Yesterday, I introduced a new series I’m calling ‘A Renewed Generous Orthodoxy,’ riffing off of Brian McLaren’s (now old) book A Generous Orthodoxy. The goal will be to celebrate and affirm the strengths of different Christian traditions and movements. But before I do that, today I’m going to try to answer the most important question of all: Why am I a Christian at all? Why Christianity and not another faith tradition? Why Christianity despite its often destructive historical wake?
The short answer is simply the standard Sunday School answer to any question: Jesus. The longer answer is more complex, but amounts to much the same.
I am a Christian because when I was a teenager, I had a spiritual encounter with Jesus of Nazareth that even years of struggle, disappointment, and Dark Nights could not shake. Even as my beliefs and approach to my faith have had to change over the years, I found I could not not be a Christian.
Now such an experience can be interpreted in different ways. Obviously, from the perspective of faith, it is what it is at face value: In a moment of need, Jesus intervened in my life and set it on a different and better course. But skeptics will point out that I was raised in a Christian home, within a society where Christianity historically held a lot of influence, and my religious experience happened in a Christian context. So, I may have had a legitimate spiritual experience, but it was my social priming that made me interpret it as an experience of Jesus. I actually have no problem with this argument, because it’s factually true. But it’s also factually true that this tradition has had enough within it to hold my attention, to keep me on my toes, and to keep changing me over the course of over twenty-five years now. And the only thing unique about Christianity is Jesus himself.
If I wanted beautiful ritual, I could find it in Hinduism. I could — and indeed do — learn much about meditation and contemplation from Buddhism. I could — and indeed do — learn much about wrestling with sacred texts and interpretation from Judaism. I could be inspired to wonderful acts of service and devotion within Islam. None of these things are unique to Christianity. The only thing that sets Christianity apart is Jesus. Yes, there have been incredibly wise philosophers and prophets around the world whose teachings are similar to Jesus’. But again, that’s not a problem for me; I celebrate that. All truth is God’s truth, after all. If others have found that truth, then who am I to gate-keep? Glory to God! But Jesus, as he appears in all his humanity (and yes, we believe, divinity too) in the pages of the Gospels (and indeed in the lives of the faithful across the centuries) — that is why I am a Christian.
As I like to say, the name ‘Christian’ means ‘little christ’, or ‘Christling.’ I can think of no greater challenge or badge of honour than to bear this name, however halting and clumsy my attempts to live into it. A couple years ago, I wrote about the four characteristics I understand to be ‘Christlike’: incarnational, cruciform, prophetic, and healing. By incarnational I mean leaving places of spiritual, intellectual, social, and even, if necessary, physical safety and privilege to go where the real needs in the world are, getting our hearts, if not our hands (and preferably both), dirty. By cruciform I mean that a life well lived does not amount to glory and praise, but humility and, more often than not, suffering. By prophetic I mean being willing to speak uncomfortable truths, most especially to those who are powerful, privileged, for the sake of the marginalized. And, by healing I mean working with whatever tools we have to bring true peace, shalom — not just the absence of violence or conflict, but the presence of healed, whole, and healthy relationships — to the world. Any other faith — any teaching that reinforces, justifies, or prioritizes our comfort, which promotes glory, power, and success, which ignores the needs of the marginalized for the sake of the wants of the privileged, or which stokes anger and strife and hurts and harms people — is not ‘of Christ’.
So, why am I a Christian? Because the way of Jesus always confronts me and challenges me to a better way of being in the world. Jesus loves and accepts me as I am, yet never lets me off the hook. As Walter Wink put it so eloquently, only Jesus is a human being; we are all human becomings. I am a work in progress, and have found no greater blueprint for my becoming than Jesus of Nazareth. My theology has shifted over the years, my priorities have changed, my assumptions have been overturned. But the clarion call of Jesus’ example has remained the same, equally challenging, confounding, and beautiful, no matter where I’ve been in my life.
And to this I say ‘Amen! Amen! Amen!’
Matthew Root 