Theology Today - Vol 33, No. 4 - January 1977 - ARTICLE - The Ambiguity of Biblical Religion

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The Ambiguity of Biblical Religion
By Gregory Baum

"The claim that in Jesus Christ the ancient promises have been fulfilled and the final age of the world has arrived has led the church to look upon itself too uncritically as God's holy people and become insensitive to the ambiguity of its piety, its teaching, its life and practice, in short its religion. "

THE Bible paints a highly ambivalent picture of religion. The faith of the people is ever threatened by various religious trends that undermine their openness to divine truth and falsify their understanding of the human world. It is possible to read the Scriptures as a textbook on the pathology of religion. The prophets of Israel offer us a detailed critical description of the corrupting religious trends; we learn from them to distinguish idolatrous religion, superstition, hypocrisy, legalistic religion, and finally religion as source of group-egotism and collective blindness. So vulnerable is the religion of God's people that it is in constant need of redemption; the believing community remains in need of the divine Word which continues to judge its religion and renew it in terms of greater trust, surrender, and fidelity.

While the ambiguity of religion and its ongoing need for redemption is a commonplace for biblical scholars, this need has been minimized or even forgotten by Christian teachers and theologians. The claim that in Jesus Christ the ancient promises have been fulfilled and the final age of the world has arrived has led the church to look upon itself too uncritically as God's holy people and become insensitive to the ambiguity of its piety, its teaching, its life and practice, in short its religion.

First and foremost are the repeated prophetic warnings against idolatrous religion. This warning belongs to the core of biblical teaching; it is summarized in the first commandment that God alone is to be worshiped.

Gregory Baum, O.S.A., is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto. Well-known as an interpreter of contemporary Catholicism, he is the Editor of the lively journal The Ecurnenist, author of several books, and a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. This essay on biblical religion is from Religion and Alienation: A Theological Reading of Sociology, by Gregory Baum, Paulist Press,1975, pp.63-75. Reprinted with permission of The Paulist Press, Copyright ©1975, The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York.

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The very creation of Israel had been an act whereby the people were separated from the surrounding tribes involved in the worship of false gods. And yet the people remained vulnerable to idolatrous trends. The prophets continually reminded them to renew their dedication to the Holy One of Israel and to abandon their attachment to other gods, to idols and images, and to the worthlessness surrounding them. "Hear the word of the Lord,O house of Jacob. . . . 'What wrong did your fathers find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthlessness and became worthless? " (Jer.2:4-5). The prophetic preaching against the idolatrous trends in the religion of Israel was not simply aimed at the worship of idols; it also included the repudiation of world views that were incompatible with faith in the true God. At the time of the Maccabees, the temptation of idol worship was present in the surrender to the pagan humanism of the dominant culture that undermined the faith of Israel (I Macc.1:43). In the New Testament the warning against idolatry continues. The condemnation of idol worship was then aimed not so much at the veneration of false gods and demons as against the universal tendency in humanity to forget the creator revealed in works of creation, and instead to elevate a part of this created order and worship it as if it were divine (cf. Rom.1:18-32). The apostle Paul regarded this idolatrous trend as so powerful and central in human history that he derived from it the fall of culture and society into sin, violence, and the estrangement from all that is good and holy. Idolatry in this wider sense remained a constant temptation in the church. Either Christians serve the Lord, or they become slaves and venerators of created realities such as money (Mt.6:24), personal gain (Col.3:5; Eph.5:5), political power (Rev.13:8), envy and hatred (Titus3:3). Faith in the true God implied the radical repudiation of the divinizing trends operative in culture and religion. To believe that Jesus is Lord meant that nothing in the created order, neither people nor ideas, can ever lay claim to be an absolute and demand unconditional loyalty.

While the warning against idolatry holds a central place in the Scriptures, it has not been central at all in Catholic preaching and teaching. In the church's teaching, idolatry tended to be equated with the worship of false gods and hence did not refer to a sin commonly committed in monotheistic religion. There was no reason, then, why the church should warn people of the idolatrous trends in their piety. This neglect of the biblical perspective was largely due to the church's institutional self-interest. For if idolatry be understood as the absolutizing of the finite and the elevating of a part to be the ultimate measure of the whole, then the church's unmitigated claim to absolute truth and ultimate authority becomes problematic. From the biblical point of view, the church itself could become an idol. Church doctrine and ecclesiastical authority promote idolatrous trends in religion whenever these institutions no longer present themselves as serving the divine Word and as mediating a divine mystery that transcends them; the church becomes an idol whenever it identifies itself with the kingdom of

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God. The church is tempted by idolatry when it wants to multiply the absolutes and regard its teaching and its hierarchy as the ultimate norms for judging all forms of Christian life and faith. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Protestant Reformation in its struggle against the medieval church made the biblical warning against idolatry central in the proclamation of the gospel. To this day, one of the most admirable characteristics of Protestantism is the ardent desire to discern the idolatrous trends in culture and ecclesiastical life. Yet even in the Protestant churches there is no structural guarantee against idolatry. Religion remains forever vulnerable to idolatrous trends. In the Catholic Church it was Vatican Council II that clearly distinguished between the church and the promised kingdom of God and thus encouraged a critical trend among Catholics to discern the idolatrous elements in the life of their own church.

Second, we find in the Scriptures the denunciation of superstitions that distort the true faith of Israel. The Scriptures repudiate astrology (Jer.10:2; Isa.47:13), necromancy (I Sam.28:7-25), soothsaying (Ezek.21:21,23; Zecb.10:2), and magical practices of all sorts (Ex.22:18; Lev.20:6,27; Deut.18:10). Even the wearing of amulets, a superstitious practice to ward off evil spirits, was strictly forbidden (Gen.35:4; Judg.8:24; Isa.3:20;II Macc.12:40). The reason why these practices were so vehemently repudiated was that they were a sign of fear and hence symbolized the waning of faith. These practices, moreover, recalled the ways of idolatrous religions; they invested with saving power the coincidental and the worthless. The New Testament continues to warn the faithful against magical rites of any kind (Acts13:6-10;19:13-19; Gal.5:20; Rev.21:27). Superstition is here regarded as the breakdown of truth. It is inspired by fear of the unknown and the suspicion that the universe is hostile and malevolent. According to the Scriptures, the universe belongs to God and was created for humanity.

The ambiguity of religion, however, makes superstitious practices almost inevitable. Superstition is present in the transition from faith to credulity. The manifestations of the sacred in history have always inspired people to surround them with protective ritual, separating them from the profane aspects of life, and, following a tendency that is hard to resist, the very gestures that were intended to serve the holy and keep it unalloyed acquire sacred authority themselves and become the object of veneration. The ambiguity of religion is such that the celebration of the sacred is never wholly free from superstitious trends. Faith in God's power is only too easily accompanied by a credulity that sees divine guidance behind coincidences. In Christianity it is in fact not always easy to decide whether a certain practice or a certain belief is based on God's self-manifestation in history or whether it is simply the product of human credulity. To most contemporary Christians the widespread belief in the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures and hence in the inerrancy of the biblical books appears like superstition; for

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here, faith in God's Word recorded in the Scriptures is transmuted into credulity in regard to the written text. Today Catholics have begun to ask themselves whether the belief in the infallibility of the church and its hierarchy is part of their faith grounded in God's self-revelation, or whether it is the fading away of faith into an all too human credulity. Catholic theologians seek criteria for distinguishing between the authentic response of faith to God's Word and the superstitious extension of faith into wishful thinking.

On the other hand, the ambiguity of religion is such that the radical efforts on the part of religious leaders to root out all forms of superstition have usually led to such a rational and critical approach to life that religion itself began to decline. For when people can no longer accept the religious community and its liturgical gestures as bearers of divine grace, they fall into individualism and separate themselves from the sources of faith. There is then no pure religion. It remains ambiguous and hence in need of an ongoing critique.

III

A third corrupting trend present in religion is hypocrisy. The ancient prophets and Jesus himself revealed the nature of hypocrisy and denounced its destructive effect on the believers, individually and collectively (Isa.29:13; Eccl.1:29-30;32:15;36:18-19; Mt.6:2,5,16;23:5-12). Believers are hypocritical to the extent that their religious words and gestures do not correspond to their hearts. Hypocritical re-ligion is play-acting. We assume a role to which we are faithful, but weorder to be seen by people. In other words, hypocrisy is an attempt touse religion to advance one's position in life: it is a manipulative abuse of religion. It is easy for people to recite religious creeds and join in religious celebrations to protect their role in the community, enhance their authority, and derive the benefits which the community bestows on its dedicated members. Jesus recalled the preaching of Isaiah: "They have honored me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me" (Mt.15:7; cf Isa.29:13). According to the biblical account, this self-serving use of religion may be due to purely personal ambition or, more often, to the interests of a particular class. The preaching of Jesus stressed that hypocritical behavior protects the power of the dominant groups and enhances the respect in which ordinary people hold them. Hypocrisy is a particular temptation for those who exercise authority in religion.

Again we notice the inevitable ambiguity of religion. The practice of religion itself produces the occasion for hypocrisy. Since religion is a communal activity, since in religion people are responsible for one another, it may at times be necessary for persons, especially if they exercise positions of leadership, to give witness to the common faith and celebrate the common hope, even if they are unable at the time to

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endorse these interiorly. This sort of fidelity to the community, disregarding personal doubts and hesitations, could become the source of new religious experience and nourish personal faith. At the same time, public witness of this kind could also lead ecclesiastical leaders into hypocrisy. For while the intention behind their testimony may at first be simply to strengthen the community of faith, the fact that their words also enhance their authority in the community may in the long run become important to them and affect their interest as a group. Even here an ongoing critique is necessary.

The fourth corrupting trend in religion, carefully analyzed in the Scriptures, is legalistic religion. The prophets of Israel and Jesus himself provided us with a detailed critique of legalism. Legalism, we note, cannot be equated with fidelity to a way of life, to liturgical rules, and to the norms in which a religious community embodies its ideals. The fidelity of the believing Jew to Torah does not represent what the Bible means by legalism, no more than does the loyalty of the Christian to the ethos of the apostolic community. Legalism is, rather, the religious attitude that makes observance the end of religion. Legalism substitutes observance for holiness (Amos4:4-5; Isa.1:11-16; Lk.18:9-14; Mt.20:1-11; Lk.15:25-30; Rom.2:17-24). For legalists the laws and rites of religion are the ultimate norms of life; what they forget is that laws and rites are meant to be symbols mediating inward transformation and new life. The legal structure of biblical religion was to establish people in a way that would deliver them from selfishness and group-egotism and lead them to communion with the divine mystery, The legalist deformation of religion concerns itself with the outside, the surface, of human existence. It concentrates on observance. It makes obedience to the law the ultimate sign of religious surrender and remains unconcerned and insensitive to the inward meaning of the law. Legalism creates a mask of conformity which makes believers holy in their own eyes and thus prevents them from coming to self-knowledge. Legalistic religion stresses will-power, and it is this very stress on personal effort that makes legalists unaware of their real feelings, of their own brokenness, and hence of their need for redemption. Legalists tend to think that it is possible for people to make themselves holy if they only try hard enough. They have little appreciation of God's gratuitous presence to human life, bringing people to critical awareness, and supporting their faithful action. And because legalists think that holiness is within people's grasp, they tend to despise the men and women who are not as observant as they. Thus they elevate themselves above the sinner, the outsider, the non-conformist. Because of this self-elevation, this reliance on themselves, coupled with lack of self-knowledge, legalists render themselves incapable of receiving divine grace; they do not live by faith.

Legalists, in the perspective of the Scriptures, entertain a false understanding of God. God, for them, is an exacting lawgiver, a stern

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master who confronts people with a set of laws, expects them to live up to them, and promises to reward them if they are obedient and to punish them if they disobey. But this is a caricature of biblical religion, For the message of both Old and New Testament is that God is the redeemer of people, that God has taken the initiative in a covenant of mercy, and that the way of life divinely revealed-first Torah and then, from the Christian viewpoint, the new way-is the road that leads to fidelity and abundant life. The God of the Scriptures has power over the human heart, and hence along with the commandments offers the inward help enabling people to respond to them in faith. In the New Testament in particular we hear the good news that God is present and active in our history, that the divine mystery reveals to us the sin of the world and undergirds our actions of hope and love, that we are alive by a principle that transcends our own, limited powers, and that we have access to the life of holiness by relying on the divine grace operative within us.

Legalistic religion, we should add immediately, remains a dimension of the Christian life. While the great theologians of the church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas in particular, have stressed the radical difference between holiness and observance, and while even the teaching of the Council of Trent, especially in the session on justification, tried to remove the suspicion of legalism from Catholic teaching, the ordinary preaching and the official teaching in the Catholic Church do not pay much attention to the critique of legalism so central in the Scriptures. Even in Protestantism, which began as a vehement protest against the hypocrisy and legalism of the medieval church, there is an ever-present need to be delivered from the ambiguity of religion and the legalist mentality. The roots of legalism are situated in the human psyche; for the legalist mentality is even found in people who have little to do with religion. Unfortunately, religion readily lends itself to a legalist misunderstanding. The reliance on ceremonies and commandments only too easily leads to a false trust in the legal elements of religion, even when they are meant to proclaim and protect God's liberating presence in the religious community.

There is, however, a factor intrinsic to New Testament preaching that has prevented the churches from making the struggle against legalism as central as it was for the prophets. The vehement preaching of the early church against hypocrisy and legalism, following the preaching of Jesus himself, was usually presented as a polemic against the group of people called the Pharisees. The books of the New Testament, confessional documents with a strong polemical edge, describe the Pharisees as hypocritical and legalistic men with so much eloquence that to this day hypocritical and legalistic religion is called "pharisaism" in the language of Christians.

Modern scholarship has demonstrated that the New Testament has drawn a caricature of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were in fact a radical party of reformers in Israel that made Torah and the faithful life the center of religion and the primary locus where people en-

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countered their God as a living reality. This new spirituality made the Jewish community independent of the temple worship in Jerusalem and undermined the authority of the hierarchical priesthood; it also gave the people a sense of peace and self-possession in an age of oppression and delivered them from the feverish messianic expectations that pervaded occupied Israel in the century before the Christian era until the destruction of Jerusalem. The Pharisees had created a Judaism centered on daily practices, the study of Torah, and peaceful community life. It was the Pharisees' rejection of the apocalyptical mood and eager messianic hopes that made them impatient with the claims of Jesus. The Pharisees were the most powerful movement in Israel, and after the destruction of the temple and the waning of apocalypticism, they represented the sole spiritual force in Judaism. Rabbinical Judaism is derived from the Pharisees. The church's conflict with the Synagogue was, therefore, mainly with the heirs of the Pharisees, and it was for these polemical reasons that the early Christian writers projected onto the Pharisees the various corrupting religious trends Jesus had denounced in his preaching. This polemical caricature of the Pharisees has had tragic consequences for the image of Judaism in the Christian tradition; it has also had damaging consequences for the Christian church, which was led to believe quite falsely that Jesus' preaching against hypocrisy and legalism was not a message addressed to the community acknowledging his name, but a denunciation of Jewish religion. It was this false identification of "Pharisaism" that prevented the churches from submitting their life and practice to the preaching of Jesus against hypocrisy and legalism. It was the unwillingness of the church to come to self-knowledge and confront the ambiguity of its religion that made it project the repressed elements of its own life onto the community of Israel which preceded and accompanied it.

The fifth corrupting trend of religion, recorded in Old and New Testament, is the falsification of people's self-understanding which is designated by the biblical words of "blindness," "deafness," or "the hardening of hearts." The ancient prophets and Jesus himself repeatedly revealed to people that they no longer saw themselves as they were: they had blinded themselves to reality, they clung to illusions that flattered them and protected the worst tendencies in their social life. The ironic phrase of Isaiah, repeated by Jesus, depicts the prophet as the one who drives the people's false consciousness to the breaking point: "Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed" (Isa.6:9-10; Mt.13:14-15). The people, we are told, made false use of the signs of election in their midst, the temple and the symbols of the covenant (cf. Jer.7:4), to persuade themselves that they were indeed

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God's chosen people and to remain ignorant of what was actually going on among them. This notion of "blindness" remained central in Jesus' preaching. The self-interest of groups, classes, and peoples, we are made to understand, can be accompanied by so much self-delusion that they remain wholly unaware of the purposes, the motives, and even the actions that determine their collective existence. The Bible describes here what Karl Marx was later to call false consciousness.

The people are blind when they misinterpret divine election as a guarantee that they are superior to others, have an elevated place in history, and are destined to triumph over their enemies. This misinterpretation prevents them from being aware of the actual danger in which they live and of their own infidelity to the divine promises. The divine election, commissioning the people to be a special witness of God's truth and generosity in history, becomes in the minds of stubborn and hardened people an election to a privileged status which grants them power over the destiny of others. This deafness leaves the religious community vulnerable, for it is no longer able to listen to God's Word, nor is it open to conversion and renewal. The people then regard themselves as a holy community, and their ministers as a holy priesthood. Their basic concern has become the protection of their privileges. They have so falsified their self-understanding that they do not see the games of power and the structures of domination at work in their community, and they do not notice how much these alienate ordinary men and women from the freedom and power to which they have been called.

Again, we notice the inevitable ambiguity of religion. For while religious people, following the Scriptures, desire to be seeing and recognize the structures of evil present in their midst, they also want to praise the special mercy, of which they are the recipients. They do experience themselves as guided, as having a light available in their lives, as being in the truth. But as soon as they express these convictions and lay claim to a truth that transcends the confusion generated by society, they create a language that easily gives rise to an exaggerated belief in divine guidance and hence to false consciousness. Contemporary Catholics, to give an example, who no longer accept papal and ecclesiastical infallibility, are searching nonetheless for a language that expresses their faith in the Spirit guiding the believing community and making life-giving truth available to those who seek God's Word. There is no safe language in religion. The inevitable ambiguity of religion demands that it remain ever open to an ongoing critique.

The preceding remarks on idolatry, superstition, hypocrisy, legalism, and collective blindness offer a surnmary- a partial one-of the pathology of religion revealed in the Scriptures. What is the response of the faithful to these corrupting trends in their religion? The biblical key word is here "conversion." From the beginning of the

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prophetic literature through the entire Bible God calls the people to return to God, to seek God's face, to repent of their sins, to be converted anew, and to enter into the peace and reconciliation to which they have been called. "Cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed against me; and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. Why should you die,O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies. Be converted, then, and live" (Ezek.18:31-32). This conversion to which the people were called demanded a recognition of what they were doing, an acknowledgment of how far they had removed themselves from the will of God, and a willingness to return to greater fidelity to the divine promises. The prophets of Israel addressed the people as if they were involved in collective sin and suffered from communal blindness; the prophetic message was meant to raise their common consciousness, to make them aware of what they refused to look at, and to open them to the summons of the divine Word. The prophetic call to conversion was to make Israel aware of the corrupting trends in their religious life and enable them, if they so wanted, to return to the authentic religion revealed by God.

This call for conversion remains central in the New Testament. In the preaching of John the Baptist and that of Jesus himself, the message of repentance and forgiveness was aimed more directly at individual believers, even though the social dimension of conversion was not entirely overlooked. Personally and collectively, people were called upon to recognize the truth about themselves, which their self-delusion had hidden from them, and to open themselves to the imminent coming of God's kingdom. In the apostolic preaching, conversion (repentance, metanoia) remained a central theme. Since the ambiguity of life marked the Christian community as much as any other, the faithful would remain in need of conversion until the day of God's final victory. They were to listen to God's Word and submit to God's judgment so that they be converted anew to the source of life. Conversion here means a change of heart or a raising of awareness.

It is curious and yet characteristic that, until recently, "conversion" in the language of Christians usually referred to the conversion of people to the Christian faith or even to the church. While in the New Testament conversion and baptism were indeed the door by which people entered the Christian community, it was never supposed that conversion took place only once in the Christian life. Because of the ambiguity of religion, conversion remains a dimension of the Christian faith. By confining the meaning of conversion to the acceptance of the gospel faith, the Christian community forgot that the call to conversion was addressed to its own members. In this context, the word "repentance" acquired a purely moral meaning; people were asked to repent of their sins, that is, of their immoral actions. What was forgotten was that repentance referred to much more than that; repentance, the equivalent of conversion, included critical awareness, the acknowledgment of the repressed, and a new openness to the hidden

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truth. It was above all the biblical renewal of the twentieth century that restored to the Christian churches a deeper sense of conversion. Today Christians are beginning to be aware that the call to metanoia is to make them see more clearly the ambiguity of life and religion and become open to God's healing and elevating grace.

We have suggested that the church as a whole has not made the religious pathology indicated in the Scriptures central in its own preaching. There are many sermons against superstition and hypocrisy, but very few dealing with idolatry, legalism, and false consciousness. The church has tended to took upon itself as the redeemed community, as the holy church in which the messianic promises have been fulfilled, as the very plenitude and embodiment of Christ extended through space and time. If a community identifies itself as Christ's mystical body, how much self-knowledge is available to it? Understanding its own life exclusively in terms of the redemption offered in Jesus Christ, the church has largely lost the sense of the ambiguity of religion.

Protestants have taken the biblical teaching on the ambiguity of religion more seriously than Catholics. Yet when contemporary Protestant theologians, following the lead of Barth and Bonhoeffer, make a radical distinction between faith and religion and pretend that the Christian gospel creates faith but not religion, they also evade the challenge raised by the biblical teaching. Christianity is community, worship, way of life, religion. It may be useful, at certain moments, to deny that Christianity is a religion. One may wish to stress the divine initiative operative in our conversion to God and denounce the emptiness of self-willed religious ceremonies, or one may wish to emphasize that God is present in day-to-day secular life and not confined to specifically religious moments. But it is quite unacceptable to deny altogether that Christianity is a religion. Whether we follow the sociologists who understand religion mainly in terms of worship and the worshiping community or those who prefer to define religion in terms of symbol-systems directing people's lives and giving meaning to their existence, Christianity in whatever form is a visible religion. Theologians who insist that Christianity is only God-inspired faith, hope, and love, and that the visible, social expression of these attitudes is always and inevitably a betrayal of the gospel, prevent Christians from coming to a critical self-understanding and in the long run weaken in them the sense of responsibility for their own communities. The ready acknowledgment that the church is sinful through and through, characteristic of certain Protestant currents, is as unhelpful for the emergence of self-knowledge as the corresponding Catholic trend to deny altogether the sinfulness of the church.