Understanding Religion

I’m fairly certain that Thomas Merton had never heard of the 2×2’s, and I am equally confident that he never met William Irvine, because Merton was a cloistered Trappist monk who lived in a monastery from 1941 until his death in 1968. Nevertheless, this quote of his reminds me of William Irvine in his founding of the 2×2 Fellowship:

“Julien Green says: ‘Religion is not understood. Those who wish themselves pious, in order to admire themselves in this state, are made stupid by religion. What is needed is to lose ourselves completely in God; what is needed is perfect silence, supernatural silence. Pious talk has something revolting about it.’

There is precisely a revolt against this kind of ‘religion’ even among the most earnest of present-day Christians. The word ‘religion’ itself comes to be used equivocally, since it has been made profoundly ambiguous by religious people themselves.

‘Religion’, in the sense of something emanating from man's nature and tending to God, does not really change man or save him, but brings him into a false relationship with God: for a religion that starts in man is nothing but man's wish for himself. Man "wishes himself" (magically) to become godly, holy, gentle, pure, etc. His wish terminates not in God but in himself. This is no more than the religion of those who wish themselves to be be in a certain state in which they can live with themselves, approve of themselves: for they feel that, when they can approve of themselves, God is a peace with them. How many Christians seriously believe that Christianity itself consists of nothing more than this? Yet is is anathema to true Christianity.

The whole meaning of Paul's anger with ‘the Law’ and with ‘the elements of this world’ is seen here. Such religion is not saved by good intentions: in the end it becomes a caricature. It must. For otherwise we would never see the difference between this and the ‘religion’ which is born in us from God and which perhaps ought not to be called religion, born from the devastation of our trivial ‘self’ and all our plans for ‘our self’, even though they be plans for a holy self, a pure self, a loving, sacrificing self.

This is one of the deep problems that Eliot suggests at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, where Thomas is faced with the realization that he may be gladly admitting martyrdom into a political and religously ambitious scheme for himself: punishing the wicked and making himself a saint by treading down his enemies, stepping upon their heads into heaven. It is in this sense that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom - and of true religion. This fear questions our own religiosity, our own ambition to be good. It begins to see with horror the complacency of speeches that ‘know all about’ piety, possess the right method of pleasing God and infallibly winning Him over to our side, etc. This ‘fear’ is what imposes silence. It is the beginning of the "supernatural silence" Green asks for. [Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 153-155]

The nature of the Church is by definition a divine institution established by Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. “I will build my church” (Mt 16:18) and “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). Because of this, it possesses a fundamentally divine character even if it is administered by fallible human beings. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would be guiding the Church into truth (Jn 16:13). Furthermore, there are plenty of references in the New Testament to the Church as the Body of Christ, not just some sort of human organization or corporation (1 Cor 12:27, Eph 5:29-30) with the Church described as “his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all” (Eph 1:22-23) and with Jesus as “the head of the body, the church” (Col 1:18).

Jesus cannot abandon His own Body. The Church's life is derived from Him continually. Because of this, a mere human founder cannot create Christ’s Body. Just like the Church of England was formed by an Act of Parliament in 1534, William Irvine presumed to found a “more pure, primitive” church in the late 19th Century. If Christ’s church truly failed, then only Christ Himself could restore His body through a new divine act analogous to some sort of prophetic revelation, or Pentecost or the commissioning of the Apostles for the same reason that only Jesus Christ who was fully divine could offer himself as the propitiation for our sins for all time.