The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch
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Faith Against Religion

Karl Barth, probably the most important evangelical theologian of the 20th century, famously proclaimed that Christianity was not a religion. By this he meant that Christianity was unlike any other spiritual belief in the history of the world. And he was right.

Christianity is not a religion as the world knew religion before it existed. Christianity is an ideology, a style of thought which seeks to establish the superiority of language, its language, over all other human experience.

An absolute belief in language is what is called faith. And although Barth tried his best to separate faith from language, he failed. According to him, not even scripture could be considered as the Word of God given its status as a component of a fallen creation. But what he demonstrated through his hundreds of books and ten of thousands of pages, and millions of words, is that without language Christianity simply evaporates into nothing. Faith is necessarily linguistic idolatry.

The leaders of the Christian Church throughout its history knew and feared what Barth unintentionally showed. Religion is concerned with that which is beyond language. Faith is crucially dependent upon language and the control of language. As the world became increasingly literate, such control is harder to exercise.

Ecclesial control of language starts with the selection and approval of originary stories (like gospels), which are expressions of individual or group experiences. These are condensed into creeds, verbal statements that are the means by which members of a faith identify one another. But since the language of such creeds has no tangible referents, they must be furthered developed, in language, into official interpretations, doctrines, and systematic theologies.

With every step in the linguistic development of faith, the gap between faith and religion grows wider. Faith is by definition an intellectual activity contained solely within the boundaries of officially approved language. Any expression of religious sentiment or experience outside these boundaries is the definition of heresy.

Heresy is an event that occurs only in language, when unapproved language is used or when official language is criticised as inadequate to describe religious experience. Heresy is the perennial problem of Christianity (and other religions who have succumbed to the Christian trap of equating religion with faith, like Islam).

The suppression of heresy - not the promotion love or justice or tolerance or any other virtue - is the prime directive of faith. In other words, the entire ethical ‘contents’ of the Christian Faith is subordinate to the absolute need to preserve not just the language of Christian belief, but also the authority of the church leaders to dictate that language.

The Inquistion is the name given to the medieval attempts to maintain church authority over language. But the Inquisition was not the first or last, nor the most violent of such attempts. The suppression of language starts with the first expressions of Christianity and continue throughout its history into its various schisms, sectarian ‘reformations’ and fundamentalist pronouncements.

The history of these suppressive activities is so well documented as to be of no real surprise to educated people. What is less obvious, and of far more importance, however, is that the Christian idea of faith is the foundation for all ideology. Ideology is the enduring legacy of Christianity regardless of the decline in the institution itself.

Fascism, Communism, Liberal Democracy, even Anarchism as a political movement, are all possible because of the idolatry of language pioneered by Christianity. Each of these has in fact been explicitly supported by its proprietary political theology. And all depend upon the same faith in language whose descriptions of the world have very little to do with its reality. Among other things, Christianity has taught us how to feel comfortable with killing others for the sake of words.

Kitsch’s book is a popular version of the history of the medieval Inquistion. And he correctly connects modern events like the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to inquisitorial techniques and attitudes. But what he fails to do is understand the relationship between the control of language and the modern world of competing, largely implicit, ideologies. The problem today is not the power of the Church to commit atrocities but the rationalisation of atrocities committed by the secularised idolatry of language.

The problem in other words is not religion, it is faith. This is where Karl Barth was heading, but he couldn’t bear the consequences. Many still can’t.

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