Tuesday, November 22, 2011

True Religion

True religion, the taking care of widows and orphans sort, is the only way to win over a jaded skeptic. Here's a quote from Thomas Cahill's book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills:
Through the history of the West since the time of Jesus, there has remained just enough of the substance of the original Gospel, a residuum, for it to be passed, as it were, from hand to hand and used, like stock, to strengthen, flavor, and invigorate new movements that have succeeded again and again – if only for a time – in producing alteri Christi, men and women in danger of crucifixion. It has also produced, repeatedly and in the oddest circumstances, the loving-kindness of the first Christians. Malcolm Muggeridge, the supremely secular British curmudgeon, who cast a cold eye over so many contemporary efforts and enterprises, was brought up short while visiting an Indian leprosarium run by the Missionaries of Charity, the sisters founded by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He had always imagined secular humanism to be the ideal worldview but realized, while strolling through this facility, built with love for those whom no one wanted, that no merely humanist vision can take account of lepers, let alone take care of them. To offer humane treatment to humanity’s outcasts, to overcome their lifetime experience of petty human cruelties, requires more than mere humanity. Humanists, he realized with the force of sudden insight, do not run leprosariums.
But it is also true that the West could never have realized some of its most cherished values without the process of secularization. The separation of church and state was achieved in the teeth of virulent Christian opposition, as was free speech, universal suffrage, tolerance, and many other values we would not be without. That these values flow from the subterranean river of authentic Christian tradition points up, once more, the paradoxical validity of the distinctions Jesus made between the religious establishment and true religious spirit.

          

2 comments:

  1. That's interesting, Corey. You have me thinking.

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  2. Thanks Collin. Reading back through this, I think I should have probably mentioned that the other side of the pendulum swing for true religion is institutional drift - where an institution founded for a good purpose (i.e. spreading true religion) has gradually lost that purpose and replaced it with the new purpose of maintaining the institution. This is a constant danger for every church. And this is what the skeptics latch onto most often - church politics, corruption, hypocrisy, etc.

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