The Rebellion Against Religion: New Christianities.

Go ahead and rebel against the dominant religion in your cultue, Jesus did.

"There seems to be more and more Christians repelled by their own religion. There seems to be more and more who believe in Christ and wish there were some way of believing other than being religious, who precisely for the sake of Christ long to overcome religiosity. We have no way of knowing whether this is the onset of a disease or the beginning of a recovery, whether it is a curse or a blessing. We can only try to work out the logic and the music of our condition, in the hope that in doing so we may be of some help to the church and perhaps also those touched and puzzled by the church. For the task of the church is to make sense of the gospel, of the story of Jesus as the Christ."

"We hope, of course, that our thinking will provide more than an instructive error. No one can help seeing the world and the human story refracted by his or her own passions and anxieties. Thus the worldliness we experience in ourselves seems to us to offer an interpretation of the present situation of our civilization and particular task laid on those who would tell the gospel in that situation. Here is the origin of slogans about the world like "post-Christian," or "post-religious." Much of the sloganeering has been amateurish and some of it destructive."

"Nevertheless, the malaise all this sloganeering expresses is real enough. The time has come, however, for more than howls of anguish or of glee. The time has come to be serious. Those who believe that it is for the sake of the Jesus Christ—indeed for the sake of God who is revealed in Christ—that rebellion against religion is to be justified, if at all, must get on with the work of allowing the gospel to tell us what then we shall do and say, if we are not to be religious." If the this is radical, it is no more radical than Jesus himself or the message he proclaimed.

"The religious mimicry of our congregations, the rhetoric of our denominations, the theologies of our Sunday schools, the pseudo-divine personifications of our economic ideologies together with the bloody war-liturgies of their worship share one common feature: they all make one sick. And in exactly the same way that celluloid carnations and "lifetime" or artificial Christmas trees makes one sick. They are unmistakably phony."

With exception of a couple of sentences, the preceding paragraphs were written by Robert W. Jensen former professor Luther College and a Dean at Oxford. It was written in 1966 and published as A Religion Against Itself by John Knox Press in 1967. In light of much of the current conversation that is taking place within the church it is interesting to look back at one who risked heresy 40 years ago. Not heard of him? I rest my case. Of course that is nothing new with regards to the church. The church has been reforming since day one. Paul, Peter, and James had major struggles with what was "orthodox" and what was heresy.