MysteriousFaith

A Challenge to Christianity

What is really different about Christianity when compared to other religions? Do the differences matter? Does it matter if you can debate the historicity of Christ as Messiah? Or does it matter more about how you live and what your doctrine means in how it impacts your life and the lives of those around you?

A Challenge to Christianity

Over the last three months, I have been engaged in an extensive study of comparative religion. I have forced myself to engage the great religious traditions of the world not from the perspective of a Christian who has an agenda of proving the rightness of my own faith, but from the perspective of the people within their own respective communities of faith. This means that when I choose to study Islam, I go to the writings of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, not Ravi Zacharias or Ergun Mehmet and Emir Fethi Caner. This is not to say that Zacharias or the Caners have nothing to contribute, but it is to say that an arm chair student such as myself is not seriously engaged in inter-faith dialogue if he only reads the writing of those who agree with him. Perhaps a better way of saying this is that the best way to find out what another believes and thinks is simply to ask that person, not someone who has established opposition to the other person’s ideas. A thorough analysis of a book such as Nasr’s The Heart of Islam will properly challenge Christians such as myself and will also, if properly handled, enrich our own faith. If truth exists, it never shines as brightly as when it is allowed to stand on its own, to argue its own case, and to change lives on its very own.

My comparative religious studies have taken me into places I did not think they would - specifically, into challenges I have for the faith I call my own - Christianity. I am weary of studying for the point of being able to know conclusively which religion is right and which is wrong. I imagine that fewer than 100 people globally at this moment in time are educated enough in theology, comparative religion, and the necessary languages of antiquity to be able to participate in a meaningful discussion over the rightness of any particular religion in contrast to other faiths. I write this in large part to my Christian brothers and sisters in a spirit that views apologetics as helpful, but in no way the entirety of spiritual meaning. I write this with the intention of reminding those who I stand with that our faith means little held up with the brittle hope of being right against the greater truth of changed affections, changed lives, and a changed world. My travels around the world have taken me into the cold spiritual vacuum of Europe, a place where once the greatest of religious minds held court on important questions of orthodoxy and orthopraxy; and yet today, these countries stand listless, shadows of their former spiritual souls. American Christianity runs, in some ways, “hotter” than its European counter-parts ever did. We are, by and large, a nation that labors under a very conservative heritage that owes much to vocal pronouncements from Christians. If we are, as a country, to see our faith last for the next several generations it must undergo its own reformation, a challenge that will pry into the deepest recesses of what it means not to be doctrinally right, but to be spiritually whole. It is with this in mind that I propose seven challenges to contemporary Christianity:

• Christianity must reconcile exclusivism (the belief that no one goes to heaven who has not intentionally accepted Christ as his Savior), with limited revelation - the reality that most people across time and even today across borders, have very little exposure to the brand of Christianity Americans claim as necessary to knowing eternal peace. If your God is too small to grant salvation to those who have legitimate questions or who have never “heard” then you have more than likely substituted your own prejudices and ethno-centrism for your religion.

• Christianity must learn to see its own truth, its own story, and its own praxis within what is common to most the world’s religions. We must build on what is shared among the faiths of the world, and be willing to be vulnerable in the exercise of this mutual dialogue.

• Christianity must recognize that much within its own doctrine is mysterious, unknown, and seemingly at odds with itself and as such, we should be cautious in what we divide over. It is immature for Christians to divide over doctrines that we our divided over within our own communities. Perhaps the greater part of wisdom would be to acknowledge the earth-bound limitations to our doctrines. No doubt we fear in doing so we make ourselves vulnerable. We would do well to remember that the greatest of things this world will show any of us, the reality of love, requires vulnerability. Perhaps spiritual truth requires no less.

• Christianity must divorce itself from fundamentalism. The contemporary debate over the Muslim East combating the Christian West is really another way of looking at the underlying complexities within our own respective cultures: cultures that, while sharing their own set of Sacred Scriptures, have little else they agree on. Few more damaging realities must be dealt with than the reality that fundamentalism destroys the essential components of Christian faith.

• Christianity must clearly differentiate itself from western nationalism. We must never repeat the mistakes of the past when missionaries were cloaked within colonial agendas, when it was hoped that we could remake other cultures to look like ours. As Third World countries develop, it is essential that western Christianity walk separately with our capitalist countrymen, making sure we export more than rabid materialism.

• Christianity must do a better job of explaining what is meant by our use of the word “salvation.” It stands today not for some great truth about remade hearts and changed lives but for the avoidance of Hell. Christians have so much to hope for, so much to show the world in how to live and in how to love; we would do well to use that as the essential message of salvation. Salvation should play to the heart and not the fear of man.

• Lastly, Christianity must fully inhabit our own hearts. Christianity is not some dry set of truths we can argue about; it is about new priorities, new peace, and seeing all from the vantage point of love. Where Christianity stands with politicians, with free-markets, with courts of law or with merchants, it is no longer Christianity. It is then only a shadow of its true self, its true Savior.

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• October 23, 2004

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