Christianity is NOT a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however - the Good News of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over - period.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that Christianity transcends traditional religion by highlighting God's complete work of reconciliation independently of human effort.
Robert Farrar Capon argues that Christianity is fundamentally different from conventional religions, which often focus on rituals and human efforts to connect with God. Instead, he claims that the essence of Christianity, encapsulated in the Gospel, is the remarkable declaration that God has fully reconciled humanity to Himself through Christ, rendering traditional religious practices unnecessary. This suggests a transformative perspective on faith that emphasizes divine grace over human action.
In practice
In a sermon discussing faith, one might use this quote to illustrate the transformative nature of Christianity.
Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.
For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself-and it is our glory to see it so and to thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.
If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.
The world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion. But it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis.
To those who does not know the world is on fire, I have nothing to say.
Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.
This was not a fairy-tale castle and there was no such thing as a fairy-tale ending, but sometimes you could threaten to kick the handsome prince in the ham-and-eggs.
While women were powerfully liberated both externally as well as internally by the feminism of the 1970s, we made some serious mistakes as well.
What seems to us but dim funeral tapers may be heaven's distant lamps.
Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.
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