On Being Different

“The lives Christians live are no different from the lives other people live. Christians are not meant to be different.” Thus a distinguished member of one of the mainline denominations developed his thesis that, while believers have accepted certain moral and ethical values, this may equally well be said of some atheists and agnostics. If the Christian has any distinguishing marks they are not in the area of conduct.

He went on to maintain that Christians are deluding themselves if they think they are any better than others in the community. He was saying that Christians ought not to be different, not that they ought to but do not measure up. The followers of Christ have a duty to identify themselves with the community. They must not cut themselves off in the conviction that they are different from other men. Indeed, my friend detected a tendency to spiritual pride among Christians and thought that the sooner they abandon any pretense at being better than others the better—the better both for themselves (it would inject a note of realism into their living) and for their community (Christians would join wholeheartedly in its affairs with no inhibitions).

These days it is scarcely necessary to emphasize that the Christian is a member of a community and that he has a duty as a member of that community. The adherents of “secular Christianity” have stressed that the place of the Christian is right in the middle of the community where secular men are. He must live his Christian life precisely there. He must know the heartache and the struggle, not try to insulate himself from it.

This is an insight we dare not surrender. To build up a ghetto mentality is fatal. The Christian faith is not some delicate plant that can survive only within the confines of a closed community. It is a faith that can and must be lived where the going is hard, where the affairs of men are decided and the issues squarely joined.

But it is quite another thing to say that the Christian must be indistinguishable from other men as he goes about his life in the arena of public life. “And such were some of you” (1 Cor. 6:11) follows a catalogue of sins habitually found in the community from which the Corinthian Christians had come. “You did not so learn Christ” (Eph. 4:20) follows another such list.

New Testament Christians were expected to live lives different significantly from those of men in the unbelieving world in which they had their being. Indeed, they were to be known by their differences. Jesus himself said, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35), and he prayed that they might be “perfectly one” so that the world would know that the Father had sent him (John 17:23).

We cannot dismiss such passages by regarding the little defeats and victories of individual Christians as of no great importance in the providence of God. Some, it is true, reason that Christians are in the world to be the servant Church. They should accordingly go on with the business of serving the community wherever the need appears, unconcerned about whether they seem different or not. To do otherwise is to be preoccupied with self and by that very fact to defeat the purpose of God.

Now it is true that in some respects the Christian is to be like others in the community. He is a citizen like others. He pays his taxes and performs his civic duties. He should never adopt a “holier than thou” attitude but should see himself as a sinner like all others. He must not strive self-consciously to be different. All this is true.

But to make it the whole story is to overlook the fact that in the New Testament the Church is the beloved community, a holy temple in the Lord, a kingdom of priests, and much more. It is impossible to take the New Testament seriously and conclude that Christians were never meant to be indistinguishable from the community. They are to play their full part in the community, but that is not the same thing.

The tragedy is that Christians in our day all too often resemble and differ from the community in the wrong things. We take our place as full members of the community, but that usually means that we are just as conventional as society in general. We accept the values of the community instead of those of Christ. It is not for nothing that Christians are so often identified with a Western middle-class ethos. Even when we engage in missionary work we tend to insist that not only the faith but the interpretation of the faith that is normally given in our own culture is mandatory.

We make contemporary values in our society the standard, not the Bible. We are conventional. We confuse middle-class norms and habits with morality. Like the Pharisee we thank God that we are not like other men. But the others almost always turn out to be those whom our society rejects. And in the process, again like the Pharisee, we show ourselves to be exactly like some other men, the establishment men of our day.

And when we are different from the community we are different because we are smug and self-satisfied, because we feel that God is our Protector in a special sense. We are different because we have our own way of saying, “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, tht temple of the Lord are these.”

John V. Taylor finds that most “really believing Christians are more scrupulous, patient and personally caring than others,” perhaps more unselfish, possessed of “a far stronger sense of meaning and purpose in life.” But he finds also among Christians “just as much greed, apathy and prejudice in our attitudes to society, and probably rather more intolerance and depression” (The Go-Between God, p. 124).

This is a careful weighing up of the pros and the cons, with a recognition of the not inconsiderable Christian achievement. But in the end Taylor is constrained to ask, “What has become of the new manhood and the new age?”

And that is the question I want to ask, too. It is so plain in the New Testament that the Christian is much more than a representative of his culture who has a yen to serve that it is worth asking where the contemporary Church has gone wrong. Christ came to bring men new life, not simply to tidy up the old life a trifle. He died to bring men a real redemption from sin, not what Thielicke has called “the flim-flam of respectable Christianity.” He left on record a call to all his followers to take up a cross. And he promised to send them the Holy Spirit.

This adds up to a sizable piece of spiritual equipment. As the New Testament puts it, Christians have a great deal going for them. In providing for redemption and for sanctification God has done much for every one of his people. He might reasonably expect more from us than he usually gets.

The New Testament pictures for us men who in the light of what God has done turned their world upside down—and who leave us with the challenge to do the same for ours.

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