Why I hate religion, But Love Jesus
12 MILLION VIEWS = BIBLICAL ACCURACY?
JEFF BETHKE'S RESPONSE TO THE INACCURACIES OF 'RELIGION'
I just wanted to say I really appreciate your article man. It hit me hard. I’ll even be honest and say I agree 100%. God has been working with me in the last 6 months on loving Jesus AND loving his church. For the first few years of walking with Jesus (started in ’08) I had a warped/poor paradigm of the church and it didn’t build up, unify, or glorify His wife (the Bride). If I can be brutally honest I didn’t think this video would get much over a couple thousand views maybe, and because of that, my points/theology wasn’t as air-tight as I would’ve liked. If I redid the video tomorrow, I’d keep the overall message, but would articulate, elaborate, and expand on the parts where my words and delivery were chosen poorly… My prayer is my generation would represent Christ faithfully and not swing to the other spectrum….thankful for your words and more importantly thankful for your tone and fatherly like grace on me as my elder. Humbled. Blessed. Thankful for painful growth. Blessings.
Grace and Peace, Jeff
What is religion? (Laura Ortberg)
Is it hypocrisy? By ‘religion,’ do we really mean the way of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Westboro Baptist Church? Because if so, we are in trouble.
Is it absurdity? Is it, like Bethke said, “putting perfume on a casket?” Is it legalism – “behavior modification, like a long list of chores?” Because if so, we are in a lot of trouble.
I’m guessing Bethke doesn’t actually hate religion. In fact, I would bet my last dollar that he loves it. As we are told in James, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” In fact, it sounds strikingly similar to where Bethke claims ‘religion’ falls short: “Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor/Tells single moms God doesn’t love them if they’ve ever had a divorce?”
Unfortunately, those things that make for nice rhymes rarely encompass the necessary nuance of a mysterious God, which is probably why most Christian music gets such a bad reputation. (Surely in all of this, Bethke’s most egregious crime was rhyming ‘invention’ and ‘infection,’ or perhaps ‘mention’ and ‘spectrum.’) Our theology is a rich and varied one, and I value that Bethke can freely express his views as much, as I cringe when I hear them reduced to such simplicity.
What Bethke was really protesting, it would seem, is faith without works. Empty rhetoric and selfish thinking. Building testaments to our own greatness and abandoning the widow and the orphan. What we need now is not less religion, indeed, but more than ever.
