What Is Religion?
Metanoia, Discernment, and the Religious Shape of Purpose
In last week’s essay, I argued that we are in a new historical phase best described by Nietzsche’s phrase revaluation of values. This week I want to reflect on the role of religion in that revaluation. In particular, what is the role of religion in the exercise of purpose?
At some point, any person who seriously contemplates their place in the world faces the question: what am I being called to do? I don’t mean what should I do in this given situation that I am facing. I mean being called to attend to something that reorients us to making the world a better place for others.
A true calling blurs the boundaries between what is coming from within and what from without.
This experience is the heart of what I think of as religion.
What is religion? Many definitions have been offered, and I am not interested in summarizing or competing for top positions. For today’s discussion, however, I’ll lean on Karl Barth’s definition as our human capacity to orient toward salvation without believing that we can finish the job.
When put in the context of ‘calling’, religion is the cultivated capacity to open oneself to the possibility that a sense of purpose and orientation can come from outside ourselves—that we can be called and that we are open to hearing it.
This need not be a mystical experience. We can also call it discernment.
So, to embrace religion is to see a mutual entanglement between purpose and discernment.
This experience is the heart of the Old and New Testaments. These texts seem to be at great pains to stress the human possibility of suspending the weight of culture and all its baggage to open our discernment to a sense of purpose that does not arrive as a new law or a new code.
Discernment is what keeps purpose from becoming a hardened dogma.
We can think of it as metanoia—an orientation to the future that is not governed by a prior recognition of a truth. Metanoia, as I’ve argued, is not repentance, and it certainly is not conformity to a laid down law.
When Jesus calls Simon and Andrew to be ‘fishers of men’ (Mark 1:16), this can have no clear and codified meaning. Nor is it a denigration of what they have been doing. He does not say, ‘You are living bad lives as fishermen and must change.’ He simply calls, and they are open to ‘Follow me’ not knowing exactly where this is going to take them.
The calling of Simon and Andrew follows Jesus’s first words in our earliest written Gospel: ‘The time [kairos] has been fulfilled. The kingdom is near. Metanoiete and hear the good news’ (Mark 1:15). The calling and the willingness to follow is a clear demonstration of metaoiete.
See my full essay on Metanoia in Mark 1:15 where I trace the trajectory of its path through Mark’s text.
Discernment as metanoia keeps our attention open in a way that codes, laws, and repentance shut down. This doesn’t mean that those are not, at times, appropriate ways of acting. But they are not rules for living.
Discernment as metanoia is called for in our new Enlightenment—our ongoing revaluation of values—in which the speed and spread of our capacity to assert purpose outruns our ethics. Yes, there are bad actors exercising ‘cataclysmic wrath’ from unbound ressentiment. But if the pendulum swings back, will the left be ready with anything other than its own vengeance? Will identity politics keep us trapped in our Sisyphean political oscillation?
I hope not, but without a rejuvenation of purpose driven by discernment—what I’m calling religion—I don’t know where we’ll end up.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
Read more about how our time is can be characterized as a revaluation of values.