Religions as Human Inventions

Listening to the TED Radio Hour on my phone recently, I heard an interesting description of how the slums of the world’s great “third world” cities slowly but surely organize themselves. Residents come together to provide basic forms of sanitation, to promote education, to control crime. Invariably, resources are pooled, people hired and bureaucracies formed. Yesterday’s slum becomes tomorrow’s middle class neighborhood.

I thought about this recently when I heard someone decry the bureaucracy that exists in organized religion. “It’s all man-made,” it was said.

Yes, it’s “man-made,” with the emphasis on “man.” Historically, women have had little input in the organization and development of the world’s great religions, even though women are among their most ardent supporters and operatives. The same could be said of almost all human organizations, including governments. We all know the history. Women were, to put it mildly, not taken seriously in the development of religious, social and political organizations. Hopefully, that’s changing, if at a painfully slow pace.

(Curiously, religions may not have been the worst offenders. Some scripture scholars believe that the story of Adam and Eve was wildly revolutionary in describing Eve as formed from Adam’s rib, exhibiting an equality which would have been foreign to most ancient peoples.)

Depends on your point of view

The question here is, are religions – including Christianity – solely inventions of human beings? That depends, of course, on your point of view and the beliefs of the religion you’re talking about. I can only speak for my own religion, Catholicism.

Based on several passages of the gospels and their interpretation by early Christians, the ancient church believed Jesus was present in the nascent church after Jesus was physically gone from the scene. The most dramatic example of that is the story in the Acts of the Apostles of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who became St. Paul. Jesus identifies himself with the Christians Saul is persecuting.

Among the ways he is believed to be present among his people is in, yep, the church bureaucracy, though few would have then used that word to describe it. The famous passage in which Jesus commissions Peter (“You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church…”) is especially important in this belief, as well as the touching scene from John’s gospel in which Jesus prepares a fish breakfast for his apostles and insists that Peter “feed his sheep.”

There is little doubt that Peter was the dominant figure among the apostles and held a place of leadership in the early church. The great dispute among Christians is whether this leadership was passed on from one to another generation of “Peters” in the papacy. Catholics believe it was. Most non-Catholic Christians don’t.

What seems obvious to me is that Jesus, who from all biblical accounts was nothing if not smart, would have anticipated that his disciples would organize themselves, as humans always do, and that the organization would include a bureaucracy, as organizations always have. Jesus was himself a member of a highly organized, and bureaucratized, religion.

The church's humanity is obvious

I realize it’s hard for skeptics who are not Catholic, as well as for Catholics who have given up on the church, to understand how people can believe in an institution that claims to be divine when its humanity is so obvious. You need only to consider the clerical abuse of children. How can an organization saying it is headed by Christ have ministers who so abuse their positions of trust, who violate the most vulnerable among us?  

As horrible and embarrassing as those revelations are, they haven’t surprised me or put me off. Being a believer doesn’t stop me from being a skeptic and realist. The church is composed of – to use the churchy word – sinners, people who have no special claims on virtue, no immunity from human weakness, no superhuman strength of character.

What they do have is Jesus’ promise to be with them, not just individually, but communally in a church that struggles to pass on what Jesus taught in the face of confusion, doubt, tragedy and faithlessness. They also have Jesus’ promise of forgiveness, which believers seek day in and day out. And I believe because of Jesus’ presence in the church, it also has members who are genuine heroes, people who daily show great compassion, love, generosity, determination, faith, and the same forgiveness  God shows them.  

Sure, the church is man-made, but it’s also God-made. It’s the body of Christ, the people of God, whom Jesus promised to accompany, and direct, throughout history – bureaucracy and all.