More Than a Feeling: Why Christianity Is Both a Relationship & a Religion, Part 3

Behind the slogan, "It's not a religion, it's a relationship," lies an implicit ecclesiology (doctrine of the church). And this implied ecclesiology is desperately inadequate. If Christianity is fundamentally about a personal relationship between the individual and God, then the church is, at best, a helpful supplement and, at worst, an optional inconvenience.

From this vantage point, a slogan like "I don't go to church, but I love Jesus" is not a paradox; it's a logical conclusion. If the essence of the Christian faith is characterized by an internally felt relationship, then the visible, corporate institution of the church becomes peripheral -- if not altogether redundant. This is not the ecclesiology we discover in the pages of the New Testament. Paul's epistles are not addressed to isolated individuals enjoying private relationships with Jesus. They are addressed primarily to churches. These are communities bound together by baptism, formed by word and sacrament, overseen by elders, and called to embody together the life of the Kingdom that Christ has inaugurated. The church is not a gathering of pre-formed spiritual individuals. It is the body of Christ, the new humanity, the colony of the present and coming Kingdom. To say something like, "I love Jesus, but I don't need the church," is, to use Paul's terminology, the equivalent of saying, "I love the body, but I have no need of its members." It is an anatomical impossibility dressed up as mature spirituality.

What we are dealing with here is not spiritual depth but spiritual individualism. And spiritual individualism produces a kind of Gnosticism in which the invisible, interior relationship is everything, and the visible, embodied community is entirely optional.

In our final blog post, we'll examine the history and meaning of the word "religion" to try to figure out why it's so unpopular in our contemporary context.