THE PERILS OF AN INHERITED RELIGION

Most of us are what we are because our parents were before us. Hardly any of us have come out of Hinduism or Buddhism, or even out of atheism or skepticism. Many in Churches of Christ have, to be sure, come from the Baptists or Methodists, often due to marital influences; but this is not really a basic change from the Protestant heritage that belongs to us all. We not only look back to the heroes of the Old and New Testaments, but to Luther and Calvin, Knox and Zwingli, as well as Campbell and Stone. Ours is a great heritage, but since it is indeed a heritage rather than an original experience it has its perils.

God intended, of course, that ours be an inherited religion. We cannot all be Abrahams. Our father in the faith stood virtually alone in his trust in the one God of Heaven. Even Terah his father served the gods of the land (Josh. 24:2). Abraham grew up amidst gross polytheism, with his neighbors not only worshiping the moon and the stars but objects of wood and stone. They even sacrificed their firstborn to assuage the anger of their imagined deities. The patriarch’s response was so sensitive that history knows him as the friend of God and the father of the faithful.

Abraham was more the founder of a religion than the inheritor of one, which is admittedly a unique position. Even his son Isaac and grandson Jacob were more inheritors of the tradition he had vouchsafed to them than they were creators of it.

Jacob was the third generation of Hebrew religion, and the peril of being an inheritor was already apparent. God had not spoken to him personally as he had to Abraham, bidding him to venture into a strange land, nor had he heard God speak at the last moment to save him from death as had his father Isaac. In fact his inherited faith had not done much for Jacob. It did not keep him from filching his brother’s birthright, and he bore a name that must have been appropriate to his character, for it meant swindler.

But Jacob at last had his own encounter with the Lord. Emerson believed that God has a private door into every man’s life, and that there is no stereotyped way in which He encounters men. It may be so, for God sent an angel to “wrestle” with Jacob, an encounter that lasted all night, leading to Jacob’s request for a blessing, which was not given until he confessed that he was a swindler, that he was indeed “Jacob.” It was not unlike the experience of his father Isaac, for he too could say, “I have seen God face to face and my life is spared” (Gn. 32:30). He was given a new name, Israel, one in keeping with his new direction. It was also for Jacob to dream of a ladder that stretched from earth to heaven, whereon angels were descending and ascending. Here he was not only given a renewal of the land promise made to Abraham and Isaac, but in the vision of angels he must have been able to see their role in ministering to man’s needs.

Few of us experience such drama in our pilgrimage. Many are Christians in the same way men are Germans or Canadians — because their fathers were. An inherited religion is likely to be vapid to those who do not seek, as Jacob did, God’s special blessing. One peril is that of failing to create in men a deep sense of sin. One does not long for God unless he really feels a need for him. Paul could say, as few men ever do, “Miserable creature that I am, who is there to rescue me out of this body doomed to death,” only when he really believed that it was “God alone, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Ro. 7:24). Like Isaiah, he did not see God’s holiness until he saw his own sin, or vice-versa.

Another peril of our being inheritors of so much is that we take it all for granted. It is easy to reduce it all to a matter of a few externals while never really capturing the power of religion. Hb. 11 tells of the faithful who were “stoned, sawn in two, put to the sword, went about dressed in skins of sheep or goats, in poverty, distress, and misery.” The writer assures us that “They were too good for a world like this.” In taking our heritage for granted we become like the world that was unworthy of them. One wonders if we can really appreciate what God has done for us apart from suffering. Have we understood the Bible when it assures us that “It is through much tribulation that we enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

Then there is the peril of growing lax in propagating a faith that has been passed along to us. Like the Olympic runners who bear the fire from its original site in Athens to the place of the games get further and further away as the torch is passed from man to man, so we as torch-bearers of the original gospel run the risk of allowing twenty centuries of history to dull our sense of urgency. The fact that the earliest disciples were at the source of the river from which we drink far downstream is one reason why they turned the world upside down. They not only believed that the gospel is the power of God for salvation, but that the world in which they lived was lost. Jesus was real because sin was real. If we really believed that Jesus is the only ultimate answer to the human predicament, we would surely be a fellowship of concerned ones, intense in our desire to bring men to the Savior. When Elton Trueblood speaks of the modern church as the greatest mission field in the world today, he must have meant that it is subject to being converted to this sense of urgency.

While ours is an inherited religion, it is not an inheritance of systems and institutions. It is not like inheriting money or property from a distant relative. God has given us a Person who is both our teacher and Lord. The eternal Word became man, and he is ours to love as friend and brother. And so our inheritance need not be cold and far removed from its source. We can be as near the source as were Peter and John, and through Jesus the God of heaven can be even closer to us than He was to Abraham. It is therefore more like standing at the mouth of a deep well that is ever gushing out springs of fresh water than standing alongside a river whose stream has become polluted in its endless meandering from its faraway source. Each can draw as deeply from that well as he desires.

Through the Spirit’s indwelling each believer becomes his own source of strength. “If any man thirst, let him come to me! Let the man come and drink who believes in me,” says our Lord, showing that each of us can partake of the original resource of power. “As scripture says: From his breast shall flow fountains of living water,” says Jesus, and the record tells us that in saying this he was speaking of the Spirit which those who believe in him are to receive. (Jn. 7:37-39) —the Editor