Losing Our Religion

On Why Christians Should Become Religious Again

Intro: Religion or Relationship?

Nobody likes the word “religion” these days. Secular people will often say they are “spiritual not religious,” reflecting the modern notion that personal beliefs and experiences cannot be made to fit into the box of this or that religious institution or tradition. Surprisingly, many Christians have also abandoned the word. But we’ve settled on a different motto: “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.” 

In a Christian context, this saying has a very different meaning than its secular counterpart. Yet the two sayings are much more related than we might think. In what follows, I want to explore this notion of “religion versus relationship,” which I believe has become one of the defining characteristics of our evangelical generation. There are good reasons for this. As we will see, faithful men and women have used this notion as a healthy corrective for a church gone astray. And yet, at this point I’m not sure it’s bearing the fruit we might have hoped. 

Love, Not Sacrifice!

The main idea of the saying, of course, is that Christianity is not just an arbitrary set of rituals. It’s a personal, loving relationship with Jesus Christ. This is deeply true and can serve as a poignant correction for, say, a past generation’s tendency to sink into a kind of mindless repetition of religious observances devoid of their original meaning and spirit. God himself repeatedly rebukes such practices throughout the Old Testament. 

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, 

the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. 

— Hosea 6:6

As the above passage makes clear, God desires our love. If the Bible is about anything, it’s about a God who wants to restore a right relationship between us and him. And yet, as you read the Bible, you find that this same God goes to great lengths to make our relationship with him very…religious. 

You can hardly open a page of it without running into priests and temples, ceremonies and sacrifices, prayers and prophecies, covenants and commandments. Now, as modern romantic individualists, all such ceremonial trappings seem fake, inauthentic, forced. We’ve seen plenty of movies where the robed priests are the bad guys, and the foul-mouthed outlaws save the day. The old Robin Hood stories (which I’m reading to my boys right now—perhaps the subject of a future post!) share a similar pattern. So do many biblical stories for that matter. Thus, as modern Evangelicals, we tend to think Jesus would identify more with the Beatles—“All you need is love”—than with Old Testament priests and purity codes, even though God is the one who instituted those things and, for what it’s worth, the Beatles shamelessly declared that they were “more popular than Jesus.”

But What Is Love?

So what do we mean by, “All you need is love”? Well, we don’t exactly know. Love is hard to define. At the very least, we mean mutual affection: feelings of love and feelings of being loved. Now, if pressed, we would also add that love doesn’t have to do with feelings alone but with the commitments that arise from those feelings. 

But this is where it gets tricky. 

Because what happens if the feelings do not last? Do you continue to go through the motions of commitment when all mutual affection has subsided? To this question, many in our secular culture would respond with a resounding, “No.” If the love is gone (and by “love” they do mean primarily “feelings”), then there is no further requirement to remain in the relationship. In fact, if the love is gone, it would be inauthentic to stay. If a husband discovers, after twenty years of marriage, that he is gay and has fallen out of love with his wife and in love with another man, how could he possibly stay in his marriage? Why would his wife even want him to stay? It would be…inauthentic. They would be…going through the motions. Keep in mind, by the way, that almost no generation in human history could have even understood this moral argument until very recently, much less agreed with it. And yet now perhaps a majority of our fellow Americans not only understand but celebrate this very thing. 

But let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that we do not agree with the above sentiment. We can even leave the very contentious issue of homosexuality aside for now (sorry, we don’t know each other well enough yet for that!). As Christians, we would still have to say something like: “No, love is more than mutual attraction and desire. Love is an unbreakable promise. Especially in marriage, we are bound by solemn vows. We must remain faithful regardless of feelings and circumstances.” 

So…Love Is Sacrifice?

Indeed. And that brings us back to the question of religion versus relationship. If what we just said is true, then what precisely have we accomplished in juxtaposing religion and relationship over the last 50 years or so? If we insist that there is such a thing as a “relationship” with God without “religion,” what exactly does that relationship look like? If the relationship is not governed by some set of overarching patterns which we did not decide, how is it not merely subject to our whims, as in the case of the married man who falls in love with someone new? What is left of a “relationship” once it is stripped of vows, rituals, authority, holiness and sacrifice (even assuming the most mundane and secular definition of all those terms)? Well, what is left is something like…feelings, and the commitments that arise from those feelings. Commitments which inevitably subside when the feelings subside. 

Do you see what I mean? 

We’ve been tricked by a shallow, narcissistic modern notion of romantic love between humans, and we have applied it to God. But the truth is it doesn’t even work between humans. As though a healthy marriage could just run indefinitely off the fuel of mutual attraction and desire or an abstract assurance that “I am loved,” rather than the more mundane day-to-day commitments which make up 99% of an actual marriage: waking up and going to bed together, sharing and keeping a common space, eating together, raising kids together, bearing one another’s burdens, mourning and celebrating, confessing and forgiving, etc. All these things we do in marriage, even when we do not feel loved or “in love.” 

The “Bricks” & “Mortar” of Relationship

But imagine a different scenario. Imagine I am deeply “in love” with my wife. I write her passionate love poems which arise from my sincere and spontaneous feelings of admiration for her. On occasion, I surprise her with a lavish gift to reassure her of my affection. But I don’t see her very often. I do my thing, and she does hers. In the brief few years of our “marriage,” we’ve never lived together or shared a space. We’ve never had to figure out who would cook and who would clean. We don’t sleep next to each other. We’ve never played the little waiting game to see who will stir first when the child cries or the dog barks in the middle of the night. We’ve never been sick at the same time. We’ve never worried together about how to pay an unforeseen expense. Never whispered a prayer together in a hospital lobby that our child would be “okay.” These are the mundane building blocks of marriage, routines which almost every husband and wife share. 

Of course, no one brick can guarantee the house will stand, nor even all of them combined. And it is entirely possible to go through these motions without love and trust, as though stacking bricks upon bricks with no mortar to hold them together. Many couples do this, and it does not end well. Usually, they have enough trust at first, thanks to shared passion. In romantic relationships, trust often begins as passion, and passion is often strong enough to hold the early bricks together, though it tends to become brittle over time. But if the couple remains together long enough—far beyond the honeymoon period, through their fair share of difficult times—the trust of passion is slowly transformed into the trust of allegiance, which is a stronger and more flexible adhesive. Without the mortar of trust (passion-becoming-allegiance), no house can stand. Yet, without the bricks of daily shared practices and experiences, there can be no house at all. 

A relationship that begins with passion and poetry is not likely to run on the same fuels ten years in. But if both parties remain faithful for long enough, a new sort of poem arises—not one of words, but of two lives knit together, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. And this, of course, is what we all hope for. All healthy, sustainable relationships are ritualized. All lasting relationships are religious relationships. It is no different with God. 

Honeymoon Christians

But sadly, we have created a Christian subculture for ourselves which is not unlike its secular counterpart, in which love means passion, and barely more. And we have applied this to God. There is an enormous subset of 20-60 year-old adults in our country who truly met the Lord as teenagers at a youth meeting or Christian camp. They had a real experience of God, and they began a relationship with him there and then. For years afterward they could give passionate testimonies about who they were before they discovered the love of God and who they were after, about how their relationship with Jesus changed everything. 

Fast forward a few years. 

The seemingly best case scenario for many of these same people is that they become “honeymoon Christians,” constantly working to renew the passion of their first youthful encounters with Jesus, despite the inevitable complications and mundane complexities of life as an adult. This may perhaps explain why many of our church services today feel like oversized youth groups for adults. There is true love for God there, but also a kind of denial or ignorance that marriage can or should be anything other than a honeymoon period. There is no, “When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind…” (1 Corinthians 13:11) No, the well goes no deeper. The insights we already received are all there is. The only thing left to do is share what we have already received with others. There is only going back to the blessed simplicity of our teenage experience of Jesus, when we were truly passionate about him, when we learned how to date him, but not how to stay married to him. There is no going forward into further and further glory. No maturing of the relationship into deeper, unforeseen types of love that only new unforeseen seasons can bring. No gospel that grows as we grow, that shows us more as we trust more, that offers deeper draughts of wisdom and love as we become deeper people through suffering, confusion, and painful obedience. On the contrary, for the honeymoon Christian, the complications and complexities which increasingly wage war against certain aspects of their simple teenage gospel are nevertheless squeezed into that simple gospel box or else amputated/ignored by continual renewal of their youthful passion. And that’s as good as it gets for many. Relationship without religion, indeed.

Two Roads To The Same Divorce

But a worse scenario is increasingly more common. These are folks who also met the Lord as young adults, who also had real experiences of Jesus and gave passionate testimonies of their teenaged transformation. These were real experiences. But somehow, for them, the complications and complexities of life on the ground could not be made to fit into the little box of their teenage faith any longer. They tried. They really did. But now their perspective has changed, almost by accident. They cannot not see those early days of faith as a kind of immature and dreamlike “phase.” Now they have moved on, or are moving on…to “reality.”

This is the phenomenon loosely referred to as “deconstruction.” And, while there are perhaps as many deconstruction stories as there are individuals to tell them, I want to point out two seemingly opposite ways this deconstruction narrative can go. And then hopefully show how they are not as different as we might think.

The first is the more predictable type of deconstruction, which we are seeing seemingly everywhere these days. In short, you start examining the faith of your youth with a critical eye and slowly begin to discover you no longer believe what you used to believe. Sometimes it comes from processing personal experiences of shame or grief or abuse. A lot of times it happens because of changing social and political norms around sexuality or gender or some other form of inequality. Sometimes it leads to a different kind of faith--say, a more progressive form of Christianity. Sometimes it leads to no faith at all. Oftentimes, honestly, it’s much more subtle than all that. It just kind of happens as a natural byproduct of decreased passion and participation in the church. But whatever the details, the basic pattern is: things which seemed so firm and true when we were, say, teenagers, start collapsing once you allow yourself to see outside that lens. I have spoken of this type of deconstruction in more detail elsewhere. But for the sake of this essay, I’m more concerned with the second type, which is perhaps even more common, far older (at least 500 years!), and is not usually considered to be a form of deconstruction at all. 

In the second kind of deconstruction, you remain a traditional Bible-believing Christian. You probably go to church and raise your kids in the faith. You have not so much rejected your youthful experiences of Jesus. Rather, over time, you have slowly replaced those experiences with explanations. Explanations, doctrines, truths are what you care about now. What you believe, in factual detail, is what makes you a Christian or not. Indeed, you will choose or even leave a church depending on how much the weekly sermon content comports with these specific facts, because the facts are the faith. 

Now, I am not denying that certain facts are central to the Christian faith. If Jesus was not, in fact, crucified under Pontius Pilate and raised on the third day for the forgiveness of our sins, then we’re all wasting our time with this Christianity thing. But the truth is: the facts are not your faith any more than a marriage license and the pictures from your wedding day are a marriage. And sometimes…they may even represent the last semblance of a marriage that is all but dead. 

Let me explain. 

Neither Religion Nor Relationship?

So far I have tried to show that Christianity is not merely a relationship with God (devoid of religion), but rather…a religious relationship. Over the course of this writing project, I hope to show what this religious relationship might look like “on the ground,” in our specific context. But first, it’s important to note that it is possible—and indeed, quite common—for Christianity to be neither religion nor relationship. In such cases, what it tends to be is…an explanation. That is, for many Christians today, their faith is not much more than an explanation of what they say they believe. 

Imagine a marriage in which the mortar of trust (passion and/or allegiance) slowly dies, so that all that is left are the bricks of hollowed out rituals, two souls who seem to have nothing in common but their shared habits and habitation. In the Bible, this would be something like “circumcision of the flesh,” yet without “circumcised hearts.” Or as Jesus says of the Pharisees, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones” (Matthew 23:27). This type of marriage proves unsustainable. Eventually even the common habits die away, and finally common habitation is no longer desirable. What then is left?

But you could also come to this same failure in reverse order. Take my example of the passionate poet husband. The affection and admiration are obviously there. But the husband and wife do not live life together. There is mortar, but no bricks. They share no common habits or patterns or consistent experiences. And without this shared, embodied life, is it not inevitable that the heart’s affections will also die away? 

In either case, once both the bricks (outward practices) and the mortar (inward trust) of marriage have been abandoned, what remains? Only a marriage license and some pictures of the wedding day. 

This is the reality for many Christians. 

If you could somehow see that two married people had nothing left in common but the explicit promises made on their wedding day, you would then know that their union was hanging by a thread. Yet this is the case for Christians everywhere, and it is much harder for us to perceive the direness of that situation. For some of us, our relationship with God could be hanging on the thread of our own explanation of the faith and little more. Our youthful affections have slowly died away, and so have the daily habits and patterns which once kept us in common orbit with God and his people. What remains of our marriage to Him is the spiritual equivalent of a piece of paper.

If this is true, what can be done about it? Or perhaps the better question is: If we don’t know what to do about it, what might God do? 

3 Ways To Win A Heart

Well, it just so happens that the Bible is the story of how God has solved and is solving this exact problem. How do you marry a people who do not want to marry you? (Forgive me, by the way, for all the marriage metaphors. It’s hard to find a better image for this problem.) So imagine my wife and I are not yet married. Let’s go back. Imagine I’m in love with her and want to spend the rest of my life with her, but she does not feel the same about me. Let’s say she doesn’t trust me. Let’s say she barely even notices me. What can I do? The way I see it, there are three main strategies to win her heart, which we can test out one at a time.

1. Explanation

First, I could tell her about it. Thank you, Billy Joel, for that classic 50’s-style pop hit by the same name. Billy Joel gets strategy #1. If I tell her, then she will know that she is loved. Right? Right? Wrong. Even Billy sees the problem with this: “Listen boy, it’s not automatically a certain guarantee.” Redundant, but correct. Just because I tell her doesn’t mean she will know. And just because she knows, doesn’t mean she will care or trust me or return my affections. But what if I tell her really well? Like, what if I’m Shakespeare’s Romeo?

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

It worked for Juliet. And it sometimes works for us. God is as good as Shakespeare (and better, of course). The words of the Bible alone have been known to convert souls. And when those words are paired with the explications of the greatest Christian thinkers and communicators of our time, the impact can be even greater still. Just look at the amazing legacy of men like Tim Keller (who, by the way, spoke quite eloquently about “religion versus relationship”). Great man. But remember: God’s purpose in the Scriptures is not merely that we would know things that we have failed to know. It’s that we would love the One whom we have failed to love. Information alone—even the truest, deepest information—cannot go all the way to winning the human heart. (Tim Keller would agree, btw.) Even when it seems to work for a time, our fickle affections turn to other voices, other explanations, other lovers sooner or later. The story of Israel is constant proof of this fact.

2. Experience

So telling her may not be enough to win her heart in the end. Okay then, what if I could show her? What if she could experience it? She may not listen to my words, but she cannot ignore my actions. I will shower her with gifts. I will constantly be in her corner, supporting her in whatever she needs. If she calls, I will answer. I will do for her whatever it takes, even to the point of sacrificing myself for her good. Then she will know my love. Right? Right? Yes, this strategy seems stronger than #1. In fact, the two combined would be even stronger still. But it’s hard to say if even experience would be enough to make her trust, to make her love me as I love her. Especially if she is already tempted to give herself to someone else. Maybe she can be won over for a time, but how do I know she will stay?

It’s worth taking a moment here to recognize that explanation and experience could serve as proper labels for the two main types of evangelical churches that now exist in America. First, you have your “Explanation Churches,” which tend to emphasize the Bible and the precise theological doctrines revealed therein, which are said to make or break our faith. These churches usually steer clear of overly long and emotive musical worship sets and tend toward 40-60 minute sermons soberly explaining “what the Bible says.” By contrast, “Experience Churches” might spend 40-60 minutes on one song (or group of songs), reveling in the spirit of the moment, clearly prioritizing the immediate, tangible experience of the presence of God, not to mention the visible gifts of the Spirit, miraculous encounters, etc. Some churches, like my own church, emphasize both. This, to me, is better. And yet even strategies 1 and 2 combined do not add up to strategy #3…

3. Participation

What do I mean by “participation?” Let’s return to my parable about trying to win Hannah’s heart…Let’s say I have told her in great detail about my love for her and I have shown her my devotion with dramatic and sacrificial acts of love. Explanation? Check. Experience? Check. What if my love is still unrequited? Or maybe it’s working a little. I’m chipping away at her. But she won’t go all the way. What else can I do? 

Well, if I’m taking notes from the God of the Bible, I could do something like this. I could go to Hannah, and I could say, “I know you haven’t made your mind up yet, but I would never do you wrong. I’ve known it from the moment that we met; no doubt in my mind where you belong.” Oh wait, that’s not the Bible. That’s Bob Dylan. Not a bad start, though. But keeping a little closer to the biblical pattern, I might say: “Hannah, I hereby make a promise to you. For the rest of your life and for the sake of all your future offspring, I will do X, Y, and Z. I will always be yours. I will never leave you, nor forsake you. No matter what you do or what happens to the both of us, this is my solemn vow.” 

You interrupt, “Well that’s just strategy #1 all over again.” 

Sure, but I’m not finished yet. Then I would continue, “But that’s not enough, Hannah. This one-way love will never do. So in order for this to work, I have to ask something of you. I have to ask you to take a step with me. You don’t have to go as far as I have gone, as far as I will go for you, but you have to be mine as I am yours. That’s the only way this works. Will you trust me? Will you make a promise to me? Will you do X, Y, and Z? Will you pledge your faithfulness to me, as I have to you? If you will, I promise, there is no limit to where this love can go.” 

A Religious Relationship: The Strange Power of Covenants

What I have just described is, more or less, a covenant. And in a weird way, it’s what almost the whole Bible is about. And truly, it is weird. Have you ever stopped and thought about how strange it is that the God of the Universe insists on making these little two-sided deals with human beings, not just once, but continually? He begins, arguably, with Adam. Then the covenant language becomes more explicit with Noah. Then he does it again and to a greater extent with Abraham. Than with all of Israel. Then with David. And why? Why does he want them to pledge to him? It almost feels petty. What can he possibly receive in return? 

First off, he doesn’t need anything. “If I were hungry, I would not tell you. For the earth is mine, and all that is in it” (Psalm 50:12). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, he knows they’re probably going to break their side of the bargain. So then, if God is so good and all-loving and doesn’t need anything from humans, why not just pledge his one-way love, ignore our response, and do what he wants with us anyway? Wouldn’t that be a lot more efficient? Why make the whole thing turn on our response, our faithfulness, our embodied love for him? Isn’t his love for us enough? Can’t his love alone transform the world? We’ve heard plenty of sermons that would say it does. 

And yet, the Bible seems, stubbornly, to say otherwise. “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,” is only the beginning of God’s message to his people in Psalm 50. Once he’s made it clear that he needs nothing from them, he goes on, just two verses later, to say this: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and perform your vows to the Most High. Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me” (Psalm 50:14). In other words, apparently it is we who are called to make offerings to him, vow to him, and call upon him. Then we will be delivered. Not that our response merits our deliverance. No, he makes us worthy. But our response is the missing piece of the puzzle nonetheless.

But why? Why must it be two-sided? What does he want with us that cannot simply be given to us via divine zap? Evidently, the answer is relationship. Our deliverance is in the relationship; it is not located anywhere else. And this relationship can only exist if we offer to him as he has already offered to us. 

It turns out John’s memorable line, “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19) is a near-perfect synopsis of the gospel. Notice, John doesn’t say, “We are loved, because he first loved us.” Surely that is true as well. And our modern songs and sermons remind us of that fact continually. But John is saying something else, something more: Love begets love. That’s the main point. That’s how we are saved. Without love, flowing both ways, we are dead. Covenant partnership—trust and trustworthiness flowing in both directions—is the answer to all our problems. 

If the perfect man proposes marriage to you, and you don’t say yes, it is your life that is ruined. If the perfect man proposes marriage to you, and you do say yes, but you don’t remain faithful to him, it is you who remain in hell. Of course, even then, he may choose to descend into hell to rescue you there. But even there, he will only propose to you again. There is no escaping that choice. “What is hell?” ponders the wise Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, "I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

A New Covenant

Of course, none of this changes the fact that God’s whole covenant plan—that we should love him as he loves us—still seems impossible. Throughout the rest of the Old Testament, Israel continually fails to keep their part of the bargain. Surely, at some point, God must abandon Plan A, the seemingly silly pattern of trying to partner with and rely upon the covenant faithfulness of human beings to bring about the salvation of the world? Surely, at least by the time of the New Testament, salvation-by-participation will no longer be a thing. But no, the pattern continues. The word becomes flesh and dwells among us. And thus, Jesus the God-man fulfills both sides of the covenant. He simultaneously embodies God’s faithfulness to Israel and Israel’s faithfulness to God. Great! Then the pattern ends with him! The rest of us are off the hook! He has done it for us, and we get the golden ticket! 

Yes, but also, perhaps more importantly, no. 

Remember what Jesus himself says to his disciples the night before he is crucified? “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28). There’s that word again. Covenant. How does the blood of Jesus save us? How does it forgive our sins? Is it a magic potion, a one-way zap? No, it is the blood of a new covenant, a new partnership, a new wedding vow, which requires that we vow ourselves to him. As much as we might be tempted to see only substitution in the symbolism of the cross—i.e. “Jesus died so we don’t have to”—the New Testament itself reveals a much deeper and less mechanistic relationship to our Savior. 

Jesus: 

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. — Matthew 16:24

Paul: 

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his…Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him…For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body… — Romans 5:5-12 (excerpts)

George MacDonald (not from the New Testament obviously, but sums up the above pretty well):

The Son of God suffered unto death not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.

How are we then saved? Not by explanation alone, not by experience alone, but by participation in Him. Not by a mechanism which Jesus accomplishes on the cross without us, but by a new covenant, a new relationship, in which we die with him and are therefore raised with him. Why does he keep calling us back to covenants? Why does he care how we respond to him if he does not need anything from us? Why is the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God? Because…salvation is not a golden ticket to heaven when you die. He is our salvation. He cannot give us salvation, as though salvation were an object. He must give us himself. And he cannot give himself unless we receive him by giving ourselves in return. 

Salvation Is A Person

This mystery finds new clarity in Jesus’s conversation with Martha at the grave of Lazarus in John Chapter 11. If you recall, Martha is distraught at the death of her brother. Before Lazarus died, she had hoped Jesus would come and heal him (experience). Yet, once he has died, she feels she can only take solace in the doctrine of the resurrection on the last day (explanation). But Jesus makes clear that the solution is deeper still…it is Him. Resurrection is not a doctrine; it is a Person. 

Martha: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died…” 

Jesus: “Your brother will rise again.” 

Martha: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” 

Jesus: “I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and

everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” 

Martha: “Yes, Lord…”

Martha shows herself to Jesus. She is raw and honest. And Jesus replies, in effect, “Yes. I hear you. But I cannot just give you what you are longing for, because, you see, I am what you’re longing for. Whoever believes in me shall have me. So…will you trust me? Will you give yourself to me as I have given myself for you?” “Yes, Lord,” she replies. 

This is salvation. To love him as he loves us, to marry him as he has promised to marry himself to us. Salvation cannot be received any other way. And at least for Martha, as well as the other disciples, this doesn’t happen all at once. It’s the fruit of a patient relationship over time. Bricks. Mortar. Bricks. Mortar.

Conclusion: How To See God

In perhaps C. S. Lewis’s greatest novel, Till We Have Faces, Lewis dares to tackle the almost impenetrable question of why Moses—and, by extension, we—cannot see the face of God. “Why would the gods hide?” asks Orual, the skeptical main character. “Or perhaps they do not exist at all.” Yet over the course of the novel, she begins to consider another possibility. In short, maybe God is not the limiting factor. Maybe we are: “How can [the gods] meet us face to face, till we have faces?” 

Aha. The problem of the invisibility of God is the reverse of what we might have suspected. Apparently, it is we who lack faces, not God. He has shown his face, most climactically, in the person of Jesus. We are the ones who cannot be seen by him. We lack faces precisely because we will not face him. If we want to see him, we must be seen by him. We must come into the light, as he is in the light. We must show ourselves to him, as Martha did. Day by day, little by little, by giving him our disappointments, failures, anxieties, and fears…as well as our praise and thanksgiving. We see by being seen.

Notice, when Jesus speaks of the dangers of out of relationship with him, he does not say, “You never knew me, so you don’t get in.” No, what he says is, “I never knew you.”

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’ — Matthew 7:21-23

True religion is participation. More than explanation. More than experience. It is showing ourselves to him and learning to do his will, bit by bit, day by day, so that finally he becomes our reward. Thus Orual concludes in the end, “I now know Lord why you utter no answer. You yourself are the answer.”