Christian Faith at a Crossroads

I just finished reading Christian Faith at a crossroads by Lloyd Geering. The book was originally published in 1980 but it was updated and released anew at the invitation of the folks who bring us the Jesus Seminar, The Westar Institute. Here are the first of several quotes from this book. He offers this definition of religion, borrowing in part from Tillich (long quote):

Humans show themselves to be religious whenever and wherever they take the questions of human existence seriously, acknowledge that life can have depth and meaning, and make their response to whatever they find ultimate. It is the person who treats human existence as trivial or meaningless, who is non-religious. This means, for example, that the sincere and concerned atheist is more religious than the half-hearted theist or purely nominal Christian.

The phenomenon of religion originates from within human experience and results from reflection on the fundamental nature of human existence. Only with rare exceptions, people everywhere and at all times have made some kind of response to the demands of human existence. They have tried to make something of life. They have looked for meaning and purpose... For such reasons humankind has been universally religious in the past. There is no good reason to suspect people will cease to religious in the future...

To understand religion it is thus necessary to distinguish between the mode of origin and the forms of expression. The latter consist of particular sets of beliefs, rituals, patterns of behaviour and social structures. One such set may serve a particular society as its living religion over a very long period of time. But every such set is dependent upon an initial response to the demands of human existence. Such a response is always made in faith.
That is why faith has always been a necessary component of religion... Faith is the attitude of trust and hope in which a person responds to what he/she believes to be the ultimate significance of life...

Within the context of a living and healthy religious tradition the faith of successive generations of believers continues to add to and mold the set of forms in which the faith is expressed. There may come a time however when there arises some kind of disjunction between the experience of faith and the traditional form of expressing it....

We have reached such a time. It is an indisputable fact that the great major religions which have existed for two thousand years (some more, some less) are all suffering erosion from what has been called the acids of modernity...

Many of those who have come to distance themselves from the traditional forms of religion or to abandon them altogether, have often done so because they find them to be in conflict with their current experience of faith.

Their protest, in other words, is a genuinely religious one even though from the perspective of past tradition, it appears to take an irreligious form... As in the past, protest may also be an excuse to cover hidden motives of sloth, pleasure and self-indulgence. But wherever people have chosen, on grounds of sincerity and truth, to walk no longer on the traditional paths of faith, their sincerity must be respected and the reasons for it sought.

He then describes the coming of the axial age -- when and in what context the major world religions were born -- and why it is all crumbling down under the weight of science, psychology, sociology, biblical criticism, history, and more. And where we might go from there. More to follow. But I like his definition of religion, and his analysis of the breakdown of ancient religion , and his ability to encapsulate the thinking of major religious, scientific, and philosophical thinkers is great.