I heard it again recently: the assertion that the Christian faith is a relationship and not a religion.  And while I totally get what those who say such a thing are “going for,” I can’t help but feel like there’s some dangerous false distinction occurring just beneath the surface.

I say this because I see (and have experienced) the fallout of an over-emphasis on each of them.  If the Christian faith really is all about “me and Jesus,” then we’ve created an immensely subjective construct that, unchecked by “religion,” becomes almost insurmountable.  And so you get lots of conversations about spiritual gifts or inerrancy or whatever is the topic of the day, but rarely do you get the “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” that Paul wrote about.  It’s a kind of spiritual “ear candy” mentality that’s sweet for the moment but isn’t nutritious at all.  Or you get the other side of the same coin: a faith that is so personal that it cannot be talked about whatsoever.  I’ve found this to be true quite a bit these last few years: “yes, it’s about a personal relationship with Jesus, and that relationship is none of your business.”  As a co-worker of mine has noticed, you get discipleship with out doctrine.  I’m beginning to think that there’s nothing very Christian about that at all.

I also know that people have different things going on in their heads and hearts when they hear the word religion.  They often use it as a substitute for denominationalism or church culture or salvation-by-works.  Which is really unfortunate because the simple fact is that Christianity is a religion.  And if you reject the “religion” part of the faith, you very well might find yourself bereft of corporate worship, confession, the Lord’s Supper, prayer, and so many other things that Jesus instituted or Paul put in place (or at least placed in our thinking).  With the overemphasis on this, you can still end up with “topic of the day” conversations also void of “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.”  You get doctrine without discipleship.  There’s a potential earnestness, an immediacy, to these concerns that can leave you feeling that the sky is falling. But that’s usually as far as it goes.

The false distinction of relationship or religion ultimately leaves us unable to talk about either very well (if at all).  I see it because I experience it every day.  People want to talk about religious experience but don’t want to read what Paul says about it.  Or they want to talk about the intricacies of the biblical text without it having any real bearing on day-to-day faithfulness.  Everything is always up for grabs and yet it has no real implications beyond the existential moment.  We’ve reduced the relationship and religion of Christianity into a either a free-for-all or some weird form of 21st century Christian gnosticism.  And if we don’t turn our attention to bringing the two back together, we will have effectively gutted it all . . . and we won’t even realize that we’ve done it.