Religion, Hierarchy, and Celibacy

Religion only sees truth that it chooses to see. My definition of religion is a system where humans do something within themselves to please God, relying on their own efforts instead of the work God the Father and God the Son have already completed.

There are many religions in the world – many man-made attempts to please a Divine Being. Down through the millennia of man, most people have come to the truth that there is some Divine Being higher than themselves. So they begin their forms of religion by working to please this God or gods.

Yes, there are many religions but only one true FAITH. We Christians believe that Christianity and the three Persons in One God is the true faith.

BUT, WITHIN CHRISTIANITY THERE IS STILL “RELIGION”! From the very inception of the Christian community, there have been many who have attempted to live by my definition of religion given above.

Religion stands against seeing truth in total – Jesus Christ as life. It knows that, if it were to see Jesus Christ in that way, most of its religious structure would end. In Jesus’ day, the religious leaders – priests, Scribes and Pharisees – knew that if they embraced Christ as Messiah, their religious system with all of its positions and pageantry would end, and they would “lose their place” (John 11:48).

The situation in Christianity down through the centuries since then hasn’t changed much. Jesus as Savior is embraced, oh yes. But Jesus Christ as all, in all, who is our only life, is rejected. A system of priests and pageantry was created just as the religion of the Old Testament Jews. Jesus as Savior and His death for our sins was promulgated but the priestly mediation between man and God was reinstituted just as in the Jewish system. But a hierarchy structure of mediation between God and man for the Church established by Jesus Christ was never meant to be.

As seen in the structure of the churches in the book of Acts, groups of Christians would assemble in local congregations with locally elected pastors and leaders of the church. There were only loose connections between local churches.

Down through the ages, many abuses developed in the organized church because of the hierarchy structure and the need to keep power within it. The church preached celibacy of the clergy but the majority of the clergy did not live celibate.

In our present age, much has come to light about the abuse of minors by church clergy. Unfortunately this crime – and that is its proper name – has been an open wound on the Body of Christ for as far back as records are kept. History shows that in practically every century since the organized church began, the problem of clerical abuse of minors was not just lurking in the shadows but so open at times that extraordinary means had to be taken to quell it.

At the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther and the other major reformers such as Calvin and Zwingli all rejected mandatory celibacy. The rejection was motivated in great part by what the reformers saw as widespread everyday evidence that clergy of all ranks commonly violated their vows with women, men, and young boys. In reference to life in the monasteries on the eve of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, Elizabeth Abbott in “A History of Celibacy” says that the monks’ “lapses” with women, handsome boys, and each other “became so commonplace that they could not be considered lapses but ways of life for entire communities.” Up to this time, the church’s ecclesiastical leaders continued to advocate the long-standing remedies of legislation, spiritual penalties, physical penalties, and warnings, none of which worked.

In rejecting celibacy, the reformers attacked the theological basis of the discipline, arguing that it had no foundation in Scripture or ancient tradition. The major force, however, was moral outrage. Living in the midst of a clerical world of non-celibate behavior, the reformers believed that it caused moral corruption.

An attempt at conciliatory legislation was made at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) but this legislation was hardly original in any way. It provided no reason to presume that it would be any more successful in getting clerics to accept celibacy than had prior laws of the church.

This council, however, was able to bring about a far greater observance of celibacy than any other, at least for a time. The reason was not in the canons themselves but in another conciliatory innovation, namely the establishment of seminary education for prospective priests. Prior to the Protestant Reformation, the education of candidates for the priesthood was uneven and random. Parish priests had little more education than the people they served. The learned among the clergy were generally not those priests dealing directly with the people but those who belonged to the monastic orders.

While the seminaries were responsible for an initial reduction in the widespread violations of clerical celibacy, They also had a long-lasting downside of a profound though not so obvious nature. They isolated prospective clergy from an early age to the time of ordination in an all-male environment. Formation in celibacy involved convincing the young men that life without sex of any kind was highly preferable to marriage. The spiritual benefits were openly promoted while the practical consequences remained mysteriously unspoken yet ever present and operative. Celibacy presented a path to spiritual superiority, which in turn supported the mystique that the clergy were somehow made of much stronger moral fiber to be able to withstand the urges of the flesh and devote themselves so totally to God. This mystique further isolated clergy and fortified the clerical caste as a social and religious elite. All positions of power were filled by celibate clergy.

The reformers understood the problems within the clergy of the organized church – the prevalence of non-celibate behavior along with doctrinal errors concerning salvation by faith AND works. But the reformers continued the error of having a hierarchy structure within their new churches. This is where the problem was from the beginning but the reformers failed to recognize this basic failure.

So just as the original organized church built a man-made hierarchy structure of religion, so also did the reformers perpetuate it.

Am I saying that those Christians within organized hierarchy-type churches are not saved? No. There are saved people everywhere throughout Christianity. Anyone who truly believes in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord is born again. But the problem for those in hierarchy systems becomes their supposed need for priestly mediators between God and man and their need of much law structure to work to please God.

Am I saying that Christianity has always been a “religion”? Much of it has, as I have demonstrated. But throughout history there have always been local churches which have kept basically to the local structure of the first century apostolic churches. These local congregations were often persecuted by the organized church as “heretics”. The organized church usually became agitated when someone endeavored to challenge the apparent mixing of law and grace of the hierarchy body of doctrine and teaching.

These so-called “heretics”, in many cases, understood 1) that there should be no priestly hierarchy creating a power structure 2) that Christ comes to actually live in a born again person and 3) that we cannot ever please the Father by our human works, but the Father accepts us and saves us strictly on Christ living in us and when the Father looks at a born again Christian, He sees only the righteousness of Christ living in union with the human Christian.

So I say: religion is not God’s way. And there is much religion right within Christianity. Watch out for it.

For two articles on the same subject, read "Watch Out For Religion" here, and "Simply Christ" here.

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