2023-196 Why am I still a Christian?

[I wrote this essay for our church newsletter. It is an essay that has been percolating for a long time.]

Why am I still a Christian?  It’s a fair question these days. Folks who identify as Christians have been loud hateful noises of late and aligning themselves on the side of the oppressor rather than the oppressed. Even my home church has declared that I am no longer quite orthodox enough, me being an LGBTQ+ supporter and all. I cannot remember a time when I was not a member of a Christian Reformed Church somewhere. When the church that has nurtured me all my life no longer has a place for me and my friends, it calls everything into question.

So, why am I still a Christian? The short answer is that the Bible refuses to let me go. When I was in Army flight school fifty years ago, I hooked up with the Navigators, a very fine organization whose mantra is, “To know Christ and make him known.” They challenged me to read the Bible all the way through each year. I have been doing so ever since. Not just the good parts, not just the proof texts, the whole thing. After fifty years I have to say that the Bible definitely has its hooks in me.

The Bible is big. It is beautiful. It is as ugly as sin. It is ambiguous and messy, but it holds together. The bible is not a theological treatise, it is a story. Sometimes there is theological commentary, such as the awful refrain of the book of Judges, “in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did as was right in his own eyes”, sometimes there is not. Genesis, for example, is for the most part simply story, narrative without commentary. Genesis relates the lives of the patriarch without comment. It’s all there, and it is messy. But God is there, too, in Judges and Genesis and on through the rest of the story, all the way to the wonderfully strange and comforting book we know as the Apocalypse of John. God does not let go of the people he has called to be his own. The Bible is the story of God’s stubborn love.

Years ago, GK Chesterton wrote about the analogy of the key. The door locks in many houses were quite simple. The fact that a particular key fit a particular lock was no guarantee that the key had been made specifically for that lock. Any old skeleton key would likely work. If, on the other hand, the key in your hand fits the complex, high-security lock for a bank safe or military arms room, you can be confident that the key was made specifically for that particular lock.

Life is big and and beautiful and as ugly as sin. It is messy and ambiguous. The Bible fits. The Bible is the only thing I have found that is big enough and messy enough to fit life as we actually live it. Is that proof? No. Is it impressive? Definitely. The Bible fits life. At the tender age of seventy-three, this matters to me.

I am reminded of these words from John 6,

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”

And that, in a few more words, is why I am still a Christian.