TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
From religion to religiosity
Surely, the Christian “religion” continues to survive even up until this moment. Unfortunately, it lost that enchantment it once wielded in the second and third centuries.
Change Size
Surely, the Christian “religion” continues to survive even up until this moment. Unfortunately, it lost that enchantment it once wielded in the second and third centuries. (Shutterstock/File)
V
ery recently, the newly appointed head of the Agency for Pancasila Ideology Education (BPIB), Yudian Wahyudi ,drew the ire of some elements of the Indonesian public for saying in an interview that religion was the enemy of the state ideology, Pancasila.
“Religion” can indeed be “death-dealing” and used to perpetuate certain corrupt practices. In fact, Wilfred C. Smith reckoned that the current understanding of “religion” is insufficient, since it has failed to encapsulate “immensely diverse, fluid and subtle data of religious life”.
Therefore, in The Meaning and End of Religion, Smith argues for a whole new “concept of apparatus or theoretical framework” of looking at “religion”, which is “more rewardingly and more truly based on the historical cumulative tradition and the personal faith of men and women”.
When one looks very closely at the history of Christianity and mission, particularly from the second century onward, Smith’s assertion could not have been more poignant.
From Antioch, Christianity spread eastward to Persia, where it reached places like Edessa, Arbela, and later on Armenia. Furthermore, Christianity reached northern Afghanistan and India and traveled all the way to the Middle Kingdom (China).
Certainly, the spread of mission in this period could be linked to the apostolic zeal of the early Church. But professors Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder attributed this vitality of mission in the east at that time of history to “ordinary Christians” like merchants, migrants, enslaved people and itinerant missionaries or wandering/traveling ascetics.
These “ordinary Christians” assumed a very important role in, what Michael Green calls, “gossiping the gospel”.
