MY CONTENTION (4)

What Have We Missed Out On?

So, in all of this, what have we missed out on?  Well, it’s not so much what we’ve missed out on as what we’ve failed to see and understand and apprehend – because it has been hidden, corrupted and campaigned against.  And if it can be reduced to a single word, that word is freedom: freedom in Christ; freedom from and freedom to, both in such abundance that any – repeat any – human being can find their origin, purpose and destiny, and live a full and abundant life fully immersed in all that Jesus has accomplished for us.

BUT – there’s always a but, or two or three.

We first have to understand that religion is the direct opposite of that freedom.  To get at the nub of this matter, we need to consider three issues: the original/literal meaning of the term and it’s etymology; it’s dictionary meaning; it’s current contextual meaning.

Religion is an old Latin word made up of three parts; a root, a prefix and a suffix.  Thus re-lig-ion.  The root is lig meaning to bind up or a bondage; the prefix re means back or again; the suffix ion means the act of.  It’s literal meaning then is ‘the act of binding up again’ – implying that a thing or a person was once bound up, has been freed and is bound up again.  The use of this word is traceable back to a time in history – and in particular ‘church’ history – considered by some as the “Late Latin” era: 200 to 550 AD.

In this period, a deal was struck between the so-called ‘church Fathers’ and Roman Emperor Constantine to accept “Christianity” as a legitimate social force and institution and permit the ownership of land and property and the construction of houses of worship.  In the lead-up to this agreement, the profound freedom discovered and experienced by those who chose to follow Jesus Christ as their Lord and Master was a real problem to the political and ecclesiastical authorities of the day.  Not least of the problems was their insistence that they had no king but Jesus.  The agreement struck was that, in return for the right to official recognition, the right to own property and the right to build places of worship, the church Fathers would bring the “rabble” into line by curbing and restricting the freedom of Christians and subjugating them to the Emperor’s authority by bringing them under the authority of an equivalent to the Emperor – one who would be known as a Bishop, and later Arch-Bishop or “ruling” Bishop.  In other words, a description of what transpired was “the act of binding up again” otherwise free people: in Late Latin, religion.

Many people today do not know that the word cathedral means the “home” or site of the Bishop’s throne.  Over time, cathedrals and the institutions and authority structures they represent legitimised the impositions and the destruction of the freedom in Christ the Apostle Paul was at pains to emphasise right up to his death prior to the end of the first century AD.  How familiar it seems to us today – with so many freedoms being compromised in the name of “national security”.  A sanitisation process akin to money laundering turns freedoms into crimes and crimes against humanity into a new definition of ‘freedom’.  White becomes black and black becomes white.

That is what ‘religion’ in its original form represented.  However, if you look up a dictionary or hold a public forum with a panel of society’s leaders today, you’ll get a very different picture.  This is the evolution of the sanitisation process legitimising the destruction of the freedom in Christ that the true gospel of Jesus – the one true faith which was, according to the epistle of Jude, “once for all handed down to the saints” (1:3) via Apostle Paul – delivered to those who staked their lives on Jesus Christ their Lord and Master.

There is an Old Testament story analogous to this sad theme of history.  In Genesis 25:29-34, Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of lentils or some rough equivalent to his scheming brother Jacob.  Esau’s attitude was ‘I am about to die, what good is a birthright to me’.

Wikipedia notes the meaning of the AV Bible English phrase “mess of pottage” which Esau traded his birthright for in this way: “A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable”.

That definition aptly fits the debauching of the freedom in Christ that happened long ago basically terminating the blood-line and DNA of the true gospel of Jesus and the first apostles soon after they were dead and gone.

But we do need to understand that this was not some surprise, unexpected circumstance or happening.  The entire ministry of Jesus and those first apostles was plagued by the pressure for this debauchery imposed by the religious and political establishment of the day.  From the very outset, both Jesus and Paul were persecuted for the ‘scandal’ of the freedom the good news of Jesus brought to people’s lives.

Our present day dictionary definitions and socio-political interpretations have all taken on board the sanitisation process described earlier, leading to the situation where religion is viewed and accepted as a positive force for the good and the betterment of individuals and societies globally.  When evidence appears of the opposite, every effort is made to placate offenders and excuse their behaviour – whether malicious or not – on the basis of ‘It’s our religion, we’re entitled to it.’

Is it legitimate for our dictionaries and our social, political and legal mores to be tilted permanently and irrevocably in favour of a deliberately twisted and distorted word?  Can we justifiably continue the delusion of bondage being used to justify itself – in the name of political expedience?

Many today refuse to look at or think about anything Karl Marx said, but we would all be better off if we paid a bit of attention to some of his words.  Sometimes people argue against all official ‘religion’ on the basis of a supposed quote from Karl Marx that goes something like this: “Religion is the opiate of the masses”.  But, as usual, this is poor translation and a cut-down version of Marx.

In 1844, the introduction to Marx’ work critiquing G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right was published and it contained this paragraph:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

Note the sentence, “It is the opium of the people”.  In the midst of distress and difficulty, people turn to religion.  According to Marx, religion is the sigh of the oppressed, the heart of the heartless world and soul of the soulless situation – all probably true, and certainly that’s the positive spin most put on it today.  To Marx, in this, it works like opium giving a feeling of disconnection from oppression, from the heartless world and from soulless situations and connecting to a much better place.  However, to Marx, if people want real happiness, they need to abandon religion because it is an illusory happiness.  Further, he says, if people want to abandon their illusions about their human condition, they need to abandon religion because religion is a “condition which needs illusions”.  Religion mitigates against being fully human, fully alive because it is in part about disconnecting from everyday reality.

I’m with Marx.  I sometimes find it useful to consider this analogy: you want the latest model of your favourite car but you can’t afford it so you settle for a tiny pedal car scale model of it instead.  Religion, to me, is the pretend, scale-model look-alike of the real thing.  And to me, the real thing is faith.  Hence, as with Marx ‘if you want true happiness, you have to abandon illusory happiness and the pursuit of it’; religion is pretend or faux faith and it requires illusion to sustain it.  Furthermore, religion cannot deliver you to faith since it is going in the opposite direction; it is the reverse boat gear.  Therefore religion is, to me, the antithesis of faith.

The Late Latin word ‘religion’ has never been translated into English – how very convenient!  It is a Latin word, appearing in a Greek New Testament, and simply transliterated (from its Latin form) into English.  The New Testament apostles and writers used the Greek word threskeia to represent the idea behind the only time the word ‘religion’ is used in our English New Testaments and it has only tenuous links to the meaning we attribute to the word today.

The word ‘religion’ should never have been used in our English bibles since the word is more correctly translated as one of several words for ‘worship’.  Although using a slightly older from of English, Ellicott’s commentary for English readers on James 1:27 says:

It will be observed that by religion here is meant religious service. No one word can express this obvious interpretation of the original, taken as it must be in completion of the verse before; and certainly “religion” in its ordinary sense will not convey the right idea. Real worship, we may say, pure and undefiled, beheld and acknowledged as such in the presence of God, even the Father—mark the tender pathos of His divine relationship—is this: to visit the fatherless (or orphans) and widows in their distress and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

What we now see as “charity” the first apostles saw as ‘pure and undefiled worship’; what we now call “religion” had an equivalent for them in either paganism or in Jewish culture.  Religion is the antithesis of both faith and worship for true disciples of Jesus.

That’s the first ‘but’ out of the way.

 

>>  NEXT: Second 'but' - freedom.