well every once in a while
in a kind of extraordinary way a video
will just explode it will make its way
all over the country it'll sweep like
wildfire through the virtual world
and the most recent uh example of this
phenomenon is a video
kind of slickly produced video of a
young man in a leather
jacket and he's kind of half wrapping
half of speaking
a very simple poem about jesus and
religion
uh more precisely why jesus came to
abolish
religion how jesus stands over and
against religion
well this um you know short a five
minute um
simple video with a very um simple
argument
has inexplicably in my judgment uh
become this overnight sensation as i
record these words
i think it's around 13 million views uh
on youtube
well um i first heard about it through a
student of mine at the seminary who said
hey there's this video going around
maybe you should comment on it
so i watched it and i remember thinking
this video has gotten so much attention
go figure but then i got flooded with
requests on my
site on the facebook page father you got
to say something about this
video so um here goes here's my
my reaction to it but what it represents
is a kind of
simplistic expression of evangelicalism
it's a it's a view that has its roots in
the thought of martin luther you go back
to the
16th century reformation and what do you
find in luther
well as a central idea that we are
justified or were saved not by our works
but rather through faith by grace
accepted in faith
so there's the center of luther's
reformation
we're not saved through the church we're
not saved through
institutions the liturgies and
sacraments or moral effort
we're saved by accepting in faith the
grace of christ
now this basic idea led luther in some
of his texts anyway
certainly a lot of his followers to
demonize
much of ecclesial life so things like
sacraments and liturgies and
masses and and even the call for good
works were kind of demonized as
a distraction from the grace that comes
from from christ alone so all of this
constitutes
the religion that many evangelicals to
this day
are against including this young man so
here's the militancy in favor of jesus
and his grace and against
religion now you know what's interesting
are the political
and cultural implications of this view
because it begins as a theological
perspective
but it has huge ramifications
in the world beyond the world of
religion
it is absolutely no accident that
freedom
becomes the great watchword of modern
politics
think of our own country you know as the
land of the free if there's one value we
cherish is freedom
we'll trace it back behind jefferson and
rousseau and those people
go right back to martin luther his his
maybe
most revolutionary text is called the
freedom of a christian
so as the christian stands free of all
this religious
institutionalism so now it morphed into
the political view
that we should stand free of oppressive
uh political and cultural institutions
so our own country for example is born
in this great act of
anti-institutional uh revolutionary
violence
helping to explain by the way why this
video has had such great play
in america because this idea of you know
freedom from the institution appeals
very deeply and profoundly to the
american and modern soul
okay so what does a catholic make of all
this
i would say actually not very much
go right back to luther's central idea i
mean to be
blunt about it luther um conveniently
overlooked
a plethora of biblical texts that
militate against his position on
justification by grace through faith
in fact as cardinal avery dulles pointed
out the only time justification by grace
through faith alone
is mentioned in the bible it's
explicitly condemned look in the letter
of james for that
but you know for example matthew 25 the
great parable of the sheep and the goats
what do you find
salvation depending not really on faith
so much
but on the quality of our love
especially our love toward the poorest
and most uh
marginalized and thing too of of paul
himself whom luther claimed as his
principal inspiration
the saint paul who spoke about
justification
by grace and apart from the law also
said
if i have faith enough to move the
mountains
but have not love i'm nothing
an extraordinary claim isn't it in in
first corinthians
um the saint paul who had a very intense
personal experience
of conversion through christ also spoke
very eloquently of
our participation in the mystical body
of jesus
by which he meant the densely textured
life
of the church it's not a sort of
privatized individualism that paul's
advocating but it's a very
rich ecclesial sensibility
and let's go to jesus himself now
because a young man claims in this video
that
jesus is against you know religion well
okay
the same jesus who railed against the
pharisees against certain um
violations and and misuses of religion
in his own time that same
jesus who railed against the pharisees
also said
i've come not to abolish the law but
i've come to
fulfill it the same jesus who yes
overturned the tables in the temple and
said i'm going to tear down this place
also said in three days i will rebuild
it
see here's my point was jesus against
the corruptions of religion in his own
time
sure in fact often bitterly so did he
know about the ways that
institutional religion goes bad of
course and that's how you explain all
these uh
polemics against the pharisees and so on
but but
jesus was not simply against religion in
fact he was a
loyal law-abiding jew
jesus in fact said i don't want to
abolish it i want to fulfill it
in other words he took the very best of
israelite religion
took the best of jewish institutionalism
if you want think of law
covenant temple sacrifice priesthood all
of that
he didn't abolish it he fulfilled it
he brought it up into a new and higher
synthesis
so the young man in the video
um if he's against the corruptions of
institutional religion
up and down the ages to the present day
he's got an ally in me
i'm with him you know here's the thing
finding
corruptions in the religious institution
of christianity over two thousand years
is like shooting fish in a barrel i mean
that's not very hard to find
and being against it is kind of like
being against rotten eggs i mean who
isn't against institutional
corruption but if he's advocating a kind
of individual spirituality that
ignores the thousands of ties that bind
us
sacramentally liturgically and
institutionally to each other
if he's trying to divorce jesus from his
mystical body of the church
then he does not have an ally in me he
has a
pretty fierce opponent in fact the
mainstream of the catholic
tradition for 2000 years stands strongly
against him
you know here's something that strikes
me there are a lot of new age people
today
famously who want spirituality without
religion
and they're evangelical christians who
want jesus without religion
the problem is both those views end up
with an abstraction
but the one thing the real jesus is not
is an abstraction
the word became flesh and now that
incarnation
is prolonged over space and time
precisely in and through the church
sacrament liturgy the mystical body uh
the lives of the saints the love we have
for each other
that's precisely where the real jesus is
apparent to us
so i would say against this young man
jesus did not come to abolish religion
jesus came to fulfill religion
you