Driving a car is a funny thing: I do it for a total of an hour going to and from work. There is the straight shot that I tend to take in the mornings, and then there are the back roads that I take when I feel like driving away from everything. Sadly, neither route is much faster or slower than the other: I will spend about the same time driving whichever way I go, though at 3:30 in the morning when I drive I can get there five minutes faster. But that is neither here, nor there.
On the back roads, right about the time I’m allowed to go 50 mph, I pass by this Baptist church that has a little slogan on their marquee that changes every once in a while. Now usually I don’t care much for church marques because they tend to be cheesy, or just an announcement about God’s will for your life, but I have to admit that when I read them I usually think about them. I think maybe I must think about them; I’ve developed this habit of taking a message and dissecting it, thinking about it, and making necessary changes.
The message this time on the marquee was not just a statement I wanted to discuss, but rather a story of my own religious behavior. “Religion is not just belief, it is behavior” is what it said. And I would have dealt with that message differently throughout the stages of my life.
Early years:
As the youngest child of a Reformed pastor, growing up with discussions about religion and Christianity were just topics I took for granted. I think religion for me was just something that my family was a part of, so if I had read that marquee I think I would have been more concerned with trying to figure out exactly what religion was and meant. On one hand I am grateful that religion was such a part of my family’s life that it wasn’t something that could be separated out into Sunday mornings, or not saying bad words. But on the other hand, if you had asked me what religion was, I think I would be able to explain as well as the theory of gravity: it was just this thing that I woke up to and was affected by.
Teen years:
As I grew older and began to take Christianity seriously, the statement on the marquee was have been common sense to me. Of course religion is behavior; that was how I marked myself as a Christian. I didn’t listen to secular music, I didn’t cuss (but I wanted to), I never smoke or drank anything bad; I was “holy.” And growing up in the Northwest that was easy to do: there was such aversion to Christianity that all you had to do was say “Jesus” and people grew annoyed with you. It didn’t matter what I actually believed, as long as I claimed I was on the right team. But than Houston shook everything up for me. In the Bible-belt of America, everyone went to church, and everyone was on the right team. And yet people did things, said stuff, and acted in such opposite ways that not smoking and drinking and saying “Jesus” did not mean anything. It just meant I was dumb for not taking part in the fun stuff.
I still believe this was an important part of my life as I had to suddenly contemplate, and quite seriously, the first part of the statement, that “Religion is not just belief” but belief is an important part. I couldn’t just act, I had to understand, comprehend, and know what was the foundation of my acting. I didn’t know what I believed, I just behaved. And through this process I became skeptical towards behavior, and tipped my hand to belief. I didn’t care if you went to church, had been baptized, didn’t have sex until you were married, it was what you believed that mattered. Those years in Houston I would have laughed at that marquee, because what mattered was belief, not behavior.
Twenties and on:
Sadly my journey isn’t very far progressed. We can really break this story into three sections, but yet this last section has quite a few shifts in it that are important in how I think about the statement “Religion is not just belief, it is behavior.” As I moved back to the Northwest, charged with thoughts and discussions about what I and others believe, and whether it is important how you act, I found myself returning back to the land where saying “Jesus” was all it took to be shunned. And yet I did not find that to be completely true. I found some people were okay with me talking about Jesus, liked the guy at times, and even sought spiritual events. And like me they didn’t care much about behavior, they cared about belief.
I wasn’t satisfied with this.
But at the time I continued down the path of belief over behavior because just acting or talking right wasn’t going to save anyone. I was convinced there were people who acted and spoke the right words on Sunday that still didn’t know Jesus. But I also found that there were people who believed in Jesus but never acted on it, as I was quickly becoming. Even to this day I am still running into people who lean on the side of belief over behavior.
Watching and attending emergent churches has shown me that even the term “religion” has so much baggage loaded onto it that the members aren’t aware it can be a good word. Speaking about religion and behavior is equated to legalism and Pharisees. There is a shift these days to claim “follower of Christ” over “Christianity” because it is a religion, and I understand this: I felt this way too. Religion is behavior and good/bad actions, hateful to dissenters, oppressive. And it is beyond this that I have begun to move.
You see, what struck me one day while reading for one of my classes was that if you asked anyone before the 1900′s whether they were a Christian or a follower of Christ, you would have gotten a lot of confused looks. If you told them you weren’t a Christian but a follower of Christ, because Christian had too much baggage attached to it, you would have been scoffed at. Now don’t get me wrong, “Christianity” and “Christian” sadly do have a lot of shameful baggage attached to them, but it always has had that baggage attached to it. Since the beginning of time the people of God have failed to be perfect, and sometimes the baggage hurts us. But from Abraham, to Jacob, to David, to Elisha, to Ezra, to Peter and John, to Cyril, to Martin Luther, to Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian has been a follower of Christ, someone who prescribes to the religion of YHWH. Baggage included.
This may seem like a random tangent, but it affected how I deal with belief over behavior, because no matter what I believe, the biblical authors are also concerned with how I behave. To steal from speech-act theory, to act is to speak, and to speak is to act.
James is a book that many people struggle with and flat-out do not like. Many times in the history of the Bible James was a book people tried to remove. Here is one instance why:
2:17 So also faith,if it does not have works, is dead being by itself.
Especially for evangelicals this is a statement we struggle with and attempt to manipulate into meaning something else. But maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe religion, believing in Jesus Christ as the only Son of God the Father, who died for our sins, was buried, resurrected, who with the Father sent the Holy Spirit to indwell the church, is not just belief, but behavior.
In my own story I have swung from one side to the other, claiming solely behavior, or solely belief, but in these last couple of years I have begun to rest in the middle. And as I stated previously, it is due to speech-act theory, and specifically The Drama of Doctrine by Kevin Vanhoozer. It is because of statements like “To speak is to act, and to act is to speak” that I have modified what I do with belief and behavior. You see, if my actions speak as much as my words do, than my actions and words must agree. Or as James would say, what good is it to say “God bless you” to someone who is poor and hungry? Or as someone else put it, if what you say about the Bible and God does not match up with how you act, you have failed to interpret correctly.
So I may claim God is love, and that I am his follower, but I must act then in love, or I have failed to interpret correctly. If I speak about Christ redeeming creation, and claim that I am his follower, but fail to redeem anything, I have failed to interpret correctly. Thus religion is not just belief and behavior, but also acting, thinking, speaking, and living correctly. And when all of those fields do not agree with one another, I have failed to understand what God is doing, and what I must be doing.
I believe what I act, and I act what I believe.
And if how I act and believe do not match up with the God of the Bible, than I have failed to understand him correctly.
Cameron
