Genuine Religion
April 23, 2000
Dear Friends:
This week I would like to share a quotation from a man named Fosdick. If I knew any more than that one detail, I would provide more. This was originally sent to me by a good friend and brother in Christ in Jamaica.
Fosdick wrote:
“Religion at its source is personal adventure on a way of living. A new idea of life’s spiritual meaning, incarnate in a leader, summons men, and they cut loose from old entanglements and try the challenging venture. By the time religion has been thoroughly organized, however, it commonly loses that daring quality and becomes instead a stereotyped system of doctrine and institution to be passively accepted and believed.”
“… This development in historic Christianity from vitality to rigidity is clearly reflected in the changed meanings of the word ‘faith’. Faith in the New Testament was a matter of personal venturesomeness. It involved self-committal, devotion, loyalty, courage. If one arranges the New Testament in the chronological order of its documents and thus enters the book by way of some of Paul’s epistles, he feels a thrilling quality in the movement which there had gotten under weigh. It was the most influential uprush of spiritual power in human history, and all the participants in it would have ascribed their inspiration to their faith.”
“But it was not faith in formal creeds, for no creeds had yet been written; it was not faith in the New Testament, for the New Testament was not yet in existence; it was not faith in the church, for the church was as yet inchoate and unorganized. That primary faith which launched the Christian movement antedated creeds, book and formalized. church. It was a personal relationship with Christ and what he stood for. It had not yet been It was vital and dynamic.”
“How different are the meanings that ‘faith’ soon acquired in Christianity! It ceased being primarily a daring thing – a mountain-mover, as Jesus said, or the victory that overcomes the world, as John called it. It was increasingly drained of its more vital elements, it was stereotyped and systematized until it tended to mean the acceptance of creedal and institutional finalities long worked out and awaiting only the credence of the faithful….”
“… But it [the spiritual life] is an adventure both of life and thought. All its formulas, summarizing experience up to date, are signposts, not boundary-lines; and when Christianity forgets that becomes preservative instead of creative, rests in assumed finalities instead of daring new sallies of the spirit, retreats into supposed citadels instead of taking the open road, it is not only false in its historic origin in Christ, who did the very opposite, but by psychological necessity it dooms itself to stagnation and decay….”
“All experiences, when they have been tried out, explored, enjoyed, tend to get themselves expressed in formulas. We precipitate a living thing into the shorthand of an abstract statement. Even love has its creeds… But a man need not postpone love until he can subscribe to that finished expression of perfected experience. He never will subscribe to it with vital understanding if he does postpone the adventure itself. Love is an adventure. So is prayer, loving one’s enemies, being sincere. So is discovering spiritual resources which we can tap and thus ‘be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man’. So is repentance, forgiveness, restitution, and inward moral conquest. So is practical working faith in God and love for all sorts and conditions of men. So is the application of the principles of Jesus to racial, industrial, and international problems.”
“Christianity is a stirring and costly adventure in personal character and social relationships. Theological theories can help. They can justify, clarify, direct, and extend the adventure. But they do not come first; they come last. They are the intellectual formulations of the adventure, not its primary cause, and whenever they grow stiff and intractable, become obsolete and deterrent, no longer help the ventures of the spirit but hinder and confuse, they must give way to other forms of thought that will illumine and guide. For at all hazards the adventure of spiritual living must go on. That is indispensable to man’s real life. That is genuine religion….”
Have a great week!
Comments»
No comments yet.