As of January 16, 2011 this video has almost 13 million views. It reflects a burgeoning view in some Christian circles that the problem with Christianity is that it has been turned into a religion. According to these Christians, Jesus never meant to start a religion. Jesus is all about the individual, the personal one-on-one relationship he has with each and every Christian.
On one hand, I understand the WHY of this video. Many Christians are tired of their religion being hijacked for political purposes. They are tired of all the negative press their religion receives. They are embarrassed by the TV preachers and scandals that make front page news most every week.
They want their religion to be about loving other people and doing good works. They want to be known for what they do rather than what they say. I get it……..I remember coming to this exact same place. I thought, if I just shake the religion and reclaim Jesus all would be well. Unfortunately, this is impossible to do.
Christianity has always been a religion. It had its start as a subset of the Jewish religion. There never WAS a time that Christianity was not a religion. The makers of this video are living in denial, denial of 2,000 years of church history.
Jefferson Bethke, the young man in the video, repeatedly appeals to the Bible to make his point. He states very clearly he loves the church and the Bible and believes in sin. All of these things are religious constructs.
He takes issue with churches condemning people for being divorced, yet Jesus himself calls divorce a sin. (Matthew 5,Matthew 19) He speaks of being addicted to pornography. How did he come to the realization that he was addicted to porn? The Bible……the text of the Christian religion.
Bethke shows that he is ignorant of the Biblical text. Perhaps knowing what the Bible actually says doesn’t matter to him. He mentions that religion makes people slaves whereas Jesus makes people sons. I wonder if he is aware of the fact that the Bible actually says Christians ARE slaves? The Greek word doulos, most often translated servant in the NT, literally means slave. I guess we shouldn’t let a little thing like this get in the way of an agenda.
No matter how much a son screams and hollers that his dad is not his dad, his dad is still his dad. Nothing can change that fact. So it is with Christianity being a religion. It is, and always will be a religion. If the video makers don’t like what is going on within their religion then they need to change it. Denying reality is not the answer.
Bud, at Dead-Logic has this to say about the video:
Jefferson claims Jesus “came to abolish religion” but then proceeds to endorse everything the Christian religion upholds: “Now let me clarify, I love the church, I love the Bible, and yes I believe in sin.” He emphasizes how Jesus “took the crown of thorns, and the blood dripped down his face.” Jesus “took what we all deserved.” When Jesus “was dangling on that cross… he absorbed all of your sin.” So what has Jefferson taken away from Christianity that makes it no longer a religion? Seems like all the essentials are still there: holy book, the church, sin (which implies damnation, hell, and all the terrible judgments Jesus is supposed to save us from by “dangling”).
Jefferson might as well say he hates birthdays, but loves celebrating the day he was expelled from his mother’s womb. “Now let me clarify,” he’d say, “I love presents, I love parties, and yes I believe in cake.” But of course he would oppose birthdays.
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse when Jefferson makes a less-than-subtle shift in his spoken word poem by first talking about Jesus in contrast to religion, then exchanging “Jesus” for the word “Christianity.” By the end of the poem, he wants his listeners to accept not only that Jesus is separate from and contrary to religion, but Christianity is as well.
Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Scientology, Judaism, Jainism, Sikhism, Din-i-Ilahi, Mithraism, Taoism, Shinto, et al are religions, but Christianity isn’t a religion.
Yeah, that seems reasonable.
It’s the old “It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship” shenanigans, except now Jefferson has given it a makeover. It’s still a vain attempt to divorce Christianity from it’s brutal and bloody past, in spite of how edgy and artsy bball1989 makes it appear.
Consider the word “religion”: Jefferson defines it as a practice of empty rituals, self-righteousness, “man seeking god” (ineffectively), hypocrisy, a fruitless attempt to do good and be good. At least, that’s his connotative definition, and for him that’s all that matters. While I may actually agree with him on this point, and while I question how a person can say – historically speaking – that Christianity doesn’t fall under that rubric, I must protest that Jefferson is attempting to control the debate by limiting his definition of “religion” to this particular connotative meaning. Denotatively, Christianity is just as much a religion as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Jediism.
Christianity is a religion and all the catchy, cute videos in the world won’t change this fact. Simply put…….it is what it is.
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