No More Lip Service

When I was younger, I was a Christian by default.

I did not choose that identity. My parents did. Growing up, a reliable premise was that everyone I met was also Christian; the only question was, “To which fragment do you belong?” For American Christianity is a marketplace of Christianities.

At some point I decided to give more than lip service to this received identity, to own it. As a young adult, I sampled the marketplace, trying on several options, discarding some as too cheap to be true and others as downright repugnant. Retrospectively, I see that every great faith, like a supernova, spawns the byproducts of pale imitations, parodies, and, tragically often, deadly derivatives. Celestial navigation can be risky and confusing.

Everyone around me spoke about faith. It was not self-evident to me what faith is. Eventually I adopted this definition: “Faith is the act of being ultimately concerned” (Tillich, 1).

Many of these marketplace Christianities required that I choose between faith and reason. Such folks confuse mystery with magic. Several peddled a faith the principal selling point of which seemed to be an assured escape from present agonies within our world or a fiery hell beyond it. None made sense to me. None manifested a depth worthy of becoming one’s ultimate concern.

Eventually I learned that I was asking the wrong question. “What do Christians believe?” seemed the place to begin because, as a modern, I assumed that wisdom is a matter of right beliefs. But if God is known to us only through what God does — through God’s actions — then it stands to reason the same is true of Christians. If I wanted to discover the essence of Christianity so I could become more than nominally Christian, I should have asked, “What do Christians do, and why?”

In my next post, I’ll share the answer I’ve discovered along the way. Interestingly, things clarify when we view three early Christians through the prism of a story in Scripture most folks have never read.

Tillich, Paul. 1957. Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row.

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