The Christian Humpty-Dumpty

do we even know what it means to live a Christian life?

The Problem.
What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to follow after Jesus Christ in my life? What does it mean to be a Christian today, here, now? Is Jesus of Nazareth someone too foreign and too ancient to be able to be grasped, to be held on to in today's climate, like sand slipping out through loose fingers?

I know I have a few presuppositions that I bring with me to the table in answering these questions. First, I know that Jesus of Nazareth is God, is Savior, and is glorified at the right hand of the Father for all eternity. Second, I have encountered and been filled with the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit on more than one occasion so that- even if I wanted to- I could not doubt His action in my story and in others. Also, I know the flawed and broken Catholic Church is the virgin bride of Christ and the fruitful Mother of humanity's gift of salvation. And finally, it is with all pride that I can say I am really bad at this whole "Christian living" thing.

What I want to do in this article is just bounce around a few big problems that we have in trying to understand how we are to live the Christian life. In this article I will introduce one main problem and its significant offspring. This is the problem of specialization. I seek to do this in four articles of which this is the first introduction to the series.


One Wild Divorce Court!
When it comes to being a Christian I think there is this weird double-think that occurs far too often, especially with young people searching for Him in their new lives. This double-think is a really annoying obstacle to intelligent thought, but it so widespread that I don't think this little article is going to contribute much to answering the above questions. The problem is a modern peculiarity, so I am told countless times in various Christian philosophical, theological and historical comments, and it is this: we are so specialized into tiny compartments that we have lost all sense of the whole, of the integrity of life and the universe and God. As Chesterton said it, and said it far better than me, "this world is one wild divorce court!"

What I mean is simple and is seen in every day life. The ordinary man feels impotent and inadequate when contrasted with the technical skill of the specialist. We have given up the right to think for ourselves, practicing a strict fideism to the men and women in white coats or with alphabets of degrees after their last name. We keep specializing so narrowly, we keep dividing up and dividing up subjects into its constituent parts that there is no longer any possibility of synthesis. We have put everything in life on the dissection table and have absolved ourselves of the responsibility to put it all back together again. The real tragedy is that without the whole the parts really do not make any sense. Like tearing upon the rear legs of the frog to scrutinize its muscles and then wondering why it no longer jumps. You've killed the thing!

So goes the world into divorce after divorce, and so goes the Church. Imagine a world where you can study theology without studying Scripture. "No! That is left to the exegetes to banter about." And those in Scripture would never think about making dogmatic, theological statements, for "That's the task of the systematic theologian! We just deal with declensions, grammar, and the politics behind the texts!" I mean, this divorce and specialization and analysis became so silly that Christology - the study of Jesus Christ - was actually separated from Soteriology - the study of the salvation that Jesus won for us. The Savior was separated from salvation! How huge an obstacle to rational thought!

In many ways, however, this scholarly attitude of distinguishing-so-as-to-divorce has seeped into the ordinary person's own mode of thinking, acting, talking and praying. Somewhere along the line between the 13th Century and the 20th Century we divorced the subject of Christian Spirituality from Morality and Christology. We sent each subject to its own corner to be studied, analyzed, picked apart and dissected and then when all was said and done, there was nothing that connected them back together. This was first done in teaching, then in the practices of ordinary persons. We lost the forest for the sake of the pine needle, let alone the trees!

Ethics Without Salvation, Prayer without Morality
Here is the common double-think that impairs our understanding of living the Christian life. On the one hand there is morality and on the other there is spirituality. Faith and morals have been separated and asked not to talk to each other any more. And who Jesus Christ is and does has nothing really to do with either. This happened for at least the period between the Councils of Trent and Vatican II, if not earlier back to the 14th Century.

Consequently, it is a crisis today in evangelization when the cautioned and careful proclamation of the Gospel has distilled away any controversial moral principles that could offend. So we have a truncated form of the basic kerygmatic message of the cross and resurrection. We talk a lot about who God is and what Jesus Christ has done, while glossing over the opinion of Jesus who said, "Repent!" and not just "believe." That is, you need to change because God hates your actions.

The encounter with the Gospel meant that we had to accept the moral implications of its message and the theological revelation it unfolded as one and the same Gospel. Cult prostitutes in pagan religions were not allowed to be Christians and carry on their fornication. Some early Christians steeped in pagan society had to become vegetarians in order to escape eating meat that other people sacrificed to idols, then sold in local markets. Why? Because it was a violation of faith to eat meat sacrificed to idols, and thus it became immoral for any Christian to participate in it, even in a more remote way. Homosexuals became chaste. Thieves made restitution. Fornicators married. Adulterers found forgiveness in the cross, but also found their way back to their own marriage beds in renewed faithfulness.

Let me make this point more clear. Just as a person cannot say, "I'm a communist" and also "keep the government out of the free markets;" just as a man cannot declare himself an anarchist and then advocate the divine right of kings; just as a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and say in the next breath, "but there was no such person as Jesus;" so too a person cannot say, "I'm a Christian" and utilize contraception, support abortion, or advocate euthanasia. The reason why is because these are things that have nothing to do with giving glory to God, and such actions or advocacy of them, like free markets to the communist, demonstrate whose you really are: the world's.


Conclusion
I know a lot of this sounds harsh, but it really should not. It is only because so much of our lives are separated into neat little compartments that never touch each other and have next to no significance with one another that we find what I have stated above as mean-spirited or over the top. The truth is faith and morals are the one Christian Gospel, united as one together in reality, so what our task needs to be is to unite them in practice and in theory. We need to stop allowing the immoral message of this world turn back our voices from preaching the truth, the whole truth, so help us God!

In the next part of this series, I wish to treat how the divorce between faith and morals, seen as possessing two different types of content, limits the way we view "Christian Living" and how we experience the moral life.


God bless,
gomer
AMDG