Losing My Religion (I Never Knew Jesus Was God)

I never knew that Jesus was God. That might seem like a strange thing not to know, living as I do in a culture surrounded by churches, and having grown up attending a church every week. But my initial, foundational assumption—the premise that reached me and taught me first—was that Jesus was certainly just a man like any other, and nothing more. To believe anything else was to cling to a fantasy.

This was the lens through which I viewed all of the claims related to Christ. His miracles had to be dismissed as hokey tall tales invented by his followers. His teachings had to be dismissed as inventions in much the same way, wherever they conflicted with our own modern ideas of what is practical, permissible, or expedient. Intellectual sophistication demanded these dismissals—and I demanded of myself that I had to be sophisticated.

Against all of this, it was not even possible to hear or understand something significant, let alone get caught up in the wonder of it. Completely lost on me was any sense of the idea that God is so crazy in love with us, he came to earth as a human being so he could teach us the way an authentic and joyful human life is actually supposed to be lived.

I thought I was resisting religion. I wasn’t. I was actually clinging to religion, because God doesn’t call us to be religious—the world does.

“Religion” is self-imposed obedience to irrational precepts. My adherence to a notion of so-called sophistication was an example of this obedience. It made no sense, but I forced myself to cling to it anyway. Other commonly embraced premises make no sense either. For example, the religion of the world tells us (or strongly implies) that the pleasures of this world offer a way to joy, and that the acquisitions of this world have lasting meaning. The religion of the world also says that the approval of the world is what matters. All of these ideas are logically and demonstrably false, yet we give our service to them anyway.

To follow the way of God is to abandon religion. It consists of becoming freely unsophisticated enough to turn away from the ways of the world, and favor the world that is oriented around God instead.

They are overlapping worlds. They include the same time and space. The vital difference is a matter of heart. That difference can be found in the new foundational assumption. Namely: When I become unsophisticated enough to lose my religion, I become so much a part of God’s plan and God’s creation that the most significant event in the world becomes the most significant event in my life. God dying as a man and rising from the dead was the turning point of all of history, and it was the turning point of my life, too.