Primacy of Christ Part I

The problem with Christianity isn't that it has been tried and found wanting. 

It is that it has been found difficult, and left untried.

G. K. Chesterton

Many of us have bad experiences with Christianity, whether it be from a specific church or family member or ministry, or maybe even looking out on the Body of Christ in general.  To claim otherwise is to create a kind of immediate suspicion, the kind that seems to say that you're either naieve or hiding your head in the sand.  However, to assume that this speaks for the validity of Christ as the only faithful Son of God is really to misinterpret both Christ's message and the nature of Christian experience.  

On the rational level, Christianity is a religion based on the sheer divinity of Christ - the perfection of His example in both upholding the law and loving His wayward brothers.  When He chastises the Pharisees saying that they should have had mercy, compassion, and justice on top of their sacrifices and prayers He is able to speak because He upholds both.  This is rarely more apparent than in the Gospel of Mark:  When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things. (Ch. 6 v. 34).  This example carries more power in context, where the narrative shows this particular instance to have lasted roughly 12 hours and to have come directly after Christ attempt to have some time to spend with His disciples alone.

If we put together the unique aspects of each gospel account what we find is a teacher who baffles all standing authority with His dedication to righteousness, a servant who baffles all men with His willingness to deny Himself, and a man who extends mercy to everyone including His murderers.  And it is this combination that is the rational basis of Christianity; the idea that Christ surpasses men in all virtues.  His selflessness is not naivete, but dedication to the will of a Father who desires to bring all men back into communion with Him.  

However, it is in John that the power and purpose of Christ are really fleshed out.  Yes, all of the above things about service, righteousness, and caring are excellent virtues, and they help to raise Christ above the reproach of nearly every religious system.  But people somehow always seem to find a hole to use these virtues to transform Christ from the only living Son of God into an especially enlightened teacher, political figure, or what have you.  What we so often miss is that these things that Christ embodied are not simply qualities to be admired; they are living proof of  real communion with God.  One of Christ's running arguments was that no mere man could do the things that He advocated, and that this should convict us rather than motivate us.  Don't emulate, humble yourself.  

In the words of one RZIM pastor:  "Christ did not come into the world to take bad people and make them good, He came to take dead people and make them live."  It is in this statement that we see sin and human imperfection for what it is.  It is not the failure to uphold a standard or set of rules, if this were true then certainly someone in the Jewish legal authority would have gotten it right.  Rather sin is seperation from God, the gulf of willfulness that stands between us and divine blessing, purpose, fulfillment, and hope.  This is an idea that extends all the way back to the beginning of the Torah and Genesis, where our progenitors decided that they could take for themselves what they assumed God was not giving them.  

Therein lies the essence of sin.  It is not what you do, not a moral accounting of your actions good or ill.  Many Buddhists have moments of compassion and many Christians and supposed Christians have moments of indifference.  It is the assumption that my destiny is my own, that I can make myself happier following my own devices than God can with infinite love, wisdom, and power.  And truly, we are given the capacity to make our own choices and live our own lives, but at what price?  How many of us can actually say that we know what's best for ourselves?  The trails of mistakes, broken hopes, and forced choices we've all experienced really ought to tell us differently.  Further, what hope is there in trial and error?  I can avoid one mistake or two with the culmination of experience, but the frame of reference is still so limited.

Then there is always what might give us greater pause, what a former teacher of mine called slavery to our experiences.  That we can indeed become the culmination of the conditions or the lot we've been dealt or created for ourselves.  This is what Chesterton referred to as a man living in a box with the sun and stars painted on it.  A reality constructed entirely of our choosing, one which is created to justify how we have lived and one which we become increasingly wedded to for fear that our world will come crashing down and we will be left with nothing.  

This is the essence of seperation from God - a reality where God is replaced by either ourselves or our constructions.  It is an existence where we are truly the highest beings in our own universe because we choose what to accept or allow into our personal realities and what to exclude.  It is a world where we have infinite freedom to choose our beliefs but also infinite powerlessness to experience anything beyond ourselves; an empty and circular movement around our own egos.  

"Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they 

do not know what they are doing.

'And they divided up his clothes by casting lots."

Luke 23:34

Notes on Chesterton and debates with a Buddhist

If chance be the father of all flesh, 

Disaster is his rainbow in the sky.  

And when you hear: 

"state of Emergency, 

Sniper kills 10, 

Troops on rampage, 

Youths go looting, 

Bombs blast school!" 

It is but the sound of man 

Worshipping his maker.

Steve Turner

Perhaps one of the greatest stumbling blocks to faith for both Christians and non-Christians alike seems to be how we perceive God.  Who is He, what is He, what does He desire, and where do we fit in?  This is a very hard question for people to answer, partly because the minute we arrive at a definite conclusion we find ourselves flying headlong away from what we are trying to describe.  

Really though, do we expect any other result?  Is God a being that can be described or understood on our terms?  Chesterton writes that one way to answer the madman who claims to be God is by pointing out that he could only be master of a small and pitiful world.  Similarly, if our imaginations are adequate to encapsulate the creator of the universe, as tiny as we are, then we do have reason to lament.  

And yet this is a fault that all men share.  We try to define things to have power over them, any anthropologist will attest to that.  If we can tell you who God is, we can figure out how to please Him, and what we can get away with.  In this way we try to become gods ourselves by having an answer for everything.  As the classic dialogue between Einstein and Boehr goes: "God doesn't play dice."  "Don't tell God what to do."  The unfortunate side-effect is that we lose our capacity for wonder.  God cannot suprise us because we claim to know all that He is.  Reality becomes a small, encapsulated infinite circle.  Again, as Chesterton pointed out, the Christian is free to  believe that there is a great deal of order in the universe, but the materialist cannot allow even one fairy into his design.  

This is the biggest problem with most philosophies.  We are sold on the promise of absolute freedom to decide, only to become slaves to our decisions.  Once we draw our lines in the sand we cannot allow contrary possibilities to exist.  To do so would lead us back to uncertainty, and cause our carefully built castles to collapse into the ground.  But these are small worlds built by finite minds, and absolute certainty isn't a sane option for finite beings.  

I don't think that we'll find many people who would argue with these ideas up to this point.  Our culture as a whole seems to have accepted that if truth is not an illusion it is at least elusive.  The mantra is to learn to be content in nothingness, and often this is used to justify either complacency or hedonism - "eat and drink for tomorrow we die."  Frameworks that provide a greater surety are considered cultural constructions or the fairy tales that put us to sleep at night.  

Sometimes this is true, even of Christianity.  But what the sceptic misses here is that Christianity isn't a religion based on human capacity.  We do not seek God as a Buddhist seeks Nirvana or a Muslim seeks Allah.  God seeks us before we know Him.  Salvation neither from works or from faith but from grace, defined as the desire of God to bring all men back to Him regardless of their characters or mental abilities or whatever else we regard as valuable.  For us, God is not something that is inside our human potential, but a being that acts on our potential.  This is in fact far more merciful and freeing than contemplation or perception, because all it requires is surrender.  

I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me; 

I was found by those who did not seek me. 

To a nation that did not call on my name, 

I said, 'Here am I, here am I.'

Isaiah 65:1