6 Reasons Christianity Really is a Relationship, Not a Religion (1 of 6)
You’ve likely encountered the expression: “Christianity is a relationship not a religion”. Perhaps you’ve also heard opinions to the contrary. It’s an important distinction. The two ideas are not the same. While the modern concept of religion may be convenient for professors and expedient for politicians and journalists, it actually distorts the Gospel. Members of Christ’s body should ask a pointed question: how did the biblical writers conceptualize their faith and practice? This is part one of a 6-article-series written to give you bible-informed confidence in a “relationship-focused” life in Christ.
Our world is filled with a dizzying variety of beliefs about life, purpose and meaning. Beginning in the English Enlightenment, scholars have categorized, defined and analyzed many these beliefs using religious lingo. For this reason, modern people have gotten the impression that all world ‘religions’ are equal: they are either all “true” in some sense, or else they are all false or incomplete. As politically correct as this view may be, it is completely at odds with the portrait of reality presented in the Old Testament.
Reason #1 - The Biblical writers present Yahweh as the peerless, sovereign creator of everything.
To the Hebrew writers, the gods of the surrounding nations do not represent alternative “faith systems”, Instead, these spiritual entities are inferior, created rivals within Yahweh’s domain! (Psalm 24:1-2, Exodus 12:12, Deuteronomy 32:8-9) These corrupt lesser beings displayed rebellious disloyalty to Yahweh, earning judgement for not following his instructions (Psalm 82:1-7). One day Yahweh would punish their rebellion and inherit the nations back from them (Psalm 82:8), blessing “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3). For the biblical writers, it wouldn’t make sense to discuss the gods of their neighbors as leaders of competing-, yet equally respectable religious “systems”. There was only one game in town.
Even the surrounding pagan nations recognized a single “realm,'' a shared theater of conflict between rival deities. Military victories demonstrated the superiority or inferiority of each army’s patron god (Judges 16:23). In one accounts in 1 Samuel 5:1-5, Yahweh’s power over a rival deity (Dagon) results in Yahweh’s permanent ownership of the threshold to Dagon’s temple. In 2 Kings 5:17-18 the Syrian general Naaman is healed by Yahweh and in return devotes his life to Yahweh, returning back to his native country with Israelite dirt so he can worship Yahweh on his own “turf”.
The point is, Israel’s neighbors recognized their conflicts with Israel and each other as a single, zero-sum game between divine powers and their human followers. And in this game, Yahweh stands utterly unique and unmatched (Deuteronomy 10:17, Daniel 3:29, Daniel 4:34-35).