Download AUTHENTIC RELIGION: WITHIN ME, AND BETWEEN ME AND

AUTHENTIC RELIGION:
WITHIN ME, AND BETWEEN ME AND THEE
LEONARD SWIDLER
Dialogue Institute, Temple University ([email protected])
Ours in the West is largely a secularized society. However, after especially 9/11, we have become much
more aware of the influence of religion—mostly bad in many people’s eyes. This, I would say, is a bum
rap for authentic religion, which I would describe in a phrase as “within me, and between me and thee.”
I cringe, for example, when someone says of a Jewish person that she is “religious,” meaning, of course,
that she does all the externals. But that is not only a wrongheaded understanding of what religion is. It is
precisely wrong! To stick with Judaism for the moment, according to the rabbis, the heart of what
Judaism is all about is kavanah, interior intention. The same is true, of course, of all the major religions.
In Confucianism, for examples, the rituals, Li, are for the sake of forming an authentic human, Ren. The
externals are supposed to be helps to get our head and heart straight, and then to act accordingly—
“Within me, and between me and thee.”
If the externals—which include not only “doing” all the prescribed things, but also “saying” the correct
formularies of doctrines (this is a special problem for Christians)—in fact distract us from the righting of
our head and heart and consequent action in the world, reevaluate them, perhaps even drop them! After
all, the greatest “sin” in the Bible is idolatry. This so not because God is thereby maligned—surely God
cannot be injured by humans! No, there is a constitutive reason why idolatry is the “worst” sin. Idolatry is
so bad because so long as we hold on to it, we are incapable of becoming authentic humans.
Idolatry literally means “worshiping an image” (Greek: eidol, image, latria, worship). It is to focus on the
finger pointing to the object, rather than on the object. The whole purpose, however, of the pointing finger
is for us to look at the object, not the finger. In the case of religion, the finger is the externals and the
object is the interior thought and desire, and consequent action: “Within me, and between me and thee.”
The two major Semitic religions, Judaism and Islam, both tend to concentrate on what to do, on actions,
whereas Christianity (“half” Semitic) stresses much more, though of course not exclusively, what to think.
Hence, the greatest temptation toward idolatry for Jews and Muslims are the external actions: I must not
eat certain food, I must stop what I doing and go pray now, I may not join with you at these times.... All
these prescribed actions are doubtless good, so long as they are for the sake of persons (for we truly “love
God with our whole heart....” by “loving our neighbor as ourselves”), and not for their own sake.
For Christians, on the other hand, although they are also tempted to idolatry by way of external actions,
the most deceptive temptation comes from their adherence to doctrines. For example, Protestantism
classically claimed that truth is to be found solely in the Bible (sola Scriptura), and yet in the U.S. alone
there are over 350 different Protestant denominations! Have they made an eidol of their doctrine of what
the Scriptura teaches? Catholicism, of course, is not any better off with its doctrine of papal infallibility.
Has papal infallibility become an eidol which is focused on with latria?
Many examples of authentic religion could be lifted up. Let me pick just one here which, in different
ways, reflects all three of the Semitic religions. The Jew Rabbi Jesus from Nazareth, who both Christians
and Muslims call the Messiah, said that “it is not what goes into the mouth” (an “external”), but “what
comes out” (an “internal” reflecting the kavanah in action) that makes a person good, or not—and then
elsewhere: “What you have done to the least ones…. enter into the reward prepared for you….”
Authentic religion is “Within me, and between me and thee.”