I am listening to a lecture at Regent College given by Miroslav Volf. One thing that stays with me is his description of a kind of malfunction faith in which people turn faith into a kind of "spiritual performance enhancing drug". I don't have a transcript of the lecture, but I have found something similar on the Internet.
"Most of us would rather think of ourselves as objects of God’s blessing and deliverance than as God’s servants constrained (as we wrongly think) by God’s commands and God’s ways with humanity. So we split up what belongs together: we embrace God’s blessing and deliverance and reject God’s guidance and purposes. The result is kind of a magical religion: we function as fully independent masters of our own lives, living as we please and pursuing goals we deem worthy of our efforts, while availing ourselves of God’s power to help our efforts to succeed and to deliver us when we are endangered or have in some way failed. In the process, we turn faith into a spiritual “performance enhancing drug” and divine “band‐aid.”... This approach, which effectively makes God our servant and we God’s masters, is a fundamental misuse of religion with pernicious effects, especially in conflict situations...."
Source: http://www.yale.edu/faith/downloads/Agents_of_Peace_in_Theaters_of_War.pdf, accessed on 18th May 2009. I have not read the whole article myself.
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