In the recent issue of National Geographic there is an intriguing interview with an Egyptian dentist/author, Alaa Al Aswany. In it, he makes a comment that articulates something I have often wondered to myself.
"It's my opinion that religions are the same everywhere. They are a way to find God, a way to have positive values, to prove oneself as a good human being. I was born a Muslim, so I am Muslim. If I had been born Christian, I would have been Christian."
The danger is this: that our Christianity - if not taken seriously enough - could easily be or become nothing more than Aswany's thinly disguised humanism. Good people doing good things for good reasons may make a nice bedtime story, but there is in such a story nothing of the startling, violent event that is redemption: "the reckless, raging fury that they call the love of God."
For those of us who were born into the faith, it is searching to ask if we would still be Christians had we were born outside. Have we chosen God, or have we simply defaulted to Him? We are talking about the difference between what is True and what is trite - between what is Faith and what is merely fuzzy. We dare not be Christians because it is healthy or popular or sensible, and we dare not act as if we were even interested in those things. This is not the beat of a different drummer, this is another band altogether.
Not to say that Christianity is not human, only that it is not merely human. Jesus came to bring us life, and we must remember that it is life as He defined it, namely, Himself. Jesus did not come to make you happy, rich, smart, or even get you into heaven. He came to draw you into a relationship with Himself. This is the essential thing, "that I may know Him."
Either Christianity is just another trickle dripping into the universal pond, or it is the waterfall rushing off the edge of everything we call familiar into the depths of what is really real.
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