The greatest reward lies not in 'religion' but in acceptance of faith

Genesis 32 : 22 - 31; Romans 9 : 1-5; Matthew 14 : 13 - 21

These are bad times for religion. Christians, especially Catholics, have learned of widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups. Muslims have seen their scholars condemned and their scriptures deconstructed for evidence that Islam encourages terrorism. Jews have suffered waves of anti-Semitic attacks as world opinion hardens towards Israel.

This is a rare moment: three world religions racked by crisis. Adherents of all three feel suddenly embattled and isolated. Atheists say "I told you so", and even some believers ask whether there may be something in the nature of religion itself that ends in corruption. After September 11, Catholic commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote "it seems almost as if there is something inherent in religious monotheism that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation - whether, that is, that it is religion itself that is responsible for recurrently convincing not just terrorists but established Churches and States that they have God's sanction to slaughter innocent unbelievers - that means, to ask whether terrorist attacks can be attributed not just to a perversion of religion, but to something in the logic of religion itself".

This commentator has not reckoned with the Trinitarian foundation of the monotheism of the Christian faith that might modify this judgement. But that is another story.

Others say that Islam in particular suffers because it has never been subjected to the fires of modernity, as have Judaism and Christianity. But Judaism and Christianity have paid a heavy price since modernity required God to fit within categories prescribed for 300 years by reigning philosophical agendas requiring that the human subject determine reality, replacing that which God was understood to provide. Consequently, God was made into an object under human control. It is these human religious constructions that have become unconvincing.

So, what are we going to do about religion? Who knows, but the omens are not good.

The word "religion" originally meant something positive as "that which binds". If it still means this, that bind seems now increasingly to be read as a negative.

Sixty years ago a European theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose whole intellectual life was spent wrestling with the ambiguities of religion, wrote from his Nazi prison cell how in Western societies the time of religion was coming to an end. What did he mean?

Well, he meant by religion those fundamentally human activities attempting to reach the beyond: the postulate of a deity, in order to get help and protection if so wanted. Bonhoeffer identified four characteristics of this religious activity.

First, religion as inwardness. This could take the form of ascetism, or it could be an abandoning of the world for the inward journey.

Second, metaphysics. The transcendence that is sought for the completion necessary for this world - God as the superstructure for being, which inescapably leads into thinking in two realms and the understanding that "reality" - the natural - must be completed by the supernatural.

Third, that thinking which regards religion as a province of life, a sector of the whole, that is interesting and socially and psychologically valuable. God as a problem solver, a gap filler, a fulfiller of human needs. Is this the Christian God, dwelling in a dark and ever-smaller province, driven out from one department after another in dreadful secularisation?