What is the Point of Being a Christian?

For my mother,

whose life answers

the question

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 ‘I Will Awake the Dawn’

Chapter 2 Learning Spontaneity

Chapter 3 The Peaceful Sea

Chapter 4 ‘Do Not Be Afraid’

Chapter 5 The Body Electric

Chapter 6 The Community of Truth

Chapter 7 I Am Because We Are

Chapter 8 Citizens of the Kingdom

Chapter 9 Root Shock

Chapter 10 Breeding Pandas

Chapter 11 Without the Day of the Lord, We Cannot Live

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

‘Why be a Christian?’, I was asked by a friend recently. I must admit that I was surprised by the question. I was brought up a Christian but had never been very interested in my faith until I found myself asking whether it was true or not. If it was true that humanity was destined to share God’s own unutterable happiness, then this must be the purpose of my life. If it was not true, then clearly I must leave the Church. So I replied to this friend of mine, ‘Because it is true.’ But this did not satisfy him one bit. ‘But what’s the point of being a Christian? What’s the purpose of it?’

We were clearly at cross-purposes. If Christianity is true, then it does not have a point other than to point to God who is the point of everything. If one asks about the point of doing anything, then ultimately, if one pushes the question far enough and if it is a serious enough matter, then one will come to the point of everything, the ultimate goal and purpose of our lives, and that is what religions are about. A religion that tries to market itself as useful for some other purpose – because it helps you to live a stable life, because it gets rid of stress or makes you wealthy – is shooting itself in the foot. If it has to justify itself by serving some other end, then it cannot be a religion that one could take seriously. The point of any religion is to point us to God who is the point of everything. That is why it makes no sense to ask whether belief in God is ‘relevant’, because God is the measure of all relevance.

But my friend was not deterred: ‘What do you get out of it? What does it do for you?’ And I began to see what he was getting at. These truths to which we adhere must have some consequences in one’s life. The truths of the law of gravity and that the earth is a globe have consequences. One can design planes that take off and if they set off in one direction they will eventually get back to where they started. If the truths of Christian teaching do not have any effects in one’s life, any fruit, then what sort of truths would they be? If God is the point of everything, then being religious, being pointed towards God as one’s ultimate goal, must show itself somehow in one’s life.

So Christianity must surely make a difference, even if one is not a Christian so as to obtain the difference. If, for example, it were to be established that Christians were more calm and relaxed than other people, then one would not urge people to share our faith in order that they become less stressed. ‘Become a Christian so as to sleep well at night.’ That would be to make religion merely a useful lifestyle accessory like going to the gym. It would be selling God as useful to me, like a bath essence or aromatherapy. But the fact that one’s faith did, just as an example, make one more relaxed, or happy, or courageous of whatever, might suggest that the truth claims of Christianity are not trivial, and that they would be worth investigating. If shaping one’s life towards God as one’s ultimate destiny has consequences such as making one free, as I shall argue, then one would not say to people, ‘Become a Christian because it will make you free.’ But if people see that Christians are free in an attractive and intriguing way, then they may become interested in knowing why, and ultimately in the God whom we worship.

Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris in the 1940s, wrote: ‘To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would make no sense if God did not exist.’¹ There should be something about Christians that puzzles people and makes them wonder what is at the heart of our lives.

In the second or third century, an unknown Christian wrote the Epistle to Diognetus which explores what is different about Christians:

For the Christians are distinguished from other people neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive people; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking way of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners.²

So the claim was that there was something strikingly different about how Christians live that might make people pause and wonder. Tertullian wrote in the second century that people were astonished at how Christians loved each other. Is there anything astonishing about how we live?

There is an immense spiritual hunger among the young. The 1999 European Values Study showed that a growing number of young people define themselves as religious.³ They are searching for a meaning to their lives. They are often more interested in ‘spirituality’ rather than doctrine, and they are nervous of belonging to any institutional form of religion which might limit their autonomy. In the words of Grace Davie, a sociologist who studies European religion, they believe without belonging.⁴ They are often more interested in other religious traditions than Christianity.

As a Christian I believe that my faith is ‘good news’, the literal meaning of the word ‘gospel’. Why is it often not experienced as good news by the young, as wonderful and attractive? Why do the claims that we make for our faith often seem to be unconvincing and even boring? Could it be that it is because there is usually nothing strikingly different about our lives? Often there is nothing to puzzle and intrigue people, so that our lives would make no sense if God did not exist.

All the Christian Churches have in recent years being making a big push to spread the gospel. Certainly in the Catholic Church there has been a lot of talk about evangelization. Dioceses and parishes have drawn up ambitious plans to let people know about our faith. Usually these have had little effect. We talk about love, freedom, happiness, and so on, but unless our Churches are seen really to be places in which people are free and courageous, then why should anyone believe us? Jesus spoke with authority, not like the scribes and the Pharisees, and his authority was surely his manifest freedom and joy. His words made an impression because they were embedded in a life that was striking, reaching out to strangers, feasting with prostitutes, afraid of nobody. So in this book I wish to reflect about what difference faith might make to how we live.

Let me make it clear from the start that what may be strikingly different is not that Christians are better than other people. There is no evidence that we are. Jesus said, ‘I came not to call the righteous but sinners’ (Mark 2.17), and this he continues to do. He ate and drank with the disreputable. The Church is a home for everyone, especially those whose lives are a mess. It is fitting that the first Christian to make it to Paradise was the thief who was crucified beside Jesus. According to an early Syriac poem, when he arrived at the gates of heaven, the angel who looked after such things tried not to let him in because he was not the sort of person who belonged there!⁵ Anyway, a community which founded its existence on the claim to moral superiority would not only be repulsive but would inevitably invite people to search for our failures and expose them with glee. If the Churches are so often attacked in the press, and our every sin given banner headlines, then this is because it is generally but wrongly assumed that the point of being a Christian is to be better than other people.

This book will not try to trace the special ingredient of Christianity, the secret of its savour, like the mysterious special ingredient of Green Chartreuse or Pepsi-Cola. Rather, it will be looking at a number of different aspects of Christian faith, exploring how these might invite us to sit askew to the dominant culture of our global village. It is these differences that will make sense of the statements that we make about our faith. Without our lives being in some way odd, if we just conform, then our words about faith will be vacuous.

As linguistic animals, who make sense of things by talking about them, then our faith needs to take the form of statements. We assert things to be true. But St Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican, maintained that our faith is aimed not at the words themselves but at what the words point to, our God who is beyond words.⁶ This is not to say that the words are unimportant. Quite the opposite. They are the ladder up which we climb towards the mystery. But the words only really communicate if they are seen to point beyond themselves.

Hugh of Saint-Cher, a thirteenth-century Dominican, said that ‘First the bow is bent in study and then the arrow is released in preaching.’ To adapt this metaphor, our statements of faith are like the arrows of an archer. The whole point of arrows is to be pointed to a target and shot towards it. If the archer just wandered around with an arrow in the bow but never let go of the string, then the arrow would be pointless. And so it is with our statements of belief. They only make sense in being propelled, as it were, in the direction of the God who is beyond all conception. It is the puzzling aspects of Christian life that give what we say its point and propel our statements towards the mystery. For example, anyone can say, ‘God is love.’ But it will not be a statement that makes any Christian sense unless its context is a community that does, however badly and with endless failures, love. If we say that Jesus is risen from the dead but there is no sign of resurrection in our lives, then we can talk about the resurrection until the Kingdom comes, but our words will not mean anything. It would be like a man in a country from which alcohol is banned talking about the pleasure of drinking wine – a typical Dominican activity as we shall see. His words would have no context in which they might make any sense.

We often complain about the immense ignorance of the young about Christianity. But we shall waste our time in producing more documents, videos, radio and TV programmes unless we also labour to make the Church a place of evident freedom, courage, joy and hope. We must choose with care the words that we speak. Truth matters. But our words will be useless unless they are embedded in communities which show how they are pointed beyond us, to the one who has sought us out and given us his Word. St Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Franciscan preacher, complained that the Church in his time was ‘bloated with words’. Things have not changed much. We go on producing vast quantities of documents, tedious long sermons, but unless people catch the whiff of freedom in our lives, then our words will actively subvert the preaching of the gospel.

The point of Christianity is to point to God as the meaning of our lives. To hope is to hang on to the confidence that there is some ultimate point to human existence. If there is not, then Christianity and all religion is a waste of time. And so the first chapter will look at what it means to hope and how that may be manifest in our lives. In fact the whole of this book is an exploration of our hope. But it is not our faith that we must laboriously make our way to God, as the distant goal of our striving, like Frodo and Sam making their painful way to Mordor. Our faith is that God has sought us out and found us. God is already present in the lives of all human beings, even if unnamed and unrecognized. So the goal of our hope, our ultimate destiny, is already in some way present. Preachers do not bring people to God; we name the God who was always there before us. As Christians, we believe that this presence of God among us takes the form of freedom, happiness and love. These are the first-fruits of the Kingdom. So Chapters 2 and 3 look at whether Christianity invites us to any odd and puzzling form of freedom and happiness. I have not devoted a chapter to love, perhaps surprisingly, because it is the form of the whole Christian life, and so every single chapter of this book is, in a sense, an exploration of what it means to love.

At this stage it becomes clear that entry into true freedom and happiness requires of us a profound transformation. Freedom is not just choosing between alternatives, and happiness is not just a cheerful emotion. They are a sharing in God’s life, and this asks of us a sort of dying and rising. This is frightening. We require courage if we are to let the God who is with us liberate us and fill us with joy. This is the subject of Chapter 4 and it is the virtue that we most urgently need in the Church today. It will also, I hope, have become evident that becoming free and happy are not just mental processes. Being human is deeply bound up with our bodies. We do not just have bodies, but we are bodily. Our bodiliness is fundamental to nearly all of Christian teaching. We cannot understand our hope, our happiness and our freedom unless we have some grasp of what it means to be bodily. This we shall explore in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, we shall examine whether being Christian means that we understand truthfulness in a distinctive way. It is not, again, that Christians are more truthful than other people, and so may claim the moral high ground. There is no evidence that we can. It is rather that we have a rather unusual understanding of what it means to be truthful.

St Augustine described humanity as ‘the community of truth’, and so this leads us naturally on to the next question, which is that of the unity of humanity. To be pointed to God is not just to believe that God is the goal of my private pilgrimage through life and death. We believe that it is in God that all of humanity will find its final unity and meaning. I am incomplete and unfinished apart from the whole of humanity. So Chapters 7 and 8 will explore what it means for us to believe in the ultimate unity of humanity and how that might affect how Christians live. But disunity between Christians and within our Churches gravely wounds our witness to the unity of humanity, so in Chapters 9 and 10 we shall therefore look at how to heal disunity and polarization within the Church. Finally, we shall end by thinking about what it means for us to rest, take Sabbath, and so point to that final rest that humanity is called to share with God. So the book will lead us from hope to that most eloquent sign of our hope, which is being at ease, at play, homo ludens, now. We show our hope that our lives do ultimately lead somewhere, to the Kingdom, by not striving too incessantly to get anywhere.

I thank my brethren at Blackfriars, Oxford, whose friendship and preaching has taught me most of what is in this book. I especially thank Vivian Boland OP for reading the typescript and offering his encouragement and help. I am aware that when I consider the point of being a Christian, I do so as a member of a particular tradition, as a Dominican and a Roman Catholic, but I hope that my reflections will make some sense to Christians of other traditions, to which I am also indebted.

¹Growth or Decline, Notre Dame 1951, quoted by S. Hauerwas, Sanctify the Time, Edinburgh 1998, p. 38.

²Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Church Library, Edinburgh 1867, Vol. 1, p. 307.

³Yves Lambert, ‘A Turning Point in Religious Evolution in Europe’ in The Journal of Contemporary Religion, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2004, pp. 29–45.

⁴Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates, Oxford 2000, p. 3.

⁵Cf. Simon Tugwell OP, Human Immortality and the Redemption of Death, London 1990, p. 171.

⁶Summa Theologiae (henceforth ST) II.II.1.2 ad 2.

Chapter 1

‘I Will Awake the Dawn’

What is the point of being a Christian? We must begin to answer this question by asking whether there is any point to anything at all. Are our lives shaped by some ultimate goal that gives them meaning or not? Christianity is either an attempt to answer this most fundamental question or it is nothing. When I travelled around the world, visiting the brothers and sisters, in some countries they liked to end the evening with songs, and I used to dread the cry ‘Timothy, give us a song.’ And so I learned a curious song from the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which had the great advantage of being short and repetitive, and I could remember the words however jet-lagged I was. It tells of a young lad who dies and is confronted by a knight who represents the devil.

‘Oh, where are you going?’ said the knight on the road. ‘I am going to meet my God’, said the boy as he stood, And he stood and he stood, and it was well that he stood. ‘I am going to meet my God’, said the boy on the road.

In this time of plague, the devil tempts the boy to believe that his life is not going anywhere beyond the grave. But the boy goes on travelling ‘with a strong staff in my hand’. He resists the temptation of despair and carries on his journey to the Kingdom. This is a question that haunts many people today. Are we going anywhere? Are we pointed towards any ultimate goal? And if not, then is there any point in anything at all, even in just getting out of bed in the morning? It is a question which is often not explicit, perhaps because we fear that the answer might be negative. It is a question about whether we may dare to hope or not.

Two of the most popular books published in Europe recently were Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran¹ and Oscar et la dame rose² by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt. Oscar sold over 400,000 copies in the first year; they are on the best-selling lists in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy. These two books are part of a trilogy, in which the heroes are Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim and Christian. They are about children who are searching for God. Oscar, who is ten years old, makes his journey on his bed, during the last week of his life. With the help of an old Christian wrestler, Mamie Rose, he bombards God with questions. Momo, who is Jewish, makes a pilgrimage to the home of his Sufi Master. They look to any religious tradition to help them on their way.

A natural expression of this religious hunger is to go on pilgrimage. When I was checking in for a flight at Stansted Airport, I noticed over the desk an advertisement for a book on science and medicine: ‘Fuel for your spiritual journey.’ The skies are filled with people travelling, and our travels are often symptomatic of a search, a tentative hope, though sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between tourism and pilgrimage. Five million people a year go to Lourdes, and two million to Fatima. Every week in the summer 6,000 young people make their way to Taizé. Europe is criss-crossed by pilgrim paths, going to Iona, Walsingham, Chartres, Rome, Medjugorje and Częstochowa. This expression of faith is shared by Muslims travelling to Mecca, Hindus to Varanasi, Shintoists to Mount Fuji, and believers of all the Abrahamic faiths to Jerusalem. Going on pilgrimage is rooted in our human nature. Pilgrimages can be expressive of deep conviction, but also give space for the unsure, those who travel hoping to find something on the way or at the end. I am constantly meeting people who are setting off for Santiago de Compostela. Often they are hesitant about what they believe, suspicious of doctrine, but believe that there is a journey to be made. They may not belong statistically to any church, and find no attraction in turning up at a religious service week after week, but they are comfortable, when they arrive at the shrine, to go and hug the statue of St James who, like them, is dressed as a pilgrim.

Our ancestors had no choice but to have a tough time going on pilgrimage. But although the modern searcher can take the easy way, millions choose to walk or bicycle. No gain without pain, as they say. According to Dante, St James is the Apostle of Hope, and Thomas Aquinas says that hope is for ‘bonum futurum arduum possibile’,³ for a difficult but possible future good. We will have nothing to say to young people about our faith unless we are prepared to journey with them, literally sometimes, but also mentally. Surely Cardinal Basil Hume was so loved because he was obviously a pilgrim, someone who walked with us as we search for God. Indeed his best-known book was To Be a Pilgrim.

We must cherish and nurture the pilgrim itch that is in every human being. It is expressive of at least an implicit hope. The ninth-century Frankish theologian, Paschasius Radbert, said ‘Despair has no foot on which to walk the way that is Christ.’⁴ We are like terns, yearning to migrate when spring comes, or salmon touched by the deep need to swim upstream against the currents and to come home. This is surely why stories like The Lord of the Rings fascinate so many people. They touch some deep hunger to set out on an adventure, like Bilbo, restless and incapable of settling down. We must walk with people, as Jesus walked with the disciples to Emmaus, even if, like those disciples, they sometimes seem to us to start off by walking in the wrong direction.

The question is, of course, do these journeys lead anywhere? Do we find that for which we are looking? Or are we just wandering around in circles, like the Israelites in the wilderness? The Way to Paradise by the Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Llosa,⁵ is about two people who are looking for Paradise: Paul Gauguin and his improbable grandmother, Flora Tristán. Gauguin looked for it in a tropical paradise not yet ruined by Western industrial society; the grandmother looked for it in a transformation of that society, a future just world in which all human beings would be equal, especially men and women. He looked for Paradise in a survival of the past, and she looked for it in an anticipation of the future. Both of them were disappointed.

Gauguin’s most famous painting was called ‘D’où venons-nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons-nous?’ ‘From where do we come? What are we? Where are we going?’ It was painted in 1897, and it was Gauguin’s last testament before he tried to commit suicide the next year. He had fled from the West in search of a paradise in Tahiti, but found it already ruined. He moved in 1891 to the even more remote Marquesas, but the colonial administration and the missionaries had got there first. Paradise was no more, and he despaired.

Who are we? This is placed between questions about the past and the future. We can only know who we are if we have a longer story which looks backwards and forwards. Our Christian ancestors lived within the story that looked back to Creation and forward to the Kingdom. We come from God and go back to God again. Walking on pilgrimage expressed that hope. Our society has largely lost that shared story. Confidence in secular hopes is also weaker. Flora Tristán’s dream of a political paradise has largely collapsed, and there are few places from which we can escape the ruinous effects of modern industrialism. And so Paradise has largely escaped from our shared imagination. We no longer walk together towards a common destiny. Maybe this is why an ever increasing percentage of young Europeans believe in a personal life after death. If I can no longer tell a story about humanity’s destiny, then at least I might cling to some promise for my own future.

When I was a young friar in the late 1960s, there was a tremendous sense of the promise of the future. Anything seemed possible. In my student days ‘L’imagination au pouvoir!’ – ‘Let the imagination rule’ – was scribbled all over the walls in Paris. Even in the England of the Beatles things seemed promising. One could get frogs’ legs and snails in the restaurants, and my mother began to put garlic in the cooking if my father was not watching, so the Kingdom must be nigh. It was the last echo of the confidence of our Victorian ancestors. As Dickens, the supreme Victorian, wrote, ‘Time is rolling for an end, and the world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing and more hopeful, as it rolls.’⁶

But that confidence has now largely gone. One moment in its loss was, strangely, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As Fukuyama famously said, history has ended. The dreams of a radical transformation of humanity weakened. Oliver Bennett of Warwick University argues in Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World⁷ that despite an explosion of wealth in many Western countries we are suffering from a collective depression. There is growing violence in our cities, the development of gang warfare, escalation of drugs and, in the wider world, increasing inequality between the rich and poor, the spread of AIDS, the threat of ecological disaster and, above all, clashes between religions and the spread of terrorism.

Without the promise of a future, what can we, the Now Generation, do except live in the present? Hugh Rayment-Pickard wrote,

Around us we see New Age religions offering individualistic piety and instant