Why Bear Grylls is incorrect about organised religion 

An online article in The Times has highlighted the proven fact that the Christian adventurer and tv personality Bear Grylls is against what he calls “organised religion”.

According to the article, Grylls claimed that organised religion has “ruined” the story of Jesus. He told The Times, “You don’t have to go to church. Our faith has nothing to do with church.” 

He went on, “We’ve had 2,000 years doing a very good job of really screwing it up, wrapping it around religion and rules when the beating  heart of the message was all the time about freedom, laughter, life, love, risk, rescue and sacrifice.”

The 51 12 months old then added that Jesus “understood all about religion because that’s why he was so offended with it on a regular basis. The religious elite were all the time those distorting the reality for control or for money or for power.” 

There are five problems with what is claimed in this text. 

The first problem is that there isn’t any definition of what’s meant by “religion”. Scholars who’ve considered the difficulty have noted that the term religion is difficult to define. Most people within the West would say that religion is anxious with the connection between human beings and God, but this understanding of faith runs into difficulties with polytheistic forms of faith and with those types of Hinduism and Buddhism wherein God (or the gods) are non-existent or unimportant.  

Furthermore, in case you agree with the German reformer Martin Luther that “your god is that on which you fix your heart” it may very well be reasonably be claimed that the operative religion of much of the world consists of the worship of pop icons, football stars and material possessions. 

So, what’s Bear Grylls actually talking about? In context what he appears to be saying is that the Christian Church – which is the community of Jesus’s followers – has ruined the story of Jesus. 

This claim brings us to the second problem with what Grylls is reported as saying. This problem is that we’re depending on the Christian Church for our knowledge about Jesus. Apart from a only a few passing references to Jesus by ancient writers we only learn about Jesus due to the reports about him compiled by his followers (‘the Church’) and brought together within the pages of the New Testament.

The paradox which Grylls and people who argue like him fail to notice is that it is simply since the Church has faithfully preserved the story of Jesus, generation after generation, that we’re able to appeal to Jesus as the idea for criticism of the Church’s current teaching and practice. In reality, then, Grylls’ whole argument rests on the premise that the Church has not in reality “ruined” the story of Jesus. 

The third problem is that Grylls has did not note that in case you actually take a look at what the New Testament tells us about Jesus, we discover that the “beating heart of the message” is that through Jesus God created the community which we call ‘the Church.’ In fact, it says, being saved means being made a part of this community. 

Paul spells out this truth for us, for instance in the next words from his letter to the Ephesians, which was written to the Christian churches in what’s now Turkey: 

“Therefore keep in mind that at one time you Gentiles within the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what known as the circumcision, which is made within the flesh by hands—keep in mind that you were at the moment separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God on the planet. 

“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near within the blood of Christ. For he’s our peace, who has made us each one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one recent man instead of the 2, so making peace, and might reconcile us each to God in a single body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he got here and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those that were near; for through him we each have access in a single Spirit to the Father. 

“So you then aren’t any longer strangers and sojourners, but you’re fellow residents with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the muse of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the entire structure is joined together and grows right into a holy temple within the Lord; in whom you furthermore mght are built into it for a dwelling place of God within the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:11-22).

The great Anglican theologian Charles Gore, in his book The Epistle to the Ephesians, helpfully comments on this passage as follows: 

“God’s deliverance or ‘salvation’ of mankind is a deliverance of people indeed, but of people in and thru a society; not of isolated individuals, but of members of a body.

“It is and has been a preferred religious concept that the first aim of the gospel is to provide saved individuals; and that it’s a matter of secondary importance that the saved individuals should afterwards mix to form churches for his or her mutual spiritual profit, and for promoting the work of preaching the gospel. But this manner of conceiving the matter is a reversal of the order of ideas within the Bible. 

“‘The salvation’ within the Bible is meant normally ‘to achieve the person through the community.’ God’s dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural development. For man stands out in history as a ‘social animal’. 

“His individual development, by a divine law of his structure, is simply rendered possible because he’s to start with a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and thru the submissions and limitations on his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he turn into able to any degree of free or high development as a person. 

“This law, then, of man’s nature appears equally in the tactic of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the ‘commonwealth of Israel’ that the blessings of the covenant belonged. 

“Under the brand new covenant St Paul still conceives of the identical commonwealth as subsisting (as we will see directly), and as fulfilling a minimum of formerly the identical religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to incorporate the believers of all nations, and never merely one nation; however it remains to be the identical commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it remains to be through the church that God’s ‘covenant’ dealings reach the person.” 

As Gore goes on to notice, the metaphors that Paul uses on this passage to explain what it means to be someone who’s saved are all social metaphors. They are fellow residents of the commonwealth of Israel, they’re members of the household of God, they’re the stones which together constitute God’s holy temple. 

It is because being saved means being a part of God’s recent covenant  community that this community got here into being from the Day of Pentecost onwards and if we take a look at the way it is described within the opening chapters of the Book of Acts we discover that from the start, the Church had the characteristics which have been present in it (albeit in barely different forms) ever since. 

In Acts 2-6 we learn that it was an organised community with recognised leaders, rules and the exercise of discipline, wherein people provided one another with practical mutual support and got here together repeatedly for acts of worship wherein the word was preached, and the sacraments of baptism and holy communion were administered. 

It could, after all be argued, that this was not what Jesus desired to  occur, that Jesus wanted his followers to every do their very own solitary religious ‘thing’ in isolation from one another, but what we might then have to elucidate is why the community just described was the direct results of Jesus’ Spirit being poured out at Pentecost and why the apostles (who had been taught what Jesus wanted) raised no objection to this community coming into existence. 

A fourth problem with what Grylls is the suggestion that “you don’t have to go to church”. This claim not only goes against the actual fact just noted that coming together as God’s people has been a characteristic of the Church since its earliest days, but additionally contradicts the direct command given in Hebrews 10:24-25, which says: “And allow us to consider easy methods to fire up each other to like and good works, not neglecting to fulfill together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging each other, and all of the more as you see the Day drawing close.”

In the words of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Bible commentator Matthew Henry what we learn from these verses is that: 

“It is the need of Christ that his disciples should assemble together, sometimes more privately for conference and prayer, and in public for hearing and joining in all of the ordinances of gospel worship. There were within the apostles’ times, and must be in all ages, Christian assemblies for the worship of God, and for mutual edification. And it seems even in those times there have been some who forsook these assemblies, and so began to apostatize from religion itself. 

“The communion of saints is a terrific help and privilege, and a very good technique of steadiness and perseverance; hereby their hearts and hands are mutually strengthened. To exhort each other, to exhort ourselves and one another, to warn ourselves and each other of the sin and danger of backsliding, to place ourselves and our fellow-Christians in mind of our duty, of our failures and corruptions, to observe over each other, and be jealous of ourselves and each other with a godly jealousy.”

Henry’s reference to “our failures and corruptions” leads us to the ultimate problem with what Grylls is reported to have said, which is his claim that the Church has “done a very good job of really screwing it up” – “it” being the story of Jesus – over the past two thousand years. 

Now, after all, no sensible Christian would deny that Christians each individually and collectively (including those that Grylls refers to because the “religious elite”) have done things which can be contrary to God’s will day in and day trip throughout the history of the Church, with sometimes dreadful consequences. It is because that is the case that in my very own Anglican tradition, we now have historically said week by week the words of the prayer of general confession: 

“Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed an excessive amount of the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we should have done, And we now have done those things which we ought to not have done, And there isn’t any health in us.”

Nevertheless, this is simply half the story. In spite of its sinfulness God’s recent covenant community has been responsible by God’s grace for bringing hundreds of thousands of sinners right into a state of everlasting salvation and that’s an achievement of inconceivably great significance. 

Furthermore, in purely temporal terms the impact of the Church has modified the world for the higher. 

For example, in his book The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener notes that in the trendy world “we rely on values and goals – and ways of desirous about values and goals – which have been deeply and distinctively shaped by the Jesus-revolution (otherwise often known as ‘Christianity’). These values at the moment are so all-pervasive that we consider them to be universal, obvious and natural: the air we breathe.” 

In summary due to this fact, for these five reasons, while what Bear Grylls says may sound persuasive, it simply isn’t true.