Glynn Cardy: Let's celebrate the humanity of religion

For many Christians, Easter is a time to gather in churches and remember the founding story of their faith. Photo / The Oamaru Mail

Christians are once again about to celebrate their festival of Easter. There will be processions through streets following a cross.

There will be dawn services on hilltops. They will gather in churches to hear beautiful music and remember the founding story of their faith.

Easter, however, is not just important to Christians - it is a symbol for all who value freedom. One way of understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus is with the motif of freedom. Jesus was a free man.

Free in his mind and spirit. Those affronted by freedom killed him.

The resurrection celebrates that freedom actually can't be killed. When freedom is repressed it goes underground, only to emerge later in the lives and actions of others.

The spirit of freedom is more powerful than all the machinations and weapons of human control and repression. This is one way of understanding the hope celebrated at Easter. It is the hope upon which our modern Western world has been built.

The Bible contains within it a deep belief in the value of freedom. The founding story of the Hebrew nation, the escape from servitude in Egypt, is one of freedom. This parable, remembered in the ritualised history of both the Jewish Passover and the Christian Last Supper, extols the values of risk, rebellion, and freedom.

The early Christians understood Jesus as leading them into a new liberty - freedom from enslavement to the written word of the Jewish law.

As the story of the Exodus led in time to an institutional religion with rules and regulations, so the ministry of Jesus and his followers led in time to an institutionalised religion of power, control, and a surfeit of rules.

In the 16th century Martin Luther broke free of that religion and suggested that access to God is possible without ecclesiastical brokers. Yet the freedom of the Reformation was also in time curtailed by another form of bondage - enslavement to the written word of the Bible.

Despite the biblical support for the value of freedom, for most of the last 2000 years it was firmly believed in the Christian world that people were not meant to be free.

Rather they were meant to be subject to authority - subject to God the Supreme Ruler in the heavens and subject to the king who ruled under God on earth.

People were not even meant to be free to have their own thoughts, let alone express them. Freedom of expression is still today looked upon with suspicion and often antagonism by many political and religious authorities.

Yet the freedom of people to think for themselves and publicly express those thoughts led to the opening up of the modern world and to a whole series of emancipations.

First there came freedom from absolute monarchy and the advent of democracy. It is sobering to remember that before the 18th century, Christianity was wedded to the upholding of the royal power structures in society, and any attempt to overthrow them was regarded as a direct assault on the "will of God".

Secondly, there came the affirmation of basic human rights. Gradually over the last two centuries there has come the abolition of slavery, the rejection of racism, the emancipation of women, and the acceptance of gay and lesbian people. All these wonderful and hard-fought for changes pitted their proponents against conventional Christianity.

Thirdly, there has simultaneously been a steady erosion of belief in a supernatural Supreme Being whose revealed will was not to be questioned. No longer is there unquestioning acceptance of a being who dwells above and beyond the earth, and can direct the affairs of earthlings. Humanity in relation to this God was required to be dependent and subservient.

Belief in this being has broken down due to the tools of literary and historical analysis being applied to sacred writings like the Bible and revealing, along with the spiritual insights, the errors and prejudices of those who wrote them.

It has broken down because people have learnt that leaders and institutions are fallible and have used such a God to preserve their power. It has broken down because people have had the temerity to ask questions and expect a response.

Some would argue that the journey towards freedom - including democracy, human rights, and questioning of a Supreme Being - is dangerous and needs to be controlled. Others would argue that the future of spirituality is contingent upon freedom.

Spirituality in the Western world is increasingly not finding its sustenance in adherence to texts, creeds, and rules, but in discovering the essence of truth within each person and context.

Likewise, spirituality is increasingly discarding an unquestionable God-father and finding an incarnated God, indivisible from humanity, that critically engages with perceptions of truth.

* Archdeacon Glynn Cardy is vicar of St Matthews-in-the-city, Auckland.