What is the difference between faith and religion?

[Matariki]

What is the difference between faith and religion in Christianity, and which of the two is more important?

 

[Incariol]

What is the difference between faith and religion in Christianity, and which of the two is more important?

They are both equally important. Some people try be hip by saying Christianity isn't a religion, showing they don't know what the word means, but ah well.

Sent from my iPod touch using Forum Runner

 

[Matariki]

bump^

 

[Matariki]

bump^^

 

[AMR]

I would say faith in the Christian religion.

Many know the word of the Lord, but knowing (knowledge, assent, faith) the Lord of the Word is what counts.

 

[twin1954]

Everyone has a religion. Rom. 1:18-23 makes it very clear that all men have a knowledge of God though they suppress it. That is why you can't go anywhere in the world and not find some sort of religion. We were created to worship. What has happened is that depraved sinful man has changed the worship of God into religion. Religion is always about outward things, ceremonies, law and practice. It is based in man's natural thinking which has changed the glory of the incorrupible God into an image like unto coruupible man. The Jews of Christ's time here on Earth had a religion and the Lord called it hypocracy and devilish. He never once had a good thing to say about the practice of religion. Paul in Col. 2:16-23 called the practice of religion will worship and only satisfying the flesh. Religion is damning.

Faith, on the other hand, is a vital union with the Lord Jesus Christ in His life, death, ressurrection and ascension. It is Christ in you the hope of glory, Col. 1:27. Faith is inward and spiritual. Religion is outward and a show. Faith is a committment of the whole of your soul's salvation to the Person and work of Christ, He is all, Col. 3:11. He is all my righteousness, holiness, sanctification and redemption, 1Cor. 1:30.

The faith once delivered to the saints is the whole council of God in the Gospel of Christ. It encompasses the whole of truth set forth in the Scriptures concerning Christ and salvation in Him alone.

Hope that answers your question.

 

[heymikey80]

There is a crucial content to identify Who we rely on. However, reliance on the Person for our lack is more important than further content about this Person.

 

[SDBaptist]

Define "religion."

 

[twin1954]

Define "religion."

Whatever man naturally thinks about spiritual things.

 

[JM]

Define "religion."

"Man's religion is to build up the creature. God's religion is to throw the creature down in the dust of self-abasement, and to glorify Christ." - Philpot

 

[Apologetic_Warrior]

"Man's religion is to build up the creature. God's religion is to throw the creature down in the dust of self-abasement, and to glorify Christ." - Philpot

Nice quote!

 

[Apologetic_Warrior]

When the word "religion" comes up, people will sometimes say things to the effect of "Christianity is about a relationship with Christ", or "the Pharisees were the Religionists of Jesus' day, and they rejected Christ". While both of those statements may be generally true, people tend to think of "religion" wrongly in a negative connotation and use it to 1.) outright reject theological/doctrine discussion/study/learning and 2.) use such as an excuse for staying in Christian infantism sucking on the proverbial milk bottle.

 

[Apologetic_Warrior]

Thought I would add a couple of definitions for reference and a more in-depth look into the terms:

Faith. Faith is a word that has a poor press in the 20th century. Many regard it as simple-mindedness and as an expression of an uncritical spirit inappropriate to men and women ‘come of age’. By contrast, the Scriptures seem to regard faith as a stepping forward, not into darkness but into the light which God has given.

Faith, of course, must be understood in a number of ways. It may refer to dogma which is believed (in this sense the expression ‘the faith’ comes to mind) or it may refer to trust in a person, which is essentially relational in character.

Faith is a quality highly prized in Scripture. Heb. 11:6 sums this up by saying that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God’. The Reformers recovered from Scripture, notably from Paul’s letters, the doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide; Rom. 4:5; 9:30; Gal. 3:2). At times, evangelical theology has been in danger of making faith a ‘work’ in itself. However, the Reformation tradition at its best has seen that believers are justified and saved by God’s grace operating through faith. Faith has been essential, for example, to justification, but it is not so much in strict terms that we are saved by it: rather we are not saved without it.

In Scripture faith is both an attitude of spirit which we freely exercise, and the gift of God. Eph. 2:8 lays stress on the gift aspect. Yet, throughout the NT, people are exhorted to believe or trust or have faith (e.g. Jn. 14:1; Acts 16:31). The relationship between our freedom to repent and to believe in Christ, on the one hand, and the giving of repentance and faith, on the other, has been a matter of contention among Christians since the days of Augustine in the 5th century. Both Scripture and the church traditions (Catholic and Protestant) appear to say that faith is mysteriously both a divine gift and an uncoerced human activity.

A common traditional distinction is that between assensus, assent, and fiducia, trust. While trust in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ, is of paramount importance in Scripture and in Christian experience, clearly what we believe is also of considerable practical importance. What we believe tends to determine our attitudes and behaviour. Moreover, Heb. 11:6 recognizes that before a person comes to God he must believe in the reality of God, and further believe that he will reward those who seek him diligently.

As emphases differ in laying stress either on the human or divine character of faith in justification and salvation, so some theologians lay more stress on the human factors leading to conviction about God and Christ, while others suggest that such conviction is wholly or primarily the result of a unique operation of the Holy Spirit in human hearts.
Assensus has often been associated in traditional natural theology with intellectual assent to general truths about God and providence, which are at least consistent with reason, though perhaps not established by it. It has also been associated with belief in truths made available to us through the Scriptures or through the authority of the church. It has been urged that it is consistent with reason to rest upon the authority of the Scriptures and/or that of the church: accordingly, we accept the detailed truths made available to us thereby, such as the doctrine of the Trinity or of salvation. This accords the way in which people commonly accept today the truths made known to us on the authority of the scientific establishment, such as the age of the earth or the chemical composition of the stars.

Another strain of Christian theology, associated in the early church with Tertullian, and in modern centuries with the names of Calvin, Kierkegaard and Barth, lays greater stress upon the inability of the natural person to receive truth about God, and upon the work of the Holy Spirit in supernaturally imparting such knowledge. Karl Barth is doubtless the most extreme exponent of this emphasis, but Reformation and post-Reformation theologians have tended to stress this also.

The options are not simply between discovering at least some basic truths about God by reason, and discovering them through the supernatural revelation of truth witnessed to in the Scriptures. Liberal theologians, influenced by 19th-century idealist philosophy, have made much of faith (whether in God or in Christ) as a matter of judgment. Liberals have not intended to deny divine influence in leading us to truth, but they have been resistant to seeing revelation of divine truth as operating in some special way that is unrelated to the way in which we apprehend truths about the world. Apprehension of the truths of theology, it is held, must be of the same order as the apprehension of all truth.

In Scripture, and in the historical Christian tradition, faith always points beyond itself to that which is believed in, or to the one in whom we believe. Just as in justification faith is necessary but has the value of a link, relating us to the source of our salvation, so in the grasp of the truths of Christian theology the emphasis falls upon the givenness of that truth in its objective reality. Faith is only the means by which we apprehend.

Behind all faith in Scripture and in the mainstream of the Christian tradition (especially in its more evangelical understanding) lies the reality of God and his Christ. At the level of intellectual grasp of truth this has an affinity with that understanding of the world of nature which sees it as objectively ‘being there’ and being available for our understanding. Our knowledge is not so much a relative man-centred view, in which these truths hold good for us but which may not inhere in reality beyond us. Our knowledge is, rather, a penetration into reality, creaturely or divine, which exists beyond our perceiving spirits.

In experiential Christian faith we also get into difficulty when we become more concerned about the character of our faith than about the one to whom faith should be directed, namely, Jesus Christ. When this happens assurance of salvation is weakened.

Faith in its various forms is central to the Christian life. Paul’s understanding is that genuine relational faith is expressed in ethical behaviour, while James sees it as intimately coupled with its expression in good works. ‘Faith without deeds is dead’ (Jas. 2:26). Faith has a bearing on the intellect, the heart and will, and on behaviour patterns.

Bibliography

H. Berkhof, Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, MI, 21986); G. Ebeling, The Nature of Faith (London, 1961); J. Hick, Faith and Knowledge (London, 1974); B. Milne, Know the Truth (Leicester, 1982); K. Runia, I Believe in God (London, 1963); T. F. Torrance, God and Rationality (London, 1971).

Ferguson, S. B., & Packer, J. (2000, c1988). New dictionary of theology (electronic ed.) (246). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Religion.Although the meaning of the term may seem obvious, there is no generally agreed definition and it is used in widely differing senses by different writers. In its original Latin usage (religio), Cicero defined it as the giving of proper honour, respect and reverence to the divine, by which he meant the gods (Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, 2.3.8, and Invention, 2.53.161). He distinguished ‘religion’, a dutiful honouring of the gods, from ‘superstition’, an empty fear of them (The Nature of the Gods, 1.4.2).
It is useful to start with this narrower definition of religion as belief in God or gods, together with the practical results of such a belief as expressed in worship, ritual, a particular view of the world and of the nature and destiny of man, and the way someone ought to live his daily life. It is also useful to distinguish, as Cicero did, between religion itself and other things which may be associated with it or are a part of it.

The widest possible usage of the term is seen in Discovering an Approach: Religious Education in Primary Schools (London, 1977), which claims to use it ‘both in the strict sense to refer to a particular religion and in a looser sense to embrace religious and nonreligious belief systems’. This is very confusing and quite unjustified.

The term ‘implicit religion’ is used in religious education to cover the study of things which are not religious in themselves, but can have religious significance for religious people. Thus the beauty of flowers is in itself solely aesthetic, but may be viewed religiously as the handiwork of God, and thus become part of explicit religion.

It is disputed whether a faith such as Buddhism is a religion or not. In its broader forms, where there is worship of gods, and perhaps of the Buddha himself, it is clearly a religion. But in its narrower form it may be considered as a philosophy of life. Some (such as Donald Horder) would insist on changing the definition of religion to include Buddhism.

Some further distinctions will help to define religion. Theology is an intellectual, systematic and theoretical study, while religion refers to the whole man and his practice. Religion is the practice; theology is the theory. Politics, as such, deals with this-worldly affairs, while religion has a divine reference. But a religious person’s political view will naturally be shaped by his religious views and his religious scale of values.

Ethics deals with a way of living and of treating people, and can be entirely nontheistic. Religion includes a way of living, but it is related to the divine. Ceremony and ritual of themselves are purely external actions, whereas religion is both internal and external; religion may be expressed in ceremonials and rituals, but ceremonials and rituals do not necessarily express religion.

Sport may produce very great enthusiasm on a human level. Religion may produce a similar enthusiasm and emotional excitement, but it has a divine reference. Whether the strong feelings in religion come directly from God, or whether they are generated at least in part by association with others of similar persuasion, they are at any rate linked with religious belief. To a psychologist, the emotions involved in sport and in religion may be very similar; but that does not justify including sport in the category of religion, as some do. The similarity is only superficial and at one level.

A distinction was made by Barth between religion—even the Christian religion—and faith, which comes from divine revelation. Barth stressed the sovereignty of God so much that he denied any possibility of knowing God at all by human effort, and he considered that all religion was a human activity. God could only be known by his self-revelation in Christ, and that could be accepted only by faith. So Barth spoke of ‘the judgment of divine revelation upon all religion’ (CD, 1.2, p. 299). ‘Apart from and without Jesus Christ we can say nothing at all about God and man and their relationship one with another’ (IV.1, p. 45).

Brunner similarly said that ‘revelation—in the Christian sense of the word—means something entirely different from all forms of religion and philosophy’ (The Mediator, London, 1934, p. 202). But ‘no religion in the world, not even the most primitive, is without some elements of truth’; this, however, ‘is not half the truth but distorted truth’ (p. 33). ‘In distinction from all other forms of religion the Christian religion is faith in the one Mediator’ (p. 40).

The study of religion, or religious studies, has become increasingly popular as an academic subject. It has a different scope from theology, and is more closely related to anthropology, in that it examines human experience.

Bibliography

J. Bowker, The Sense of God (Oxford, 1973); E. Brunner, The Mediator (London, 1934); H. Gollwitzer (ed.), Karl Barth: Church Dogmatics. A Selection with Introduction (Edinburgh, 1961); H. Kraemer, Religion and the Christian Faith (London, 1956); E. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London, 1975); N. Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind (London, 1971).

Ferguson, S. B., & Packer, J. (2000, c1988). New dictionary of theology (electronic ed.) (575). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.