The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View. . .

THE TRAGEDY OF RELIGION

A generation ago Morris Cohen, then of the City College of New York, wrote an essay on “The Dark Side of Religion.” Assuming the role of the advocatus diaboli (the devil’s advocate), he set out to show how destructive to human progress and happiness religion has often been, even though he realized that religion also has its good side. I am doing something like that in this essay in that I intend to show how often religion is a tragedy, but I too recognize that religion is often “the abundant life” that Jesus of Nazareth came to give mankind.

Cohen points to witchcraft, magic, superstition, emotionalism, ignorance, and even immorality as part of the ugly fruit of religion. He notes that the church through the ages has hindered the progress of physics, chemistry, and medicine by persecuting pioneer scientists. Religion has fostered ignorance and superstition by deliberately keeping people in the dark, making it evident that it had no interest in the truth. The magician brings rain by rubbing a stick, he says, while the priest brings rain by saying a prayer. Holy water wards off devils and meteorological phenomena are portents to warn mankind against sin.

As for religion being an anti-moral force, Cohen points to the priests, popes, and cardinals that have led rapacious and licentious lives, noting that even Dante, a faithful son of the church, put popes in hell. It was the church that conducted the Inquisition and launched “holy” wars. Even a lovely psalm that begins with “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept” ends with “Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!” Religion more often than not has been cruel, he insists, pointing to the fact that it has no qualms about hating, persecuting, and murdering heretics and dissenters. He admits that religion has always given lip service to love and brotherhood, but it has always divided people into sects, while science and education have united them. This is why Cohen finds more wisdom and courage in honest doubt than in the creeds of men.

Cohen finds it predictable that the church would oppose birth control, for orthodoxy always has priority over the alleviation of poverty and suffering. In fact, he says, there is not a single loathsome practice that has not at some time been regarded as a religious duty, whether assassination, thuggery, self-torture, sacred prostitution, or even human sacrifice, including children.

Well, one can do what Cohen has done, for religion obviously has its dark side. He could even add, as the evangelist Billy Sunday had a way of saying as he slapped his knee with his Bible, “Remember that it was religion that killed Jesus Christ!”

My purpose herein is not to refute Cohen’s thesis, which one can do by showing that there is both bad religion and good religion, or false religion and true religion. True religion fosters human progress, alleviates suffering, builds charitable institutions, educates and liberates, and bears the fruit of love, peace, and joy. Good religion has not failed man, man has failed good religion. There may be popes in hell, as Dante says, but there may be some in heaven, too.

My purpose is rather to identify a problem within religion, even good religion, the understanding of which may make it even better. I refer to it as the tragedy of religion. Religion is a tragedy whenever it is a way of self-salvation. It can be a good and true religion and still have this tragic element. One may reverence God, respect his fellow man, and live a life full of good works, and yet suffer the tragedy of trying to save himself, even while praying for God’s help.

In his Systematic Theology Paul Tillich names four ways of self-salvation — legalistic, ascetic, mystical, and sacramental (which includes doctrinal and emotional ways). They all fail in their efforts, he insists, and only add to man’s anxieties in that he does not have the resources within him to attain the reunion with God that he seeks.

Tillich sees legalistic ways of salvation as very attractive to man in that they are based upon a law of commandments, to which he can respond with some success. Law reveals to man his true nature, which is alienated from God, and it does so through commandments. Man thus sees his estrangement or his sinful condition. Seeking salvation by keeping commandments is always a catastrophe, for man can never obey them sufficiently.

Since man believes he has the strength to act, in spite of the bondage of his will, and thus attain what he has lost, legalism becomes “an almost irresistible temptation,” as Tillich puts it. Man’s predicament is that he sees the commandments (especially the commandment of love) as necessary but their fulfillment impossible. This caused Paul to cry out at one point in his life, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death” (Rom. 7:24).

Legalism is almost irresistible, the theologian assures us, and most of us can attest to this from our own experience. We may never completely escape legalism, appealing as it is, but we must come to see, as Tillich urges, that love, which is the basis of all law, cannot be commanded and cannot be obeyed. Love is a given, the gift of God’s grace. It comes only through gratitude of what God has done for us. The strongest antidote to legalism is the great truth of Rom. 5:5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

But it is such a temptation to seek salvation by doing something, and to measure our goodness by what we have done rather than by what God has done for us. We distort the picture, Tillich warns, when we allow the New Being to be substituted for performance, whether ritual or intellectual. The ascetic saves himself by escaping as many of the objects of desire as possible, thus avoiding the lawlessness of concupiscence. He obeys the law through self-restriction. It is tempting for one to suppose he moves closer to God (and away from his feeling of estrangement) when he voluntarily denies himself of something good in itself, such as marriage.

While Tillich believes true religion must have a mystical element, such as the “felt presence of God,” mysticism becomes a way of self-salvation when it seeks reunion with God through bodily and mental exercises.

So with sacramental, emotional, and doctrinal ways of self-salvation. The search for true reunion with God is distorted when one relies upon sacraments performed by a priest or the “true doctrines” formulated by the church. One falsely seeks security in pietism, fundamentalism, and revivalism. It is all made too easy, such as “obedience to the word of God,” which is usually a demand for conformity to some sectarian interpretation. Emotionalism does this by provoking the desire for emotions which are not genuine but artificially created.

Whether or not we find Tillich’s analysis helpful, he is surely on target when he concludes that “The personal encounter with God and the reunion with him are the heart of all genuine religion.” He says this presupposes the presence of a transforming power within man, a power that turns him toward the ultimate and away from all preliminary concerns. This power within man that would lift him above the artificial is God’s grace. This is disturbed when anything is imposed upon man’s spiritual life, whether by himself or someone else, that is artificial. It is this that produces anxiety, fanaticism, and the intensification of works. This is the failure of all ways of self-salvation.

And this is the tragedy of religion, whether the animist, the Pharisee, or the Mormon: the presumption that somehow man can save himself, if not by building systems then by erecting temples. Tillich is surely right that the temptation to “do it for oneself” is so irresistible that the legalism of self-salvation pervades all religion. Our problem is that we do not keep ourselves sufficiently open for an invasion of the grace of God. Pride gets in our way, self-elevation Augustine called it, the sin of turning to ourselves instead of to God.

Sinful pride (self-salvation) separates us from God; grace reconciles us to God. Grace means total forgiveness for our total guilt. It is not that grace enables us to save ourselves. We can only accept with a humble and contrite heart what God has done for us. Grace has to be unconditional, otherwise it would not be grace. This is the tragic failure of self-salvation. It cannot accept unconditional grace. It must help God do it!

The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, Tit. 2:11 assures us. This is the glory of religion. God’s grace is God’s presence in our lives, and this is the only answer there is to all our fears and anxieties. Grace means that this spiritual presence cannot be produced by us. It is given as a free gift. Faith is the acceptance of the gift, which means the surrender of our own presumed goodness. Faith is the acceptance of the divine acceptance of oneself, the unacceptable.

Our selfish pride would deny us such grace, for the surrender of such pride is far more painful than the pain of moral toil or ascetic self-torture or any other way of self-salvation. —the Editor