(The Nationalist, 01 September 2006)
Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century British explorer of the South Seas, is said to have given pigs to tribal leaders of one of the Pacific islands, and asked them to lay a religious taboo on them, prohibiting their killing for a generation. The pigs flourished; then the taboo was lifted; people were free to hunt them, and had a reliable source of protein for generations to come. This was Cook’s way of undermining cannibalism – a simple idea that worked effectively, it seems.
Cook’s strategy raises the question of invoking the name of God over something which does not come from God. The gospel describes three situations in Jewish tradition where God was said to have prescribed rules which, in fact, came from humans. However desirable the goals, the means used were a violation of the second commandment, ‘You shall not make wrongful use of the name of God’. That is using religion as a means of social control. Where that is done, religion is valued, not for its truth, but for its usefulness. It amounts to saying, ‘It doesn’t matter whether religion is true, as long as it achieves useful goals’. If that is accepted, religion is negated. Jesus said of this, ‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition’.
Jesus rejected man-made additions and alterations that claimed God’s sanction; he re-asserted the primacy of the Ten Commandments; he focused on the essentials, and broke out of the limitations of Jewish tradition.
Perhaps he also implied that not only the Jewish religion, but all religion, although limited and provisional, has a tendency to self-aggrandizement that needs to be checked.
People create the technology they need: the Inuit of North America invented the fur coat, not the refrigerator. And people create the religions they need; religion is a creation of the human mind.
To say that is not to say that religion is untrue, or a fabrication; nor does it mean that God does not self-reveal through prophets (including non-Christians ones), in addition to, and especially through the man Jesus, who is the self-revelation of God, the image of the divine. It is to say that the human is limited, imperfect, and dependent.
It means that no religion can claim an absolute value for itself. There is only one absolute – God. If we make an absolute of religion, we turn it into an idol, faith into an ideology, and the church into the manager of a control-system. That makes religion into a substitute for God. Maybe that was what Jesus set out to correct in his challenges to his religious tradition. In the gospels, Jesus’ anger is nearly always related to an abuse of religion, whereas he speaks to the human heart.
For those in a hurry: ‘Most religious institutions have been more comfortable when people stay within a church-reliant faith rather than progress to the normal adult language of faith-as-decision’. (Fowler)