Posted on 07/23/2014 7:07:07 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
Over the last several years I have encountered a fair number of Christians who claim they are “spiritual but not religious.” In other words, they do not identify with a particular Christian denomination, using the Bible alone to guide their faith. It’s an ideology that says religious institutions are outdated and unnecessary.
People may reach this conclusion for a multitude of reasons. Some are disillusioned by what they perceive to be corruption and hypocrisy in religious institutions. Others may feel like they are not being “fed.” Others yet may feel that these intuitions teach something contrary to their beliefs regarding political and social issues.
Whatever the reason may be, we must reach out to these people and take their concerns seriously.
Jesus started a religion
Most dictionaries define religion as “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.” It is abundantly obvious from Scripture that Christians are called to worship the one true God (cf. Matthew 4:9, Mark 5:6, Luke 4:8, John 4:23). I’m sure most “spiritual but not religious” Christians will agree with this.
The issue is whether or not one can do this privately, reading only Scripture and coming to their own conclusions on theological matters, or whether one must submit to some authority outside of themselves.
Jesus started a Church
In Matthew 16:18, Jesus says to the apostle Peter, “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Catholics believe that in this verse Jesus is bestowing on Peter a position of authority from which the office of the pope is derived. But even if the “spiritual” Christian has problems with this belief, there is no escaping the fact that Christ intended his Church to be both visible and authoritative.
In Matthew 18, Jesus says to his disciples:
If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector (15-17).
If Jesus did not intend his Church to be authoritative and visible, then what Church is he talking about in this verse? It’s clear in the text that this Church is communal.
It is also evident from Scripture that Jesus intended this community to gather regularly for worship:
Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Heb. 10:25).
This verse indicates that, even in the first century, there were Christians who did not think it was necessary to gather for worship. This runs contrary to the idea that one can be a church unto himself as long as he has accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior. The Lord intended his Church to be a community.
Is the Bible all you need?
On his way from Jerusalem to Gaza, Phillip the Evangelist encounters a eunuch reading the Book of Isaiah:
So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him(Acts 8:27-31).
The point of this passage is that the clear meaning of Scripture is not always evident. This is reinforced again in 2 Peter 1:20:
First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation,
And yet again in 2 Peter 3:15-16:
So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures.
Clearly, just picking up the Bible and interpreting it for your self is not recommended. A teacher is necessary; preferably an authoritative one.
What about scandals in the Church?
As my colleague Tim Staples is fond of saying, “You don’t leave Peter because of Judas.” From a Catholic perspective this means you don’t leave the Church because someone didn’t live up to its teaching.
I came into the Church during the height of the priest abuse scandal. I was certainly concerned about it (as most Catholic laypeople were), but ultimately the number of people out in the world doing good work far outweighs the number of people who have abused their positions. For more on this I recommend reading our special report, A Crisis of Saints.
Many “spiritual but not religious” Christians have also expressed concerns about events in history. It’s true that Christians throughout time have acted contrary to the faith, but like the abuse scandal, it should be remembered that history is filled with good and holy missionaries.
It’s also worth pointing out that many of the events in history have been blown way out of proportion in the popular imagination. Catholic Answers has dozens of great articles about this available at this link.
Get back to where you belong
It’s clear from the Bible that Jesus did not intend Christians to live out their spiritual lives in a vacuum. He founded a Church, gave it authority in the areas of faith and morals, and guards it from teaching error (Mt 18:17-18).
At Catholic Answers, we have a mountain of great resources making the case that the Church Jesus founded is the Catholic Church. If you or someone you know is “spiritual but not religious,” please consider reading what we have to offer.
However "Get back to where you belong" could also, and reasonably, be applied to anyone on God's green earth, since "where we belong" is within the will of God; God wills that all men be saved, and come to a knowledge of the Truth; and Christ established His church for a reason, namely to be the "pillar and foundation of the Truth."
So it stacks up to be practically a syllogism. If not quite apodictic, it's at least a reasonable inference that everybody ought to be a member of that Church which He founded, which is the Body of Christ.
I wouldn't expect all the members of the FReeper Brethren Fellowship to snap to attention and say "Oh, I get it, I'm supposed to be a Catholic" --- most people are not, actually, much moved by reasonable inferences --- but this might give you an insight on how a Catholic would see it.
Billy Graham would also have Catholics in the audience and he would tell them, and everyone else, to return to their churches and be good Christians. Billy Graham was despised by many evangelicals because he would not put down Catholics and treated them like fellow Christians. On the death of JP2 He said that JP2 was “the most influential voice for morality and peace in the world in the last 100 years”.
AFAICS, there are two different versions of “spiritual but not religious” Christians, with very different motivations and desires.
The first group consists of, to use Bellah’s term, Sheilaists. They want to believe what they want to believe, whether or not the Scripture teaches it, whether or not Christianity teaches it. They tend to be theologically and politically leftist, but they don’t see any need to spend time and money in any specific leftist denomination (ELCA, PCUSA, most UMC, etc.).
The second group is very different. What you often hear from the second group is that they want “a relationship, not a religion,” meaning they want an experiential rather than a liturgical approach to their faith.
Herein lies the dilemma. Let’s be honest: most liturgical services are formulaic, and can quickly become a dry habit. For example, I would be afraid to count the number of times I have recited the Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer, or sung the Gloria or the Sanctus, gotten to the end of it, and realized that I had done it mindlessly: I hadn’t purposefully offered it to God, and I hadn’t thought of the possibility of any response from God, I had just said what I said without thinking and without really meaning it—I hadn’t *not* meant it, I simply did it because that was what one did at that point in the service.
The liturgy, at its best (and I mean that in a positive sense), is a connection to the great cloud of witnesses, to the church throughout the ages, (as I put it in my lessons) from St. Clement to Kim Clement, all gathered before the Throne in praise, worship, adoration, desire for reconciliation and closeness, petition for the saints both present and future, to feel His presence, hear from His Spirit, receive blessings from His hand, and join Him in the wedding rehearsal dinner where He gives Himself to us.
But that is the liturgy at its best. For most Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, etc. at most times, it is instead a dry ritual, something that you do because The Church Boss says you’re supposed to do it. Now, to be fair, all of the above have attempted over the centuries to generate a desire for the experience of God within and beyond the liturgy. In the 20th century, for example, the Cursillo movement in all its various iterations (Emmaus, Tres Dias, Kairos, etc.) aided in bringing the presence of God into the work and worship of parishioners, even though one of its unintended effects was to bring about a separation between insiders and outsiders, those who had the experience and were therefore closer to God, and those who hadn’t.
To be frank, the liturgical churches have done a poor job of ensuring the experience of the divine presence in the daily/weekly practice of worship—but to be equally frank, the experiential churches have done a poor job of ensuring the sense of the historical drama of the faith, and how that leads inexorably to the present drama of the faith. To put it another way, liturgical churches connect people to the churches of the past without effectively providing the experience of I AM, the God of the eternal present, while experiential churches provide the experience of the I AM while creating the heinous illusion that God has been waiting 2000 years for churches filled with people who really want to know Him, and that it’s only now that He has them.
Personally, I desire to be one of those who bring out of their storehouses treasures both new and old. Will we ever form such a church before the Marriage Supper?
That's true, since most Catholic churches stay in the same place...
(The way my grandson eats noodles I think he's going to become a Ramen Catholic, but I digress.)
“Importantly, the spiritual Christians not in community with others cannot take communion. This is vital.”
Not only that, their reasons are usually vain and self-serving.
Just one more example of the totally corrupted word “church” used in place of the correct word “assembly” used in the New Testament.
I’m with you on that one.
I see the church of today observing a foreign calendar, foreign sabbaths and foreign holy days that are traditions of men and not what is given in His Holy Word or described in the very life events of the Messiah of Israel..
I see a church in the world that has conformed to the world and in some respects taught the world these counterfeits....
His Kingdom is not filled with saturn’s days, sunsdays, Tiw’s days or july’s or August’s or christmas or easter..those are man made counterfeits taught by the church and the world..1000 year reign will teach us all that...
Being obedient to His Word has meant rejecting the church of today and the world it has conformed itself to...regardless of how it appears or what the consequences are...
what profit is there in vain worship of counterfeits?
None...
Like I said, it cant be explained to people who have a belief the church todsy represents the truth..
His Truth never changes... and hundreds of denominations and the fights on FR prove that the church today has no idea what Truth is. There are so many versions of truth in what the world calls the church that it can only mean one thing-satan has done a good job of muddying the water..
He is not the author of confusion... and I am so thankful to get my lessons direct from Him..and am able to test what other people say with His Word, proving all things..He has truly opened my eyes to the counterfeit world and the accepted lies..
And just as Jeremiah stated, I have done it in my own life
the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.
HalleluYah!
There is a number of straw man arguments the author makes.
“Over the last several years I have encountered a fair number of Christians who claim they are “spiritual but not religious.” In other words, they do not identify with a particular Christian denomination, using the Bible alone to guide their faith. It’s an ideology that says religious institutions are outdated and unnecessary.”
and
“The issue is whether or not one can do this privately, reading only Scripture and coming to their own conclusions on theological matters, or whether one must submit to some authority outside of themselves.”
The pretense here is people are using ONLY “their own” authority and are not listening to any authority outside their own. In fact, in the area of human guidance non-demominational Christians can be following a number of human “authorities” of one denomination or more as well as theologians and pastors not particularly associated with a single denomination in their writing, AND with the one authority in scripture G-d. All the writer is really complaining about is the non-denominational are not listening to some “authority” he approves of.
“In Matthew 16:18, Jesus says to the apostle Peter, “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” Catholics believe that in this verse Jesus is bestowing on Peter a position of authority from which the office of the pope is derived. But even if the “spiritual” Christian has problems with this belief, there is no escaping the fact that Christ intended his Church to be both visible and authoritative.”
And for Christians who do not accept the Roman misinterpretation - formulated to serve the human institution given the emperor’s blessing, and for all non-demominational Christians “authoritative” does not have to conform to a certain denomination and “visible” is the spiritual Church made visible and known by the Christian life of Christian believers, in and out of any denomination.
Then you reject the authority of Scripture? We are not supposed to stop meeting together as believers. That’s not optional. Calendars are optional. Eating kosher is optional. Felowshipping with and sharing lives, burdens, hopes and worship with those who name Jesus as their Savior is not optional. Those who come up with some extraordinary excuse to avoid it, even when it’s problematic, are AWOL. Do you get permission to desert when your fellow soldiers are demoralized or have lost their focus or sense of mission? No. That’s when they need you, and you need them, most.
Yes, it was when He gave the Law, but HE redeemed us from the curse of the Law so we're not under the bondage of a religious system any more.
But He did not start another one when He was here walking this planet, or even after leaving the earth.
Religion has driven more people from Christ than anything else the enemy has come up with.
The world doesn't need another system of religion for people to try to find their way to God. They need the new birth found in believing in Christ as in John 3.
And of course, their determination that it's just YPIOS is THEIR private interpretation which says that your private interpretation is wrong.
And so it goes.
Written by a Catholic to any/every Catholic...
I wonder, if we all got together in a public place and interpreted, would that insulate us from the charge?
Say: “There was nothing private about it, look, we uploaded it to youtube!”
There was a thread recently written by a Catholic where it was suggested that a person, if he were on a mountain could pray as long as he had a mechanism (iphone perhaps) to where he could access prayers...
And as we all know, to be in the presence of Jesus, there has to be a Eucharist present...I don't believe my comment is too far off the mark...
The word religion actually means "to bind back". It speaks of the reality that man has been searching for the way to bind himself back to God - that's why there are thousands of religions. Christianity is the opposite of religion because it is not what man must do to bind himself back to God but what God has done to bind man back to Him. Religions teach man MUST do specific things in order to acquire the endgame - be it heaven, nirvana, happy-hunting-grounds. One religion teaches one thing and another teaches something different, but they ALL teach the onus is on the man to make himself worthy of God.
Jesus is God in the flesh and He died on the cross to pay for the sins of the world. God's requirement is FAITH. We don't earn, merit, work for or deserve heaven, we are given heaven as a gift by the grace of God and we receive this gift by faith. Christianity is the polar opposite of religion.
That's what we are referring to...No one but a Catholic is going to pay any attention to these teachings because they are not Biblical...Just because you use a bible word or phrase or two doesn't mean you own it...
I'm puzzled by people who think Jesus established a church for no reason in particular.
Sure he did...But we bible alone people see the church in the bible, alone...And it is not your religion...
Your Church is a religion that was created outside the words of God...You hopscotch around the bible and pick a few verses that you figure you can use to connect your religion to Christianity...
That was me and it appears to be a mischaracterization of what I was talking about. The app in question was brevmeum and here is the passage:
Breviarium Meum allows you to pray the traditional (1962) Latin breviary of the Catholic Church wherever you go. Just pull out your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, select the hour to pray, and begin. You can download the texts up to a week in advance, so you can pray even when you don't have a network connection. So if you’re on a mountain top making a retreat, or down in a valley to celebrate Mass in an isolated village, you can still keep up with the office, even if you left your printed breviary at home.
The breviary contains a particular type of prayer which includes psalms and other readings, ideally it is for communal prayer. It's also called the "Divine Office".
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.