RELIGION

Those of us who are Orthodox know what is true religion; the Faith once delivered to the Apostles. It is also true that true religion transcends the bounds of religion; as long as those who say that Orthodoxy is not religion mean only that, they do not speak falsely, though there is a fatal tendency to confuse them with those who mean something different. Therefore, to my mind, it appears that it is not productive to emphasize the non-religious aspect of Orthodoxy at this time; this is rhetoric adopted from the Protestant Neo-Orthodox movement of the mid-20th century, and so confuses rather than clarifies the issue. What many mean by saying that Christianity is not religion is that they consider such things as church services, churches, candles, incense, priests, and altars to be meaningless accretions that might as well be cleared away as obstructions; these we must chide for having a Manichean Faith. They offer us bodiless worship; but we know that for us carnal humans, the bodiless soon becomes the insubstantial, and the insubstantial the non-existent. All the paraphernalia of religious practice is but the body of faith, and this body does not differ substantially from one religion to another; this is what human creatures do when they worship; it is true that, even as the human body should serve the needs of the spirit, the body of religion should serve the spirit it contains, not vice-versa, but the inseparability of this body and this spirit should also be emphasized.