Resurrecting Religion by Greg Paul

Author:Greg Paul [Paul, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Spiritual Growth, RELIGION / Christian Life / Personal Growth
Publisher: The Navigators
Published: 2018-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

To Keep Oneself from Being Polluted by the World

It’s an evocative image, isn’t it? We all know what pollution looks like: the brownish fog that hangs over most large cities in hot weather; dead fish among the cigarette packs and soft-drink bottles bobbing against harbor walls; smashed beer bottles left by some troglodyte at a wilderness campsite; a dying duck smothered in oil. There’s so much of it that it’s changing our climate, slowly throttling the planet.

In spiritual terms, pollution has historically been of great concern to just about every religion. In the church culture I grew up in, watching TV was frowned upon, and movies and dancing were out of the question. In Old Testament times, the Israelites weren’t supposed to have any truck with foreign gods or foreign women. Touching a dead animal in the field—a sometimes necessary act if you were the herdsman—made you unclean and necessitated offering a sacrifice. So did something as unavoidable as a woman’s menstruation.

It was concern for this kind of ceremonial cleanness that kept the hypocrites who were railroading Jesus to his crucifixion from entering Pilate’s headquarters: to do so would have defiled them and disqualified them from celebrating Passover.[11] Kill a man but don’t get your hands dirty: precisely the approach that has given religion such an awful stink in our world. Don’t say, “That’s not really religion.” It is. Those men were living out what they really believed: dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of the religious rules was more important to them than actually doing the right thing. It’s religion, all right—bad, toxic, evil religion.

Although the Levitical stipulations that led to such travesty don’t affect us much today, some churches do reflect, perhaps unintentionally, this need for “ceremonial” purity by the practice of liturgical confessions before the Eucharist. Communal and individual confession are certainly good practice, but the impression I suspect many congregants are left with is “Now we are cleaning up ourselves enough to qualify for participation.” A kind of spiritual quick scrub of the neck and behind the ears.

Examples abound of people, even and especially clergy, who scrupulously observe all the public religious forms while engaging in the most despicable behavior in their private lives, just like those murderous scribes and Pharisees.

But James is not referring to either moral or ceremonial pollution here. Removing the artificial chapter division, which only appeared for the first time in the Wycliffe Bible of 1382, makes James’s intent immediately apparent. Here is how he describes being polluted by the world:

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