By now, you've all seen it: the Youtube sensation, "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus". But for those of you who might have been living under a rock, I've added the video to this post. Here are my objections, in brief.
The mistake here is to put off sin, individual and collective, on "religion", that is to say, the institutional Church. This of course feeds into the popular notion that one can have "faith without religion". But for a human being, an "embodied spirit" to use Aquinas' phrase, faith without religion is not only imprudent; it is simply impossible. Faith is a matter of the heart, indeed, but that faith is lived out in the practical, the particular, the nitty-gritty of human communities. And this we call religion.
Regarding the critique of "religion", framed in rhyming couplets and a groovy beat, there can be no doubt that individuals within the Church are frequently unkind, incompetent, and stupid. The sins of the Church, from the Crusades to the child sexual abuse scandal, have been rehearsed over and over again, and repeatedly invoked to refute the claims of the Church. Now I make no excuse for these things; they are deplorable. But to say that the Church's claims are untrue because individuals within it have done bad things is simply fallacious. If I kick you in the shin and say the earth is round, it is fallacious to say the earth is flat because I kicked you in the shin.
Perhaps more to the point, faith without religion was not what Christ desired for His Church. Scripture is quite clear here: Jesus chose twelve apostles, with Peter at the head, whom He sent out with the commission to teach and baptize, "making disciples of all nations" (Mat 28:19-20). He gave these men the Holy Spirit to "guide [them] into all the truth" (Jhn 16:13) and told them, "Whoever receives you, receives me" (Mat 10:40). So according to Jesus' own words, there is no getting to Him but through the Church that He Himself built, upon the Rock of Peter (cf. Mat 16:18-19).
No comments:
Post a Comment