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Natural Religion

Religion is the most natural of human behaviors. Both religious and non-religious critics have long been able to trace the contours of our natural religion.

• God is a projection of our wishes and anxieties
• God is a projection of ourselves with more power

It is natural to come into church looking for solutions. We look for a God to fill the gaps left by the limits of our power.

• We ask God to help us control ourselves
• We ask God to control others in the ways we think they need change
• We ask God to provide power, money, security, meaning, happiness, outcomes when our ability to provide these things for ourselves runs short.

We look to our religious leaders to give us answers but our quest isn’t just for knowledge, it is for technology. We want to know how to work God and how to make God work for us.

All of this tends to boil down to two situations.

• When things are not how we want them we want God to change things to be as we want them.
• When things ARE as we want them we want God to make sure they stay that way.

We naturally gauge our relationship with on the basis of these two principles.

God is Holy

Eugene Peterson makes this observation.

Holy is a word that we use to designate the otherness, the purity, the beauty of God. God is holy. We can’t understand God by extrapolating from our human experience, magnifying and projecting the best that we are or can imagine, and then call that God. God isn’t a human being, even the best of human beings, writ large. Because God is other, God is therefore also a mystery. God can’t be studied empirically the way we scrupulously examine evidence in a laboratory. God can’t be figured out the way we logically think through the truth and falsity of language statements. God is so other that we can never pretend to predict what God will do, or get God under our control in any way whatever. Our only appropriate approach to God is in awe and reverence, in humble and submissive worship. Such and approach also contains elements of fear and trembling, for though we’re immensely attracted to what we apprehend of God –goodness and truth and beauty–we’re also apprehensive of what lies beyond our grasp, sensing that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31 also 12:25-29)

Eugene Peterson Leap Over a Wall pg 60

Natural religion tries to domesticate God and imagines God is not holy.

We keep trying natural religion for our own reasons. It keeps failing because God is holy.

In the story of David and Saul in the book of 1 Samuel we find this holy God involved in the lives of Saul and David and the story keeps us focused on both of them at once. In 1 Samuel 21 and 22 we find David becoming the kind of man God wanted him to become and Saul’s gradual corruption continuing to hit new depths. The story challenges natural religion and our efforts to employ it to our own advantage. The story continues to press us to believe that God is not a part of our story but in fact he employs us as part of his.

Fugitive David: No Longer Innocent, Not Yet Mature Continue reading →