Religion - according to Heschel

Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us.  Religion consists of God's question and man's answer.  Religion is not what man does with his solitariness.  Religion is what man does with the presence of God.  Irreligion is not opiate but poison.  Our energies are too abundant to live indifferently.  We are in need of an endless purpose to absorb our immense power.  We are either the ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil.

Little does contemporary religion ask of man.  Religion has become institution, dogma, ritual.  It is no longer an event.  It's acceptance involves neither risk or strain.  Religion has achieved respectability by the grace of society.

We define self-reliance and call it faith, shrewdness and call it wisdom, anthropology and call it ethics, literature and call it bible, inner security and call it religion, conscience and call it God.  However nothing counterfeit can last forever.  It is customary to blame secular science and antirelgious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society.  It would be more honest to blame religion for it's own defeats.  Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.  When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, it's message becomes meaningless.

It is an inherent weakness of religion not to take offense at the segregation of God, to forget that the true sanctuary has no walls.  Religion has often suffered from the tendency to become parochial, self- indulgent, self-seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of it's institutions or to enlarge the body of doctrines.  It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle for truth; to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular.  Yet the task of religion is to be a challenge to the stabilization of values.  Religion is not for religion's sake but for God's sake.

Comments

[Eric H Janzen]

ahhhh like a breath of fresh air.

It is a serious problem in our era that the Church is not seen as a true spiritual entity holding forth spiritual understanding of reality and its Creator. The Church is understood to be just one of many institutions that happens to be religious in nature. Institution is a bad word in our time of history, for institutions cannot as a rule be trusted and thus the Church finds itself cast in the color of something it ought not to be. The Church should be a trusted embodiment of the spiritual truths of Jesus and the minister of the Love and Light of God in the darkness of a world bent on destroying itself. To those out there in Churchland who are being the voice and hands of Jesus I say bless you. To those who are not I say bless you to get out of the institution and back to a spiritual faith following Jesus, for this is true religion.

cheers,
eric h janzen