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CAN I BE A CHRISTIAN ?-VIII The writer, whose age is '28, is cz Cambridge graduate,- and a missionary of the Church of Scotland in India] I N the Christian view of the world I find an interpretation of the whole of human experience more reasonable than any other that I have met ; but it is not as an answer to the problems of philosophy that I believe in the Christian Gospel. In the Christian understanding of man's nature and destiny, and in the practical experience of a common life of worship and mutual responsibility which I share as a member of the Christian community, I find the only answer to totalitarianism which does not resolve itself into a defence of futilitarianism ; nevertheless it is not as the "way out" for European civilisation that I turn to the Christian faith. I find in Christ the answer to such personal problems as fear and worry ; but I was not drawn to Him as one among the many purveyors of personal success.
Why this perversity ? If these claims can be vindicated are they not sufficient ground for being a Christian ? The answer is that none of these claims can be vindicated if we go to the Christian faith simply for an answer to our problems. To the modern man who simply wants an answer to his questions the New Testament has nothing helpful to say— until he has first heard and answered the question which it puts to him. For the Gospel is something more serious than a solution to man's problems ; it is a fresh and original word addressed to him from beyond the range of his problems by God, his maker. It is therefore bound to appear, in the first place, irrelevant. So far from merely answering his questions, it places him—when he understands it—in a solemn and tremendous situation in which he knows that his whole being is at stake, just as the sudden imminence of disaster on a modern ocean liner will, in a single flash, lift a man out of an apparently secure world of social relationships which has constituted his life for the past days or weeks, reminding him of a vaster and more terrifying environment and bringing him suddenly face to face with the issues of life and death.
So if any man complains that in speaking of a word from God I am talking in terms irrelevant to his situation, I can only answer that the fact that they seem irrelevant is precisely the tragedy of his situation. If I seek to commend the Gospel to him by presenting it as the solution of his problems, I betray both him and it. I can only plead with him to listen to it for its own sake, and to grant at least the possibility that it may have something to offer him even more important than the solution of the problems with which he is now concerned.
What, then, is this Gospel, and what has it to say about our situation ? It is concerned with guilt and forgiveness. Guilt : here we stumble upon the offence of the Gospel at the very outset. Guilt means the fact that we are rebels against God. Subjectively it means that the thing which we are bound to acknowledge as good condemns us as mean and corrupt. Objectively it means that we are at odds with the final authority of the Universe, misfits in the world, fit objects only for the wrath of God. In the age which lies immediately behind us this view of our situation was generally regarded as too sombre to be credible. Instead an optimistic temper, based upon Idealist philosophy, assured us that we were fundamentally good, and that our visions of goodness and beauty were the best things about us. Our ideals, we were told, were a great credit to us ; so far from condemning us, they were the tokens of our essential unity, or even identity, with God.
That philosophy obtained some vogue. There are few of us who take these ideas seriously now. The Romantic identification of ourselves with the highest we know ends in the Marxist identification of the highest we can know with the most sordid of immediate political expediencies—a view more dismal, but not more false. Few have followed this road resolutely to the end. Many, especially in this relatively comfortable country, have sought rather to evade the issue ; ideals, they have said, are a matter of taste. But this will not do. No one, whatever his protestations, really believes that the difference between truth and falsehood is of the same kind as the difference between black and white coffee. No one is without some awareness of the authoritative claim of goodness and truth to be obeyed. When we ignore it, it haunts us ; yet if we turn to face it, it condemns us. This is our situation, and not all the protests of our outraged dignity, nor all our enthusiastic concentration upon futilities can alter it by one hairsbreadth.
Only one thing can alter it : that God, whose will is the personal reality behind our ideals, against whom our treachery has been directed, should act so as to make it possible for us to turn back again and face Him. The Gospel is the witness of men to the fact that He has done just this, by the coming into the world at a certain point in history of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, to share the humiliation of this situation of ours, and its culmination in a despairing death, and so to establish with us at the point of our deepest tragedy a secure bond of trust and love with Him against whom we have been, and are, traitors. For us who have believed this witness, and have accepted Jesus as Saviour, His coming makes it possible for the first time to look clearly at our real situation, and to acknowledge that we are in truth rebels against God.
Without the knowledge of forgiveness this truth is too terrible to acknowledge, for it implies the sentence of annihilation upon ourselves. But in the light of the Cross we are driven to acknowledge with the deepest shame the extent of our treason; for it is measured by the costliness of God's forgiveness. And at the same time we acknowledge with unspeakable gratitude the love which came down to forgive us at such a cost. In this unique act of God, comparable only with creation itself, we meet judgement and mercy, wrath and sacrificial love, the forgiveness of a God who is both perfectly righteous and infinitely loving.- And by it we are enabled again to face Him without subterfuge or make-believe, and to serve Him as those who would pay back an unpayable debt of gratitude.
I am well aware that this proclamation of one unique saving act of God, by which history is cut in two, is regarded as intolerable by the majority of my contemporaries : by those who find such forgiveness too humiliating, and there- fore—not knowing forgiveness—must absolutely deny guilt.; and by those whose philosophical views prevent them from attaching such unique significance to any single historical event. Much may be said about these views for which there is not space here. But if I am asked why I am a Christian I am compelled to answer that it is because of this unique act of God in history whereby forgiveness is freely offered to me and to all men ; and because when one is brought to look squarely at this fact one knows that one is facing the choice as to one's final destiny, and that for ever afterwards one must be either Peter or Judas, either disciple or traitor.
[This is the last article in the series "Can I Be a Christian ?" Next week the first article in a new series on " The Use of Leisure."1
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