In most of us the con­cepts of faith, reli­gion and denom­in­a­tion are muddled – we say one, mean anoth­er, and think the third. Mod­ern man can still just about cope with faith, but with the other con­cepts he struggles far more.

How did we come to the devalu­ation of reli­gions? How did man lose his faith? Why has reli­gion, or think­ing in terms of the church, become a byword for some­thing old-fash­ioned, an out­dated social exper­i­ment?

‘To the com­mon man reli­gion is true, to the sage false, to the ruler use­ful.’ – wrote Seneca the Young­er in ancient Rome. Was he right, or not? Is the say­ing true: Mundus vult decipi, ergo decip­i­atur – The world wants to be deceived, and so it is deceived. Where is the line between fun­da­ment­al enlight­en­ment and blind fun­da­ment­al­ism? When, and by what cause, does theo­logy become dis­tor­ted into ideo­logy? What right to exist does reli­gious­ness have in the third mil­len­ni­um?

Many hold that the his­tory of the world, with the his­tory of man­kind with­in it, is a his­tory of pro­gress – from the sim­pler, more prim­it­ive con­di­tions of ancient times, through an ever more per­fect and soph­ist­ic­ated present, to a dream that will one day come true, and which some hope evol­u­tion will bring as it moves on from bio­logy to soci­ety and con­scious­ness. Oth­ers, by con­trast, see in the his­tory of man­kind a his­tory of decline, a pro­cess run­ning from a former, more per­fect or even para­dis­al state, down through the abyss of his­tory, towards final dis­in­teg­ra­tion. This is a clash of world-views, an oppos­i­tion that springs from read­ing the same phe­nom­ena – his­tory, for instance, or the state of soci­ety – in dia­met­ric­ally dif­fer­ent ways.

Along­side the reli­gious-moral trin­ity – let us call it that – of Faith, Hope, Love, men­tioned in St Paul's hymn to love, a civic quasi-trin­ity has also been expli­citly for­mu­lated since the French Revolu­tion: the ideal of liberty, equal­ity, fra­tern­ity. Crit­ics of the church or of reli­gion may per­haps rightly point out that the three Pau­line ideals have not taken root in the last two thou­sand years of man­kind, and that in the name of reli­gion blind­ness seems to pre­vail in place of faith, resig­na­tion in place of hope, and threat or guilt in place of love.

Let us note only in passing that the civic trin­ity has not taken deep hold either, though so fierce a fight was waged in the ser­vice of this ideal against the insti­tu­tions and doc­trines of the church.

Faith is a form of spir­itu­al vis­ion.

But let us dis­tin­guish the ele­ments of yet anoth­er triad, and firmly set apart the con­cepts of faith, reli­gion and the church! By our defin­i­tion faith is a form of spir­itu­al vis­ion (!), at the same time one of man's most intim­ate pos­ses­sions and, spring­ing from that, one of his greatest powers. In this sense faith is a force that shapes man, a kind of state close to enlight­en­ment, a uni­ver­sal trait of human nature. At best we may regard reli­gion as form­al­ised faith, into which worldly and sec­ond­ary ele­ments may well mingle, yet which still offers the masses an indis­pens­able and clearly defined sup­port. And let us not for­get that every ideo­logy bears reli­gious traits: sci­ence just as much as polit­ics or unbe­lief; they have their priests, their dog­mas, their jar­gon and often their inquis­i­tion too.

The nar­row­est cat­egory is the church or denom­in­a­tion, which builds on group con­scious­ness, often on the con­scious­ness of being chosen, and usu­ally sep­ar­ates one from other denom­in­a­tions or from people at large, and it is here that the danger of an exclus­ive, fun­da­ment­al­ist and fan­at­ic­al spir­it break­ing out is greatest. Rather than such devalu­ation, it is worth restor­ing the con­cepts to their noblest mean­ing and sub­stance.