Christianity, have taught many students and given many speeches, and so forth. But you have not, I suspect, understood very much about what Christianity has meant to me—and to your Oma and many of our closest friends. That is, in part, because you have been too young, or too far away, for much serious discussion of such matters; but it is due also, I fear, to a fault in me. Sometimes I am bothered by the thought that my life has been spent teaching other people’s children, whilst my own dear children and their families received only bits and pieces of the enormous treasury of the faith and hope that I struggled to comprehend—often, indeed, you received these bits and pieces from a tired and preoccupied man, who was glad enough to find diversion from his labors in the small and great pleasures of family life.
I regret this, because I know that at least some of the wisdom that you will need for the living of your lives in that complex world that the future will be can come from the contemplation and practice of the faith-tradition that has shaped so much of our Western world. Personally speaking, I don’t know how I could have faced the ordinary challenges of life, to say nothing of the great historic crises of the almost-century during which I have lived, without faith in a God who is both with us and for us!
But unfortunately—and this is what concerns me most—this same faith tradition that has guided me and countless others is itself imperilled in our time, and many of the forms in which it comes to you and your cohort are terribly misleading. Often, indeed, some of them are just silly—spiritually cheap and intellectually debased. I am not referring to the fact that for a century and more Christianity has suffered losses of numbers and influence and power: if you one day read some of my other books, you will find that these quantitative losses do not greatly trouble me. They are in any case inevitable as the Christian religion ceases to be the official or established religion of most Western nations. What is far more troubling are the qualitative losses: the trivialization of Christianity, its reduction to very simplistic ideas and slogans, its failure to speak to the most complex problems and anxieties of human beings—to the point that many of the most sober and thoughtful men and women of our time no longer find in this faith anything profound enough to wrestle with, or even to pay attention to. This represents an agonizing dilemma for thinking Christians today, because so very much of the Christianity they hear and see and are bombarded with today makes them ashamed and embarrassed; for it is simply not the faith to which they have devoted their minds and hearts
Modern media, which have aided and abetted this bombardment, will not overcome this dilemma; to the contrary, its increasing dominance of our culture only aggravates the problem. Last night I watched a television report that celebrated the glories of the multifarious and ever-expanding communications systems and devices for the spreading of religion in the world today. With the flick of a finger, prayers can be called up for every sort of occasion; whole bodies of sacred writings can be flashed before one’s eyes in an instant; religious services of every shape and kind—from the pomp and circumstance of Rome or Canterbury to the gospel swayings of spiritualists and the rants of evangelists—circulate without ceasing throughout cyberspace and can be tapped into at any moment. Individuals can be connected—can have church!—without ever setting foot in a building or being present with other flesh-and-blood humans. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism: they are all, and much besides, immediately and effortlessly . . . available!
Dear children, do not be fooled by this smorgasbord of religion. It is not all bad, or wrong, but it falsifies, in its total affect, what the human quest for spiritual depth is all about. Not only Christianity, but every profound religious tradition, requires of people—if they are at all serious about it—a great deal of reflection, study, thoughtfulness, listening, speech, and silence (sometimes called prayer). Many hours will have to be spent in solitude, many words will have to be read and pondered, many conversations will have to be engaged in; there will be times of great uncertainty, doubts will assail one, anxious questions will never be wholly absent. And even after eighty-four years one will have to confess that one understands very little (almost nothing!), and in all probability that one’s faith is also very, very small.
But one will know, at some profound level of consciousness, that one has been a human being—ein Mensch. Aristotle defined humans as “rational animals.” And Augustine of Hippo added that such thinking animals would inevitably be “restless” until they could find something greater than themselves to think about. All great religions (and this the only reason they may be called great) manifest both of these characteristics of genuine humanity: that is thought-filled, and that its thought, if honest and persistent, leads it beyond itself to that which it can honestly devote itself—or, in other words, can love.
Christianity has suffered the humiliations of all great religions in the contemporary world; perhaps it has suffered more than any of the others. There are complicated reasons why that may be the case. As the dominant religion of the most powerful nations and empires of the world, from Rome to America, Christianity has been associated in the minds of many non-Western peoples with the imperial civilizations of the West. Many Christians or former Christians themselves have become critical of the Christian religion because of its record of power seeking, its attempts to Christianize other peoples, and its too-easy dismissals of alternatives to itself. You will see, if and when you read this or other books of mine, that I have a certain sympathy for such critical assessments of historical Christianity.
But the greatest humiliations of Christianity have not originated with worldly doubters and critics. They have arisen within the Christian churches themselves. Too many avowed Christians, often the most enthusiastic among them, have mistaken some aspect of the Christian faith for its very center. Thus, you will be told by some very fervent believers that to be a Christian you must “believe in the Bible”; some will even say that you must accept every word of Scripture as absolute truth! Others whom you will likely encounter will insist that you can only claim Christianity as your faith if you belong to the church—and usually they will mean some particular church or denomination.
There will of course be many too who will tell you that Christianity involves strict adherence to a code of morality. Usually they will be quite specific: Here are the rules! And you will be puzzled, quite understandably, because others who eagerly announce their identity as Christians will present you with a very different set of rules.
Another group, having perhaps recently encountered some of the many other religions, whose numbers and influence will certainly increase in your time, will tell you to hold fast to Christianity because it only is the Truth. Perhaps they will argue that our country—or our civilization, or the Western world—is the most advanced in the world because it is Christian. They will certainly dismiss the atheists and agnostics, who have gained a certain hearing in my time and will probably become even more visible in yours.
I could go on. All such advocates of Christianity—even the sincere and very nice ones, for there are many such—have mistaken some aspect or component of the Christian tradition for its essence, its core or center. They have elevated the Bible or some code of ethics or the church or certain doctrinal truths to the highest position in the life of faith. They do this, usually, because these components of the faith are relatively concrete and graspable. We can get hold of them—and use them for our own purposes, purposes that, alas, are often quite self-righteous and even bellicose. Besides, many people, perhaps most, find it too baffling and too daunting to embrace a faith whose center is a living Being, and therefore a profound mystery whom we can never possess or fully understand but only . . . stand under.
I have written this book with you and your generation in mind because I want to help to preserve that center. If I have learned anything in my long life, it is that everything—everything: God, the Creation, the myriad creatures and processes of life, indeed life as such, and we humans who have been given the wherewithal to contemplate it all—everything is steeped in ineffable mystery. And if I were asked to say, in a word, what Christianity has contributed to this awareness of mystery, which has been felt by all great philosophies and religions and sciences, I would answer that Christianity professes and confesses that at the center of this universal mystery there is . . . love. Eternal, forgiving, expectant, suffering love.
That is why the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, called the Christ, is the central image and narrative of the Christian faith: because his story announces so poignantly