That’s Why It’s Called Life

Introduction
We have been asking ourselves a single question: What does it mean to be a Christian? This is the all-important question for everyone who styles themselves "a believer" in the Gospel, but as we have seen, the rise of specialization within academic disciplines has led to a presentation of the Gospel reduced to just a basic kerygmatic set of propositions that one believes. "Faith" becomes separate from "morality" and views the moral content of the Gospel as secondary to the kerygmatic content. This academic specialization trickles down, as it were, to the whole body of believers, causing an essential separation of "what I do" from "what I believe."

The result? Pastors are tempted to shy away from controversial moral issues in order to keep the people in the pews. This also creates the situation where people are living and supporting immoral behaviors yet still considering themselves committed Christians. This series of blog posts seeks to address this problem and suggest an answer or two.

Return to the Sources
Back in the day it was fashionable for wise men to found schools of thought in order to keep their teachings in perpetuity, but Jesus did not do this. Jesus Christ started the Church. To understand the Church is to understand the answer to what it means to be a Christian, what it means to join faith to morals in an all-embracing form that distorts neither. We need to return to the sources of the Church in order to answer this question.

In the previous article I spoke about the Apostolic Church's self-understanding. They were not members of a club, an organization, or a political party. They were communally a part of The Way of the Lord Jesus. They were Christians, followers of Christ Jesus, who understood their call to be precisely that: little christs in the world. The word for church, ekklesia, is a Greek word that translates the Hebrew qahal- the assembly, or literally 'the called-out ones'. They saw in Christ a New Moses who was calling out a people from the bondage of slavery to sin to journey to the promised land of eternal life. Christ is the new and final mediator between God and Man, and so the People of God would not be defined by ancestral bloodlines, but by His blood shed "for you and for all".

The Church, then, did not gather its essential identity from the world as a geo-political, ethnic, or social organization of men, but rather the Church was born through the encounter of man with God in Jesus Christ. The Church was fashioned from His Body and remains forever His Bride. The New Israel of God, the Church, is not a man-made institution, but a Christ-fashioned organism. She is living, vital, not on her own, but only through the life that Jesus breathes upon it through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is in the Church, first and foremost, that we know who we are, our identity, and from this flows “what I believe” and “what I do.” They are bound to one another.

New Creation is New Life
Jesus Christ does not want believers! He is sick and tired of believers! (see Matthew 7:21-23) Jesus wants followers. Those who seek to hide the Church’s moral teaching behind a more vaguely stated and less controversial kerygma loose sight of very thing that conjoins faith with morality: becoming a Christian means precisely a new way of life as a new creation. Christianity is the answer to the question How should I live?

Both the truths of faith as well as the truths of morality interpenetrate one another in order to form the good news of Christianity, for they are both located, grounded, rooted in a living person, Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the object of our Faith, for He is the final Word spoken from the Father by the breath of the Holy Spirit to humanity. Jesus is the “image of the invisible God” who entered into the human condition to communicate the life of God to man. He is the fullness of God’s self-revelation to mankind, and in becoming “like us in all things except sin,” Jesus simultaneously reveals man to himself, as Vatican II insightfully taught.

Christians do not follow the teachings of Jesus, in themselves, but rather we follow Jesus. Everything that Jesus thought, spoke, or did, all of His actions are caught up in the self-revelation of God to man. The decision to follow Christ is not a decision to believe a list of facts, but is to convert oneself to a truth to be lived, moving to a whole new state-of-being. The path of the Way of the Lord Jesus is a “recognizable form of life,” according to Livio Melina, “It is Christ who reveals in truth the heart of man, who reveals to man his highest vocation.”

That is why Jesus does not want mere believers or “hearers of the word”, because one cannot really know Jesus Christ without following Him along the way, without being “doers of the word.” It is all or nothing in the Christian life- Incarnation, life, suffering, death, resurrection- everything in the life of the Man discloses the heart of the Trinity, demonstrates that in God’s innermost mystery “is love.”

The gospel of Jesus is total, integral to the person who would have faith in God. To be a Christian is to be a new creation, the adopted son or daughter of God the Father in the Son Jesus by the Spirit of Jesus through grace.

The Incarnation
Concluding these brief and non-exhaustive thoughts on living the Christian life, one must turn again to our Savior to see the union of faith and morals in the life, in the very being of Jesus, that is relevant to answering our question.

Some Christians hold that morality is separated from faith because it has to do with human duties and works, that to believe morality truly bears upon eternal life is to substitute a false gospel of works-based righteous for the real gospel of faith alone. To such Christians, with great love and affection, I have a few concluding words to say that might help frame the discussion.

Primacy is given to faith over works because it is from our knowledge of who Jesus is and what He did that we base our lives (works) upon. I grant that outright. However, before both faith and works is grace, God’s free gift, that is poured into our very being by His righteousness.

Faith, in the sense of man’s response to God, is thus clearly a work of man, an action that man freely performs in conformity to the life of grace given to him by God. A man responding generously to God is doing an act that can be verily be described as moral. Any morally good actions done by man that is pleasing to God is done only through the power of His divine grace.

In order to re-examine the faith/works dichotomy, we must look to Christ in just what He reveals about man’s highest vocation. Jesus’ life is our life. Jesus was fully God and fully man. The Incarnation reveals not only the humility of God, but also reprinstinates human dignity. When Jesus healed, He healed as one who is fully God and fully man. When He spoke, He spoke as divine and human, perfectly united without any separation of the two natures. When He died, God died.

The Incarnation of Jesus demonstrates our highest vocation, which is to be so fully united to God by His Holy Spirit that we act like Christ: fully God’s divine grace and fully our work. The moment we begin in the authentic Christian life to separate “my work” from “God’s grace” is the moment we moved away from being followers and entered into the realm of mere believers. Yes, we are fallen creatures, prone to sin and lovers of temptation, but that is precisely where the work of the merits of Christ’s redemption is so radical: He makes it possible to live the Christian life by giving us the Spirit of the One who perfectly lived the Christian life.

Thus, to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ by hiding the controversial moral teachings is to not preach the full gospel. It is to preach, ultimately, a false gospel. Depriving people of the Church morality deprives them of the saving freedom that Christ died to give us, which is a real freedom from slavery to sinfulness. Christianity is the simple call to follow Jesus Christ in a new way of life.

AMDG