Living Christian(ly)

The Christian life is about realignment. We are realigning our way of "being" from a focus on ourselves to a focus on God and others. This realignment can occur because we are already treated as if the realignment is complete; because of Jesus, we are seen as having achieved what will take us a lifetime (and more) to actually work itself out into our external reality. Often times, however, we trade the reason for our realignment with the results of our realignment, and end up in a mess.

The common approach towards realignment in the modern church is to focus on people's behavior and what they do. If we can get them to live the way that God calls us to live, then it is relatively unimportant what they actually think about it. The world will be a better place simply because we are all living according to God's ideals. In some cases this consists of teaching people to live according to the moral standards of God: don't use bad language, treat other people kindly, read your Bible, pray, serve in the church, and things like that. In other cases, it's teaching people to live according to the social standards of God: do not tolerate oppression, care for the poor, fight against injustice. Getting people to do is more important than getting them to understand. And this lack of understanding has led to, well, a lack of understanding of what it actually means to be a Christian.

When I was in grade school, we were taught how to do math by teaching us facts about math. Two + Two = Four. As long as you memorized these facts, you could get yourself to the correct answer. The math curriculum my children are going through thirty years later has introduced some significant changes in how math is taught. Rather than simply teaching the facts of math, they are trying to teach the theory behind it. Why does Two + Two = Four? In other words, the reason that Two + Two = Four is just as important as the end result. It's the modern equivalent of "showing your work". How you got to the answer is just as important as the fact that you got to the answer at all.

Modern Christianity has traded the reason for the result and so most people assume that as long as they are acting like Christians (living out something similar to the values listed above) they are Christians. Jesus teaching, however, stands in start contrast. He makes clear that it's entirely possible to be doing all the right things, but miss the main point. Our "realignment" is only possible because Jesus has made it possible. If we attempt realignment without Jesus, it doesn't actually work in the long run.

What we need to do is remember that the only reason that we can realign our deepest desires, our deepest affections, and our deepest loves, is because Jesus has already done it perfectly in his life, death, and resurrection. As a result, we can actually begin to live a life that is truly in alignment with the way that Jesus calls us to live: loving God, and loving others.

Speculating on Jesus: Why Should I Care?

In yesterday's post, I referenced a recent survey that indicated that while the vast majority of people in America believe that Jesus was a historical figure, we have vastly different opinions on what he was actually like. The good news is that, even in a post-Christian America, very few people are questioning the historicity of Jesus insofar as he was an actual person who walked the earth. This means that the challenge for the Christian has much more to do with who he was, than that he was, since the second piece is taken as a given for the vast majority of people we will come into contact with. This challenge, though, has at least three parts. The first one is why anyone should even care. Jesus being a historical figure is one thing; that he has any relevance to my life or that I should have any concern over who he was, taught, or did, is a different thing altogether.

I mentioned that, as simply a historical figure, most people have as much knowledge about–and interest in–Jesus as we do any other historical character we might name. Our functional knowledge of Jesus is about the same as our knowledge of Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte. We know their ethnicity, a rough sketch of what they did, and that's about it. As far as learning more about them, well, that's for the historians. Why should we feel any differently about Jesus?

The main reason I think we should care is because the chief difference between Jesus and most other historical figure is that Jesus is one of a handful of people in history who made universal claims. What Jesus claimed to be true wasn't just true for people in his day, but was presented as true for everyone, in all times, in all places. This is typical for other religious teachers, as well: Muhammad, Gautama Buddha, etc. Their claims transcend their historic footprint. Even here, though, Jesus is different.

The claims that Jesus makes are more than just universal truth statements; they are universal truth statements about himself. Jesus didn't just claim to have a message from God, he claimed to be God. Jesus didn't just claim to have the secret to transcending the natural order of life and death, he claimed to be the secret to transcending the natural order of life and death. Jesus didn't just claim that there was a message of "getting right with God", he claimed that he was the message of getting right with God. Jesus didn't just preach; he practiced what he preached by prophetically claiming that he was going to die and rise again, and then dying and rising again. This is why Jesus stands out. He didn't just claim that he had a new way of religious living figured out; he claimed that the was the new way of religious living, and called people to put their confidence in him rather than in their own efforts. In other words, Jesus stands out from all other historical figures because he was one of the small group of people making universal truth claims; he stands out even further from that group, because the claims he was making were about himself. His teaching was so radically different from even the teachers in the same historical category, that it should cause us to go deeper than his historical existence.

The second reason, however, has to do with the people around us everyday who have been impacted by this message. Even if all we think about Jesus is that he was a historical religious figure who taught people how to live "right", it would be difficult to deny the power of his teachings. Tens of billions of people in the last two thousand years have made it a point to attempt to live according to his teachings. Countries were built on these principles, or in defiance of these principles. The message–even if it is only a self help message–continues to inspire people to live selfless lives. I would argue that Jesus teaching were significantly more than just a self-help message, but even if they aren't, the very fact that so many people throughout history have said that his claims are the basis for their worldview ought to be enough to get us to inquire what it was that he actually said. That should be enough, I think, to at least take a cursory glance at his life and teachings and see if they have any relevance to our life today.

One final thing that may help with this first challenge, specifically for those who claim to already believe in Jesus. Do you have any desire to inquire further into his life and teachings? There are a lot of people who claim to believe in Jesus who have little to no idea what he actually said, taught, or did. They have accepted Jesus based on the historical claim that he existed, but have not actually considered what it is that they actually believe about him (or what he believed about himself.) If that's the climate of the church–where we, functionally, believe that Jesus existed but have little interest in finding out more about him–we should not be surprised when that is the climate of culture as well. Perhaps if you want the people around you to be interested in who Jesus is or what he said, the place to begin is taking a serious interest yourself!

Feel Good Faith and Thin Christianity

Most of life happens on a pendulum. I don't mean life as in the living and breathing essence of who we are, but I mean life, generally. Our worldview, our culture, and societies values.

A couple of things came up yesterday that started me thinking about this. The first was that a basketball player at a Division 1 college quit the school and will be transferring next year or as soon as possible. He was a starting player, and he quit mid-way through the season. His rationale? From what I understand (this was second hand delivered to me), the locker room was a disaster. Racism, drugs, alcohol abuse, sexuality, and on and on. Not that this kid was a prude. But at a certain point, it becomes too much.

I commented to the person telling me that this is what we can expect if we decide as a culture that value judgments can be made by the individual. What boundaries are we willing to set? Where are the lines that we draw? And then, on whose authority do we set them or draw them? It might be the institution itself (in this case, a University), it might be the government, or it might be something else, but at the end of the day someone has the authority to set the boundary points and effectively declare that this is as far as they are willing to go. As long as it is the individual, then functionally, we have declared that "no boundary marker" is the real boundary marker.

Setting it based on the authority of a human institution typically doesn't fare much better. This is precisely what causes the pendulum shifts in our culture. Most human institutions can be changed either by popular opinion, by uprising, by votes, or in many modern cases simply by the subjective opinion of appointed judges. If we don't like the boundary marker that a particular institution has set, there is typically some way to change it. And since most of us are not overly prone to moderation, our views tend to go from one extreme to the other. We go from prohibition to license in a few generations; give it a generation or two more, and we might see the pendulum swing back.

The other conversation I had related to Christianity in the first century. A friend is preaching on the book of Revelation; I am preaching on the book of Acts. A commentary on Acts that I was reading pointed out that the way to really understand Acts, or to really understand Revelation, was to read them together and see that they are talking about the same thing from different perspectives. Acts is the historical narrative; Revelation is the spiritual one. One of the descriptions is on this side of the curtain; the other describes what we cannot see, unless it's "revealed".

I shared it with my friend and he mentioned some of what he was reading in terms of the persecution of the early church and the heinous measures that the Romans would be willing to go to either in the name of sport or simply torture. It raised an important question for us to consider: how many people would still be in our churches if they knew that simply being there could get them killed? It was sobering to think about, not just for the people in the pews, but for ourselves. Would we be willing to endure brutal torture for the sake of Christ? We both believed we would, but mostly just hoped we'd never have to truly find out.

It strikes me that the Christian faith is almost always counter-cultural, and when it isn't, it suffers. I don't mean this in the way that it's typically presented, however. For example, it's easy to say that Christianity is counter-cultural when sexual promiscuity, for example, is celebrated. This is the way that we typically mean that Christianity should be counter-cultural. I'm suggesting that it should also be counter-cultural even when the values of culture appear to be in line with the values of Christianity. That is, Christianity is ultimately just as counter-cultural when it is sexual suppression that appears to be valued, as could be argued was the case in the mid-20th century, and two married people having the same bedroom was considered too risqué for TV. For one thing, sex is a gift that Christianity and the Bible celebrate. It's not embarrassing, it's good. That alone ought to have been a counter-cultural message during that time.

The real reason that the church is counter-cultural, though, is not because we agree or disagree with the values of the culture. Again, that's what we typically mean when we say we are counter-cultural, but that should be a secondary focus. Even if the values of culture appear to be in line with the values of Christianity, what remains counter-cultural is the authority by which we set our boundary markers. This is what keeps Christianity from functioning on the same pendulum cycle as the rest of culture. Our authority is unchanging; it doesn't change based on our feelings or what we think about it. Culture can appreciate our values or think that they are old-fashioned and silly, but what makes us counter-cultural is that we define our values based on God's ideals and not based on human institution or our own perceived moral compass.

It strikes me that when culture appears to agree with the church, the church is less interested in being counter-cultural, and more interested in figuring out how we can be "mainstream" with what we believe. We try to squeeze Jesus into our already relatively moral existence. Our churches begin to look like malls, our worship events look like concerts, we give away material goods to get people to enter, we give slick, well-presented "message" that showcase our public speaking ability rather than the Word of God, and we convince people that Jesus can take their mostly-good life and turn it into a really-good life. I don't want to impugn a whole generation of churches, and I am being intentionally cynical for a reason. It appears to me that the fruit that we're seeing in the Christian church in America at large begs the question: what authority does a Christian actually follow? And if that authority is an unchanging, sovereign God, then why does it appear that his opinion changes as frequently as ours?

Again, there is much good that has been done through churches that might consider themselves "seeker-sensitive" or whatever other Christian nomenclature you might want to use. I can't help but wonder, though, whether one significant downside is that as long as our worship services look like something that we produced, or come from our own minds, whether we're not just feeding into the same old story that authority is found in human institutions. And if it's found in human institutions, if the church's authority comes from the mind of the pastor or the Elders who happen to be in charge at the time, then it's no wonder that many churches will change as quick and as soon as culture. It's also no wonder that many Christians can't fathom that being a Christian might mean that you disagree with some of what culture values; they've never been taught that what makes us counter-cultural is not necessary what we do, it's who we follow.

Imagine if the church took seriously who God was, and then took seriously who we are called to be not based on our opinion or culture's opinion of us, but simply based on God's love for us. What would that look like? 

It would be a counter-cultural church that based it's authority on God, and didn't make their decisions based on what man thinks about them, but based on who God is and what he has done. That would be a revolutionary church indeed.