously saved the woman caught in adultery dismissed her not with a pat on the back and a ?you go, girl!?, but with the admonition to go and sin no more.
In this spirit, today?s churches must not be afraid to speak out against the sins of greed, pride, lust, etc. that beset our society, and to do so in concrete terms that will make many in the pews uncomfortable. ?Often, I think, they fear that doing so will drive people away, but this is belied by experience.
Sociologists of religion tell us that it is ?strict churches? ? those with clear teachings on right and wrong and significant demands on their members ? that have thrived in this increasingly secular age. ?Moreover, the experience of Christ himself was that he kept attracting larger and larger multitudes, despite preaching forthrightly against the sinfulness of his age and laying down seemingly impossible challenges (?be thou therefore perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect?).
In the end, the Truth ? even the hard, uncomfortable, challenging Truth ? is attractive. ?As the oft-rebuked Peter said, ?Lord, to whom shall we go? ?You have the words of everlasting life.? ?The contemporary Church must not be afraid to proclaim those words, and to embrace the combination of joy and challenge that they bring.
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JOE CLIFFORD, Head of Staff and Senior Minister, First Presbyterian Church of Dallas
Religion has always had adherents who support the status quo and those who challenge it.? The Bible embodies this reality.
Within the Hebrew Scriptures these opposite perspectives are present.? 1 & 2 Chronicles endorse royal rule, while Samuel and Kings offer scathing critique of kings, embodying the ?bite? of their day.? The Psalms contain many endorsements of kings and culture; the Prophets stand in stark contrast calling for judgment against the very kings whose praises are sung in the coronation Psalms.
The same is true within the New Testament.? Jesus certainly challenges the status quo, breaking Sabbath and purity laws; yet he also says he has come ?to fulfill the law.?? Scripture contains the writings of Peter and James, representing the ?establishment? of the early church; yet the Bible also offers letters of Paul and John, who challenged the early Christian community to a radical inclusion of Gentiles.
These trajectories are present in modern religion.? We have those who uphold the culture? evidenced by the many popular prosperity preachers who reshape the Christian message to support America?s consumer based culture defined by individualism and materialism.? Other leaders blend God and country to uphold a national religion.
At the other side of the spectrum are leaders like Shane Claiborne, founder of ?The Simple Way? community in Philadelphia.? He calls for a rejection of consumerism and radical simplicity in living the Christian life.? Numerous religious leaders advocate against militarism.
Christianity that upholds culture gets much more press and many more adherents because it supports the status quo.? But the prophetic voice is also present in the faith community ? it just doesn?t get the same attention from the culture it seeks to challenge.? It is ?the voice crying out in the wilderness.?? I pray its bark has not lost its bite!
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NITYANANDA CHANDRA DAS,?Minister, ISKCON Kalachandji?s Hare Krishna Temple, Dallas
Because we live in an owl society, a society accustomed to darkness, its members generally are??not inclined to see light. What is our society?s darkness?
Well, ?number 1: Over 99% of our citizens do not know the difference between a dead body and a living body. This percentage also includes our religious authorities.
Most people erroneously think that the ever-changing temporary body is the self and therefore claim that they are Caucasian, Black, American, Democrat, homosexual, punk rocker, artist, and so on. ?Based on this temporary concept of the self, society runs after temporary gains. Thus the insignificant pleasure that it members find most often comes at the expense of another.
This lack of knowledge causes the darkness of selfishness and the cure is the ?knowledge of the self. ?Religion has seemed to lost its bite for its advocates generally because it cannot clearly and concisely answer the most basic question, ?What is the self/soul??
MIKE GHOUSE, President, Foundation for Pluralism, Dallas
Indeed, modern religion is reduced to a ritual to be performed as a social obligation to get it over with, rather than what it ought to do to you personally.? It is particularly dumped on children as a duty to be fulfilled. The story is similar in most religions. But given the space limitations, I will keep it to the Islamic month of Ramadan.
As a part of developing the model for pluralism in Islam, I am visiting every denominational mosque since Ramadan began ten days ago for the whole month ending on August 18th or 19th, depending on the moon sighting. ?You can find everything you wanted to know about Ramadan and more at RamdanDaily.com.? One will appreciate the uniqueness of each of its traditions.
Dr. Allama Iqbal, a great philosopher and a poet wrote a poem in Urdu language, and one of the most famous lines goes as follows; ?Tera dil to hay sanam aashna, tujhay kia milay ga namaz main. ? Broadly translated, your heart is elsewhere, and so what do you get out of praying or fasting?
What do the Salat (ritual prayers) and fasting do to you, and what is the cumulative effect on you?? If it does not bring Taqwa, the spirituality and humility in you, then you have? merely performed the ritual without being affected by it.
Taqwa has many dimensions, one of them is humility, the essence of which is feeling, talking and acting equal with your employee, spouse, family and other members of the society, Muslim or not. How do we measure up? Arrogance is the mother of all conflicts, whereas humility is the solution to most of them. When you bow, kneel or prostrate at your place of worship, it is an acknowledgement of the invisible superior being, and equality of fellow beings.
Has your religion lost its bite? Look at the ritual practices in your own tradition. Most people get it right, a few don?t.
To a few, religion is a powerful tool to manipulate others, or pushing their beliefs onto others. To some, it is a social need to keep their status as a church-going ?honest? family, and some feel sanctimonious when performing the rituals in a church, temple, synagogue, gurudwara or mosque. When they step out of the sanctuary, the arrogance creeps right back in, and the religion loses its bite instantly.
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WILLIAM LAWRENCE, Dean and Professor of American Church History, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University
For a lot of high profile religious bodies that identify themselves as Christian or Protestant or Evangelical, there has been a notable trend in the ?messages? or ?sermons? that they offer. Topics such as ?Forming a Stronger Family Unit? or ?How to Cope with Adversity? or ?God?s Call and One?s Career? are common. Worship leaders announce ?their hope that, by participating in religious services, people will have a better week and will find resources for daily life.
This appears to be a trend. But it is not a new phenomenon.
Notably, although it is rarely mentioned by the practitioners of this approach, there is actually a long history in American religious life for a therapeutic approach to faith. And it spans the ideological spectrum from progressives to conservatives.
The late Harry Emerson Fosdick, a leading liberal who was the most highly regarded Protestant preacher in the nation during the first half of the 20th century, defined preaching as ?pastoral counseling on a group scale.? Bill Hybels, founding pastor of Willow Creek Church in Illinois, is usually identified with the conservative or evangelical constituency of Christianity. He built his sizable congregation and its very wide-ranging influence in the last quarter of the 20th century around the concept that the church should provide whatever people said they needed. Small groups were created to help for people deal with debt, learn to pray, and find a mate. Willow Creek designed their worship space to suit the feelings of worshipers. Because some people took offense at the sight of a cross on a stage, it was removed, along with other traditional Christian symbols like the communion table, to make the church more comfortable for people who were not sure they wanted to be in church.
The byproduct of this increasingly common pattern among churches in America is that we have neglected the prophetic tradition within the faith. Such patterns and preaching forget the believers who decried the existence of slavery, who condemned legalized segregation, who agitated for the rights of workers, and who insisted on public education for everyone. Something very important in the faith is missing if we offer the calming touch of faith but eliminate the cutting edge of faith.
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?DARRELL BOCK, Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary
In sum, yes, often religion has lost its bite and is nothing more than therapy and encourgement, where challenge and a bite are often what is needed. Nothing shows this more than the fact that sin has become a four letter word in our culture.
Judgments about sin are said to reflect judgmentalism and other negative things. Accountability to God or to some sense of moral integrity is out of bounds for many (part of a distroted view of freedom our culture often sells to us). Yet Scripture challenges us in our pride, self indulgence and selfishness, things we do see around us all the time.
This is such a problem that I find myself speaking of our being dysfunctional to get people to engage on the topic. Then I will tell them this is part of what theologians call sin (once they agree there is a great deal of dysfunction in the world ? if you have any doubt about dysfunction in our world, ?just watch the news or go to divorce courts). Religion that means something should challenge us to be changed by God? and for the better? in ways he has shown to us.
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AMY MARTIN,?Executive director, Earth Rhythms; Writer/editor, Moonlady Media?
Any religion, whether modern or ancient, loses its bite when it shuts out doubt. For most of our human existence our life was spent in darkness. Before electricity and lighting, the infinity of the night sky was inescapable, millions of stars were thrust into our faces, each point of light whispering deep into our consciousness: ?There is so very much that you do not know, that you will never know.?
There have been nights when sleep eluded me, when doubts dogged the gap between wake and sleep and I have begged for the comfort of belief. I have thought of those I love and crumbled inside from the pain of mortality, stood beneath the pale urban midnight sky and even in the starless city felt taunted by my powerlessness. I wondered about the people in the houses nearby, if they too paced the night, or if the lullaby of belief ushered them easy into unconsciousness. Knowing I could no longer escape, I submitted to the sacred night, the repository of doubt, and let go. Humble before the mystery, I found faith in the absence of belief.
Doubt is not for sissies. Which is why therapeutic religions that trounce doubt, that seek mostly to assure and absolve and deny our shadow side, continue to be popular. Yet within the great religions of our times there is room for both the light of belief and the darkness of doubt, not as opposites but complements. Doubt is the water that dissolves belief to its essentials, the core truths of existence shared by all humans, the isthmus of our understanding.
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JIM DENISON, Theologian-in-Residence, Texas Baptist Convention and President, Denison Forum on Truth and Culture
?Always remember that Jesus? stories got him killed.? William Willimon, the Methodist?minister and ethicist, made that statement years ago as a commentary on the feel-good
theology he was hearing from America?s pulpits. What would he say about the pop
therapy that substitutes for biblical sermons in many churches today?
Pendulums swing from one extreme to the other. ?Sinners in the hands of an angry God?
represented the Puritan culture of Jonathan Edwards? day; sermonic advice on marriage,
money and motivation characterizes ours. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that people in
a democracy get the government they deserve. Perhaps we get the religion we deserve as
well. Or at least the religion that represents our culture.
What does the saccharin spirituality of our day say about us?
Our postmodern society has ?progressed? beyond the commitment to biblical morality
that characterized our founders. But a ship cut from its moorings will drift with
the currents until it sinks. Billy Graham?s recent letter to the nation diagnosed our?problem: ?The further we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control.? And?the more our religion will reflect us rather than the One we are called to worship and?serve.
Our oldest son was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year. If his doctors had told us
what we wanted to hear, we would have been pleased at the time but our son would have
died. For a headache, take an aspirin; for a malignancy, consult an oncologist.
Source: http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/2012/07/texas-faith-has-religion-lost-its-bite.html/
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