Were you ever a Christian?

This is the article version of a response left to the article “One Semester at Yale Divinity School and I’m No Longer a Christian. Here’s Why".

Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay

“One semester?” Was my first thought reading the title. How could that even be? People of faith base their whole worldview and lives on their beliefs. In fact, people who abandoned their faiths often talk about it being a traumatic, even a PTSD-inducing experience.

So, I was immediately drawn by Andrew Springer’s article “One Semester at Yale Divinity School and I’m No Longer a Christian. Here’s Why.”

At first, I thought it might be the ‘sheltered Christian goes to college and meets post-modernism for the first time’ cliche, but reading the piece I quickly shifted gear. It wasn’t that at all. Springer is a well-educated, award-winning journalist, and his text indicates that he spent a long time pondering about the absurdities, crimes and sins of the modern and past Christian movement.

But as I started to follow his train of thought I caught myself wondering that maybe he didn’t stop being a Christian, perhaps he simply realized that he never was one.

I don’t mean this in a spiteful way at all. I am speaking as someone who had many struggles with faith as well.

The author does present many valid points. He is right, for example, in saying that Jesus’ message has nothing to do with much of the pitfalls of what is characterized as American-centric Christianity. Americans mixed Christianity and politics so hopelessly that many can barely tell the difference between Jesus and the Republican party. And I say this as a Christian who has been voting conservative in the last few elections.

But my questioning of his past acceptance of the faith started when I saw the way in which he was trying to differentiate himself from other Christians. As an evangelical, I very much understand the desperate impulse to separate yourself from the prevailing group image. “Yes, I am X, but not one of ‘those Xs’.”

But make no mistake, the true Christian walk will always demand humility. And there is no point pretending Christianity won’t invariably be looked at with derision by those who aren’t’ wise, but consider themselves as such in their own eyes, even the Bible tells us so:

For the message of the cross is foolishness [absurd and illogical] to those who are perishing and spiritually dead [because they reject it], but to us who are being saved [by God’s grace] it is [the manifestation of] the power of God. [1 Corinthians 1:18-AMP]

Jesus was considered a heretical madman in His time. Early Christianity was mocked as a religion so silly that was only good enough for uneducated fisherman and women.

And yet, I join them.

It hurts my ego, of course. But I can’t, in intellectual honesty, walk away from what Springer called “ancient silliness.”

As much as I tried, I couldn’t find any deeper truth than the God made into flesh and nailed to a cross out of love for mankind.

Most people know somewhere in their being that there is more to the world than what the eyes can see. So, in the name of integrity, I publicly believe in the supernatural. In the “ancient silliness” of literal resurrection, as the article puts it.

Humility — especially the humility of accepting that some things don’t stop being true just because I don’t understand them — is necessary to have faith. And only through faith one can belong to Christ.

So, I invite every Christian to ponder about their own walk. If you don’t accept the “silliness” of the unseen, The Truth that can only be seized through faith, are you, or were you ever, truly a Christian?