Toxic religion!?
By Jeff Fountain, Evangelical Focus:
Religion is toxic. Spirituality is cool.
How often have we heard people say: ‘I’m not religious but I am spiritual’? Perhaps we even express it ourselves.
Theologians like Karl Barth (‘religion is an inherently faithless endeavour’) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (‘religionless Christianity’) also decried religion as a pale substitute for true spirituality.
Abraham Kuyper therefore sounds a century out of date when he unashamedly refracts the Christian religion through his Calvinist prism to discover ‘good news for science, art and culture’.
Calvinism was the religion necessary for human flourishing, in his view. It ‘united God and humanity; the individual and society; head, heart and hands’. It was the religion of all of life lived in God’s presence (coram Deo).
‘Calvinism’ may suggest to us a narrow dogma of predestination and a God who arbitrarily sends people to hell or to heaven. But Kuyper refers to something much broader and richer.
While not actually defining religion, his vision of human life lived well was when lived ‘in all its breadth and depth, individually and collectively, to the glory of God’…
… True religion cannot view the present human condition as normal, but abnormal, fallen short of God’s intention.
Religion is thus necessarily soteriological, Kuyper writes, meaning it is about the regeneration of individuals and the restoration of all that was lost through the fall.
Which engages every sphere of life affected by sin. Which is every sphere of life.
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