Religion - Glenn Conjurske
Religion
by Glenn Conjurske
Religion has a bad name among modern Fundamentalists. It is generally regarded as something false, something evil. It is contrasted with Christianity, and it is confidently affirmed that Christianity is not a religion. No matter that all the best men of God for centuries have spoken of Christianity under the name of religion. Modern pride looks with disdain on all this, and holds fast to its own spiritual and intellectual superiority.
Yet we suppose that all who know anything of their spiritual heritage, and all who love that heritage, must certainly love religion. The Bible certainly has nothing to say against it. Quite the contrary. “If any man among you seem to be religious,” we read in James, “and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” (James 1:26-27). It consists, in other words, of real love and real holiness, which is the nature of God, reproduced in his saints. This is pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father.
I quote, of course, from the old English version of the Bible, but I observe that the new versions have not been able to thrust religion out of this text, in spite of the prevailing modern prejudice against the term. The NIV, the NASV, the NKJV, and the Berkeley Version all retain “religious” and “religion” here, though we may be quite sure that if any other rendering of the word were possible, some of these versions would have found it, for though they are not likely to avow or admit it, one of their leading principles is to differ as much as they can from the old version. Here that principle would have been augmented by the natural aversion of modern Evangelicalism to the term “religion,” and yet they were obliged to retain it. And we may take it almost as an axiom that where the new versions agree with the old one, the translation is sound and solid.
We turn from the Bible to the grand and glorious heritage which we have in the history of the church, and find religion holding the honorable place which belongs to it. Bishop Henshaw thus equates Christianity and religion:
He is the true and reall Chritian whose
Most holy words are seconded with deeds;
Who lives Religion over, and well knowes
Christianity consists not all in creeds;
Pinns not his life, nor faith to others leevs,
Believes what’s writ, and lives as hee believes.
John Wesley wrote to his nephew Charles, in 1784, on the conversion of his nephew Samuel to popery, “I doubt not but both Sarah and you are in trouble because Samuel has ‘changed his religion.’ Nay, he has changed his opinions and mode of worship. But that is not religion; it is quite another thing. …
“’What then is religion?’ It is happiness in God, or in the knowledge and love of God. It is ‘faith working by love,’ producing ‘righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.’ In other words, it is an heart and life devoted to God; or communion with God the Father and the Son; or the mind which was in Christ Jesus, enabling us to walk as He walked.”
Further down in the same letter he says, “Therefore you and my dear Sarah have great need to weep over him. But have you not also need to weep for yourselves? For have you given God your hearts? Are you holy in heart? Have you the kingdom of God within you? righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost? the only true religion under heaven?”
To Samuel himself he wrote, “I fear you want (what you least of all suspect), the greatest thing of all—-religion. I do not mean external religion, but the religion of the heart; the religion which Kempis, Pascal, Fénelon [all papists] enjoyed: that life of God in the soul of man, the walking with God and having fellowship with the Father and the Son. …
“And I lament that fatal step, your relinquishing those places of worship where alone this religion is inculcated. I care not a rush for your being called a Papist or Protestant. But I am grieved at your being an heathen. Certain it is that the general religion both of Protestants and Catholics is no better than refined heathenism.”
Thus he maintains the place of pure and true religion, while of course recognizing the existence of the vain and worthless sort, by whatever name it may be called. This was the common language of all the saints. To “get religion” or “become religious” was synonymous with coming to Christ, or being converted. Thus we read in the Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Magazine, concerning a revival which took place in 1805, “I heard a number of them say, that they had taken more satisfaction in one day, since they experienced religion, than they had taken in their whole lives before.”
The following from Richard Cecil leaves no doubt as to what he supposed religion to be: “Many tradesmen, professedly religious, seem to look on their trade as a vast engine, which will be worked to no good effect, if it be not worked with the whole vigour of the soul. This is an intoxicating and ruinous mistake. So far as they live under the power of religion, they will pursue their trade for sustenance and provision; but not even that, with unseasonable attention and with eagerness.”
We read in the life of William Phillips, a Methodist preacher, “’Very soon my eldest son, about eight years old, came to me, and said, “B—-—-—-has experienced religion;” and then inquired, “What is religion?” Here conviction seized my mind, for I could not answer the questions of the child. I said, Is it possible that I, who was blessed with a religious education, have raised a child to this age, who inquires of me what religion is, and I can not tell him! I then resolved to reform my life, and examine the evidences of Christianity.”
‘He did not delay this great work, but set about it with diligence. He was soon convinced of the divine reality of religion, and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, as a seeker.”
Of the doings on a Methodist mission to the Indians of the far west we read, “One night a man got up and said: ‘I came here with my neighbor to scoff. But as the meeting went on he said to me, “Jim, let’s get out of this: it is too hot.” “No,” I said, “let’s stick it out.” And now, friends,’ he continued, ‘I wish you would pray for me; I want to find this religion you speak about.”’
Thus speak the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Methodists. So the Presbyterians also. Of an awakening under the preaching of Daniel Baker we read, “All secular business seemed for the time to be laid aside and forgotten. Religion appeared the all-engrossing subject of thought and conversation.”
And again, “You may recollect that last fall many individuals here were brought to a profession of religion in consequence of a meeting held by Presbyterian ministers. But these were comparatively few. They were enough, however, to embolden another effort, and to encourage our ministers in the belief that more hearing would produce more religion.”
Congregationalists also. Harriet Newell, who belonged to the first party of missionaries sent to the orient from American shores, writes thus of the time when she was under conviction of sin: “A religion, which was intimately connected with the amusements of the world, and the friendship of those who are at enmity with God, would have suited well my depraved heart. But I knew that the religion of the gospel was vastly different.” And among her last words, when dying at the age of nineteen, were, “Tell them from the lips of their dying sister, that there is nothing but religion worth living for.”
Her funeral discourse was preached from “And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundred fold; and shall inherit everlasting life.” The preacher said, “But where shall we find the singular character exhibited in the text? I answer, in every place, and in every condition of life, where we find true religion.” And once more, “Do you still ask, where such characters are to be found? I answer again, wherever there are CHRISTIANS.”
Religion, then, is Christianity. The Christian literature of the centuries is filled with examples of this sort. From Chillingworth’s “The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants,” to Spurgeon, to Ryle, to the “Real Religion” of Gipsy Smith, this was the common speech of the whole English-speaking church, and certainly countenanced by the Bible.
Yet somehow a change came about. Perhaps due to a decline in this robust religion, this robust speech was abandoned also, and replaced by a fastidious and artificial brand of supposed intellectual accuracy, which must distinguish between Christianity and religion. The old rhyme, which had brought conviction and sobriety to so many minds, (and I quote it purely from memory, and so perhaps may misquote it),
‘Tis religion that can give
Purest pleasure while we live;
‘Tis religion can supply
Solid comfort when we die,
this old rhyme, I say, began to be spoken of slightingly, with something resembling contempt, as though it were a grave error, calculated only to mislead people.
In 1927 A. C. Gaebelein published his book Christianity or Religion, the “or” of course implying that the two cannot be the same thing. And in 1929 we read in a letter in the Moody Monthly, “Do you suppose one Christian even in a thousand can tell what the gospel (glad tidings) is, what Christianity is, and how Christianity differs from religion…?” In our own day it is one of those things which are commonly taken for granted, that Christianity and religion are two different things, the one good, the other evil. And modern irreverence has even gone so far as to publish books on how to be a Christian without being religious. I suggest that what the writers and printers of such trish-trash need is precisely religion. They are in fact irreligious, and this is certainly a great evil. What the modern church needs is precisely religion. I have observed for many years that the general difference between the cultists and the Evangelicals lies in the fact that the cultists are religious, while the Evangelicals are not. I speak, of course, of the serious sort of cultists, for it is true also that we now have a generation of Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses who are as lukewarm, and have as little religion, as the common sort of Evangelicals. But the religion of the serious cultists is a reality, the great controlling force of their lives, while whatever it is which the Evangelicals have is more nearly akin to a game or a hobby, which they take no more seriously than they do the Green Bay Packers or the Chicago Cubs—-and in many cases much less so. The cultists no doubt have a false religion, but the Evangelicals have little religion of any kind.
We make no apology for preaching “the old-fashioned religion,” as all our forefathers did, and we no more apologize for the term than we do for the thing. The great need of the modern church is precisely religion.
Glenn Conjurske