HARPUR: God exists even without ‘religion’

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There can be no doubt we are living through one of the most critical, transformational epochs in the human story to date. Vast changes are occurring at a dazzling, unprecedented speed. From deadly global warming to the miracles of nanotechnology and from the probing of deep space to the core doctrines — the very face and substance of the various world faiths — everything is rapidly changing.

Western Christianity in particular is facing a spectacular falling away from the fold in every denomination except for some rigidly ultra-fundamentalist sects.

However, I believe God is a god of change and of endless evolution, ever making “all things new.” Christianity today bears little likeness to what I’m convinced it is eventually destined to look like.

A key note of the thinking behind it will be the concept of a “religionless Christianity.” This is based on the growing perception that the real thrust of the Gospel’s Jesus story is not about the establishment of a new religion, or the intricate, corporate phenomenon known as the Church, but the end of formal religion.

I first came to grips with this stunning, yet ultimately wholly liberating understanding in the mid-1960s. It was during a series of seminars and lectures by an amazing person. The place was Chateau de Bossey, a conference/retreat centre of the World Council of Churches on the shore of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The speaker was Eberhard Bethge, a scholar and close friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More importantly, he was the man to whom Bonhoeffer’s “Letters from Prison” (hence the book by the same title) were written.

Bonhoeffer, a brilliant theologian, was hanged by the Nazis just days before the allied armies liberated the city of Flossenberg where he was captive. He had been implicated in a plot to kill Hitler.

I had always been challenged by the brief references to religionless Christianity in the letters when I first read them. But Bethge was able to fill in the blanks and help our gathering of theologians from many countries comprehend the depth of his thinking. As he pondered in prison the kind of world that would follow the war, Bonhoeffer saw that the secularization and liberalization of thinking on its way would demand a total transformation of concepts.

His foresight has proven to have been remarkably prophetic. What I see emerging out of the gloom and doom of present church decline is the exciting evolution of a religionless faith. Clearly, from polls and personal contacts, people today are dropping the external shackles of “religiosity” — all the rituals and ancient dogmas. But they still have an amazingly firm, deep and abiding trust in God.

They have not become atheists. They may well express their faith differently. But they are anything but godless. Separation of everything into sacred and secular will have to disappear. Either everything is holy or nothing is. For example, the Holy Land is not some territory far away but the ground upon which one moves in daily life, one’s own country, every place on Earth. All time is sacred, not just a hallowed hour on Sunday morning. All places are indwelt by God, including one’s own heart and life, not just certain edifices with specific shapes.

A religionless faith would be holistic in outlook. Titles such as Reverend So-and-So or Father Jones would be no more. The same would hold for monsignors, bishops, archbishops and the rest.

People are hungry for God. The challenge is to come up with a religionless Christianity that meets their longings and needs. That could mean the rebirth so many have prayed for.

Tom Harpur is a bestselling author on spiritual and ethical issues.



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