Man-made Christianity

This is not going to be easy to explain. First of all, because religion, while it concerns God, also has us, the ever fickle-minded man, as its integral element, since religion is about us and our relation with God. 

So, while man is basically a religious being, always looking and yearning for God, there’s always that possibility, for a number of reasons and factors, of us making our own God, and failing to hit it off with the real One.

This has happened in abundance in the history of man. There were people who worshipped the sun as their God. Others the moon, or the wind. Still others carved some idols as their deity.

 We are a religious being. Our Catechism says so. “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself.” (27)

 Even those who profess themselves to be atheists (non-believers) and agnostics (doubters) cannot avoid having some aspects of religion, because if it is not a spiritual, supernatural God they believe in, they must believe in something else—their own reason and ideas, for example, or simply their own selves.

This challenge of how to put our religion on its proper course has been hounding us since time immemorial. And though the problem is huge, and the efforts to resolve it through the centuries have been hard and tumultuous, we just have to have faith and hope that we can resolve it.

The basis for that faith and hope is actually with us and all around us. No matter how imperfect our efforts may be, we cannot deny the fact that there must be a God—if not something or someone outside us, then one inside us.

I don’t know much about other religions, but Christianity is about a God who reveals himself to us, who comes to us, who makes himself like us, and leaves us with instrumentalities that continue his presence and redemptive or perfective work on us up to now till the end of time. The initiative comes from him, before we are asked to correspond.

Obviously, all religions must contain elements of truth and goodness, since any effort to deal with a God, even in the atheistic or agnostic context, cannot help but possess some of these elements of truth and goodness. Nothing can stand or even exist if no element of truth and goodness is present.

We just have to embark on a lifetime task of determining the true religion, the one initiated by God, and not any that we start or invent. For this, we need to be humble and empty ourselves, like what Christ did to become like us, so that we can be filled with God’s grace, with God himself, and from there start our relation with him.

Our big problem now is that we seem to be making our own religion. We may start with corresponding to God’s initiative, but somewhere along the way, we break off from him and go on our own.

Even among Christians and Catholics, this problem is very real. With all this RH debate, I realize more sharply that there are Catholics who think religion is simply a matter of one’s conscience, with hardly any relation to duties to Church, to abide to a certain doctrine of faith, to resort to the sacraments, etc.

In fact, there were a lot of anti-Church and anti-religion sentiments. It seems these have been festering in the minds and hearts of many people for ages. These biases proliferated in the RH debates in different forums, often with venom vomited out quite freely, and claws, fangs and hackles menacingly shown.

Many, even among the educated and professional classes, could not understand why the Church has to be heard about the morality of the RH issue. What role does it play in this issue, they ask. Why not simply what comes to one’s conscience or at least what is agreed upon by the consensus of the majority?

Some traces of Christianity can still be detected in many of the views expressed, but a Christianity very badly understood and digested, much less, lived. Many still claim they are Christians or at least adhere to some religion, but it is quite clear that it is more a man-made religion, a man-made Christianity that is referred to.

This is, of course, a big challenge for the Church which will not run away from it. But it will have to retool itself significantly.

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