I have been pondering the word religion . I used to have a personal bias against the word until I started reading the Puritans. In J.I. Packer's talk on the Puritan Century, he states that religion was to the Puritans as Christianity is to us today. In 1941, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, "Religion, a true belief in God, in Jesus Christ, is fundamental, vital, essential." J.C. Ryle wrote on Practical Religion . Jonathan Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections . Who can forget Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion . So it seems in former days, these godly men used religion to refer to the gospel and its outworking. Something has changed because my former definition of religion would have been scrupulous conformity to a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices by which a person is made right with God . This is an amalgamation of two of the definitions of religion from Merriam-Webster's online ...