An online article in The Times has highlighted the fact that the Christian adventurer and television personality Bear Grylls is opposed to what he calls “organised religion”.
According to the article, Grylls claimed that organised religion has “ruined” the story of Jesus. He told The Times, “You don’t need to go to church. Our faith has nothing to do with church.”
He went on, “We’ve had 2,000 years doing a good job of really screwing it up, wrapping it around religion and rules when the beating heart of the message was always about freedom, laughter, life, love, risk, rescue and sacrifice.”
The 51 year old then added that Jesus “understood all about religion because that’s why he was so angry with it all the time. The religious elite were always the ones distorting the truth for control or for money or for power.”
There are five problems with what is said in this article.
The first problem is that there is no definition of what is meant by “religion”. Scholars who have considered the issue have noted that the term religion is difficult to define. Most people in the West would say that religion is concerned with the relationship between human beings and God, but this understanding of religion runs into difficulties with polytheistic forms of religion and with those forms of Hinduism and Buddhism in which God (or the gods) are non-existent or unimportant.
Furthermore, if you agree with the German reformer Martin Luther that “your god is that on which you fix your heart” it could be reasonably be claimed that the operative religion of much of the world consists of the worship of pop icons, football stars and material possessions.
So, what is Bear Grylls actually talking about? In context what he seems to be saying is that the Christian Church - which is the community of Jesus's followers - has ruined the story of Jesus.
This claim brings us to the second problem with what Grylls is reported as saying. This problem is that we are dependent on the Christian Church for our knowledge about Jesus. Apart from a very few passing references to Jesus by ancient writers we only know about Jesus because of the reports about him compiled by his followers (‘the Church’) and brought together in the pages of the New Testament.
The paradox which Grylls and those who argue like him fail to note is that it is only because the Church has faithfully preserved the story of Jesus, generation after generation, that we are in a position to appeal to Jesus as the basis for criticism of the Church’s current teaching and practice. In reality, then, Grylls’ whole argument rests on the premise that the Church has not in fact “ruined” the story of Jesus.
The third problem is that Grylls has failed to note that if you actually look at what the New Testament tells us about Jesus, we find that the “beating heart of the message” is that through Jesus God created the community which we call ‘the Church.’ In fact, it says, being saved means being made part of this community.
Paul spells out this truth for us, for example in the following words from his letter to the Ephesians, which was written to the Christian churches in what is now Turkey:
“Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.
“So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:11-22).
The great Anglican theologian Charles Gore, in his book The Epistle to the Ephesians, helpfully comments on this passage as follows:
“God’s deliverance or ‘salvation’ of mankind is a deliverance of individuals indeed, but of individuals in and through a society; not of isolated individuals, but of members of a body.
“It is and has been a popular religious idea that the primary aim of the gospel is to produce saved individuals; and that it is a matter of secondary importance that the saved individuals should afterwards combine to form churches for their mutual spiritual profit, and for promoting the work of preaching the gospel. But this way of conceiving the matter is a reversal of the order of ideas in the Bible.
“‘The salvation’ in the Bible is supposed usually ‘to reach the individual through the community.’ God’s dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural development. For man stands out in history as a ‘social animal’.
“His individual development, by a divine law of his constitution, is only rendered possible because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations on his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high development as an individual.
“This law, then, of man’s nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the ‘commonwealth of Israel’ that the blessings of the covenant belonged.
“Under the new covenant St Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting (as we shall see directly), and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it is still through the church that God’s ‘covenant’ dealings reach the individual.”
As Gore goes on to note, the metaphors that Paul uses in this passage to describe what it means to be someone who is saved are all social metaphors. They are fellow citizens of the commonwealth of Israel, they are members of the household of God, they are the stones which together constitute God’s holy temple.
It is because being saved means being part of God’s new covenant community that this community came into being from the Day of Pentecost onwards and if we look at how it is described in the opening chapters of the Book of Acts we find that from the beginning, the Church had the characteristics which have been found in it (albeit in slightly different forms) ever since.
In Acts 2-6 we learn that it was an organised community with recognised leaders, rules and the exercise of discipline, in which people provided each other with practical mutual support and came together regularly for acts of worship in which the word was preached, and the sacraments of baptism and holy communion were administered.
It could, of course be argued, that this was not what Jesus wanted to happen, that Jesus wanted his followers to each do their own solitary religious ‘thing’ in isolation from each other, but what we would then have to explain is why the community just described was the direct result of Jesus’ Spirit being poured out at Pentecost and why the apostles (who had been taught what Jesus wanted) raised no objection to this community coming into existence.
A fourth problem with what Grylls is the suggestion that “you don’t need to go to church”. This claim not only goes against the fact just noted that coming together as God’s people has been a characteristic of the Church since its earliest days, but also contradicts the direct command given in Hebrews 10:24-25, which says: “And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.”
In the words of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Bible commentator Matthew Henry what we learn from these verses is that:
“It is the will of Christ that his disciples should assemble together, sometimes more privately for conference and prayer, and in public for hearing and joining in all the ordinances of gospel worship. There were in the apostles' times, and should be in every age, Christian assemblies for the worship of God, and for mutual edification. And it seems even in those times there were some who forsook these assemblies, and so began to apostatize from religion itself.
“The communion of saints is a great help and privilege, and a good means of steadiness and perseverance; hereby their hearts and hands are mutually strengthened. To exhort one another, to exhort ourselves and each other, to warn ourselves and one another of the sin and danger of backsliding, to put ourselves and our fellow-Christians in mind of our duty, of our failures and corruptions, to watch over one another, and be jealous of ourselves and one another with a godly jealousy.”
Henry’s reference to “our failures and corruptions” leads us to the final problem with what Grylls is reported to have said, which is his claim that the Church has “done a good job of really screwing it up” - “it” being the story of Jesus - over the past two thousand years.
Now, of course, no sensible Christian would deny that Christians both individually and collectively (including those who Grylls refers to as the “religious elite”) have done things that are contrary to God’s will day in and day out throughout the history of the Church, with sometimes dreadful consequences. It is because this is the case that in my own Anglican tradition, we have historically said week by week the words of the prayer of general confession:
“Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done, And there is no health in us.”
Nevertheless, this is only half the story. In spite of its sinfulness God’s new covenant community has been responsible by God’s grace for bringing millions of sinners into a state of eternal salvation and that is an achievement of inconceivably great significance.
Furthermore, in purely temporal terms the impact of the Church has changed the world for the better.
For example, in his book The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener notes that in the modern world “we depend on values and goals - and ways of thinking about values and goals – that have been deeply and distinctively shaped by the Jesus-revolution (otherwise known as ‘Christianity’). These values are now so all-pervasive that we consider them to be universal, obvious and natural: the air we breathe.”
In summary therefore, for these five reasons, while what Bear Grylls says may sound persuasive, it simply isn’t true.
