Many years ago, the son of a religious official in our church passed away from a hidden disease. This man, we’ll call him Kevin seemed inert to his son’s death. Unable to express the intensity of his feelings, they remained repressed and hidden in his being. I have lost contact with him but would not be surprised to hear that he has since succumbed to a tumour or a cancer. I mention this because I knew him to be inhibited and an example of what Manning Clark would have called a religious, yet ‘life-denying’ person. He celebrated anything that was dull and lived subdued in spirit as though this was pleasing to God.
THE EXPRESSION OF WHAT? There are people who believe you can relate to Christ even if your religion is warped and your doctrine is bent. There is some truth in this, because Christ is who He is despite our bent view of Him and His Gospel. Of course if our doctrine is bent our Christ will be warped and so will we.
Then again, our Christ relationship is not an all or nothing relationship, meaning it is non-dualistic. We can grow into life and truth if we choose or we can remain stagnant out of choice in a false Christ and a twisted gospel because it’s ours. An addiction to false facts does not negate the truth that grace and truth are better than grace alone.
But the propping up of the self with a false identity will mean that we remain a muted individual likely to abuse others and ourselves because our religion has bent us out of shape in our soul and our spirit.
SOURCE OF LIFE AND MENTAL HEALTH Grace is a blessing – Christ is the Life-Giving Spirit who enhances our humanity even if our understanding is deficient. But grace and truth are better than grace by itself. A warped gospel produces warped persons and malformed communities of faith. We are free to say that we can have a relationship with Christ even if our doctrine is deformed - but such doctrine not only produces deformed people. It robs us of the spirit and life that distinguishes the sons of God from workers and slaves of religion. AN INHIBITED LIFE In an autobiography, historian Manning Clark tells of his mother who praised God vigorously in church but lived a life of inhibition and restraint. You don’t have go far in Christianity to find pockets of religion that are convinced that God is pleased by a religion of inhibition. Yet we need not be debilitated to any degree by deformed Christianity. You may remember that King David was a lover of life. He had a passion for being. God did not commend him for his adultery, but He did assert that David was a man after His own heart. GOD OF JOY Solomon writes of sensuality in The Song of Solomon. So sensual is some of it that pious Believers can have trouble seeing this writing for what it is: They religiousify the poetry and miss what the truth is – Sexual love between a man and a woman (Song 5.) A colleague of mine was shocked that such an explicit description of sexuality in this passage was what it was. But many believers make God a prude in their own image because an inhibited life is what Satan has bound them into in the version of the knowledge of good and evil they call ‘their faith’. God created the difference between man and woman and its obvious sensuality. We need to get over the misapprehension that sex is the regime of sin. The regime of an inhibited life-denying religiosity is the regime of sin. Living from sin consciousness when we have been given Christ our life is an unfortunate morbidity. It could be argued that Jesus was murdered because He had too much life for the religious. Be careful what you align yourself with. FALSE HOLINESS Neo-Platonism and its mind/body dualism – an effect of the contradictions inherent in the knowledge of good and evil outlook and its dichotomies, is the stuff of the law enclosed mindset. It’s the specialty of assorted fundamentalisms and the hypocrisy that goes with them. This kind of thinking comes from separation from God and the belief in a god who is separate from us. MORE PERVERSE There are versions of Christianity that set Jesus up as the Supervisor of the law. They posit that Jesus lived out of the law when in fact Jesus lived from His Father. The more serious distortion of God, however, is not found in the depiction of god in stoic terms. It’s found in the legalisation of god that depicts him as the Grand Supervisor of the Law and His Son as the means of our keeping the law. There are distorted forms of grace that depict Jesus as our means of coming to terms with the law. Jesus is our means of coming to terms with life by joining the life of God to our life by the One Spirit. Let’s be clear. Our religious mindset can warp our view of God and pervert the being of us. HERESY AS RELIGION Jeff Turner writes, “Tragically.. gruesome and harmful caricatures of God eventually become dogmatized and doctrinalized and, despite being nothing more than revivals and revisions of Abraham’s “gimme-God”, become cardinal teachings of the institution that calls herself the “church”. GLOOM Sadly, it is typically these gloomy portraits that become the standard understanding of God preached from most pulpits and printed in most publications and, consequently, many, just like Abraham, find themselves behaving in ways that would have seemed unthinkable had it not been for the influence of their imagined “god”. INSTITUTIONS OF UN-LIFE “Eventually whole structures arise that devote themselves to brewing and distributing these doctrinal distillations to eager-to-drink disciples. Whole generations emerge from the wombs of these structures, fully possessed by and devoted to the false representations of God learned within their walls. All of us have been influenced by such ideas in one way or another, but trick ourselves into thinking that we just happen to be the ones possessing a pristine and perfect knowledge of God’s character.” PAST AND CURRENT EVENTS Many Believers accept their religion uncritically even when it is unscriptural. They were born into it and just accept the religious environment for the truth. This is socialisation. A less kind description is ‘brain washing’. BLIND PEOPLE AND BLIND GUIDES In Genuine spirituality of the kind that is the Kingdom Jesus began, there is no double-talk and none of the kind of religion that majors in a disconnect between Christianity and Christ. To be a life-giver in the image of Jesus means more than arm waving and participation in praise and worship services. It means this. FALSHOOD AS A PATH Trumpism reveals what has always been so - that people accept nonsense and choose folly because they want to. Not because they have to. Some of the worst perversions and distortions of Christ and His Gospel arose in America in the nineteenth century. They are perpetuated today by the inertia of ordinary folks and the vested interested of political religionists who could know better but choose to live as blind folks. These are confused people who have made religion out of drawing the naïve and vulnerable into the pit that favours their career, identity and status. Many in such pits have found God because Jesus has found them. Jesus enters our darkness to draw us into His light and His life. We get more than forgiveness and salvation in union with Jesus. Our soul gets healed and we become human beings who are the expression of His spirit and life. You are not compelled to live a lie as a religion. If we are addicted to Christ over religion we will escape the pit. But if the pit is our idol we will continue in the futility of being our own ‘saviour’.