Bible Stories

There have been many attempts to define religion, none of them entirely satisfactory. Perhaps it is easier to say what religion is not than what it is. A useful definition is this: religion is the refusal to believe that the universe can be adequately explained in purely three- dimensional terms. The three dimensions may be taken as the three conditions of our life — space, time and matter; or as the field of the physical sciences which deal with those things that can be counted, measured and weighed. A purely material view of things would naturally exclude the possibility of religion.

Perhaps there are no complete materialists. If there are, they would have to do without many things which are part of ordinary human experience. They would not know what to do with beauty, perhaps regarding it as merely unimportant or insignificant. They would recognize physical passion simply as desire, and would find it hard to understand the value set on persons as persons, which leads to that which alone can be called love in the true sense of the term.

Something beyond

Nearly every human being has some awareness of an aspect of the universe which does not fit into the material categories. For this fourth dimension, the German scholar Rudolf Otto coined the convenient term the numinous’. This comes to us, he said, under the dual guise of the terrible and the attractive, awakening the emotions respectively of awe and of delight.

Most of us know what these words mean, and have had what are sometimes called ‘peak- experiences’. These experiences are not necessarily religious. To be awed by the magnificence of the Victoria Falls in Africa, or to be delighted by Beethoven’s fifth symphony, does not necessarily make a human being religious. But this is the area of human experience in which religion can be born.

When a human being becomes aware that there is ’something other’, a reality hidden within the reality that he knows, when he seeks after it, tries to understand it, to give it a name, to enter into some kind of a relationship with it, he is experiencing, though perhaps only in crude ways, the reality of religion.

Christians firmly believe that this other exists. They seek to understand who or what it is, to find the name by which this nameless. Other can be called.

They want to enter into fellowship and to place themselves at the service of the Other.

What Christians believe is very different from what is believed by the adherents of other religions. But this element of search in the hope of finding is something they have in common with all others who in any way at all share in the same search, and are sincere in their desire and willingness to learn. It is this common element that makes it possible to speak of Christianity among the religions of the world.

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• Faith and God: From the Christian Fathers to the Moderns
• The Providence of God, our Faith
• Talking About Religion, Judaism