What is the Point of Being a Christian?
I am currently reading ‘What is the Point of Being a Christian?’ by Fr Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican Friar, that won the Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing, chosen by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury. The genesis of the book was that the author had a friend- a committed Christian- who had a son who kept on at his father saying: “What is the point of being a Christian? What do you get out of it? Why carry on?”
So Timothy Radcliffe wrote the book to address those questions as he feels that younger people are seeing themselves as the ‘Last Generation’, through the despair they feel about the world and who are living through a kind of crisis of hope and in it the author explains why he thinks the answer to his friend’s son’s questions is a clear and concise one: “The point about ‘why be a Christian?’ is simply: “Because it is true”. That is important because our faith points us to God who is the point of everything, in other words the ‘point’ of Christianity is to point to God as the meaning of our lives so that we can have the confidence that there is after all some ultimate point to human existence to turn despair into hope.
However, the book realises that in itself is not enough to convince people to be Christian, to successfully engage with people you have to show the difference being a Christian makes not just to your own life but those around you-the impact of it all. Go back to 2nd and 3rd century where people talked about how astonished they were at how the early Christians loved each other, one person said of them “ …they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking way of life, they dwell in their own countries but simply as sojourners (temporary residents), as citizens they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners…”.
Where the book hugely succeeds is in Timothy Radcliffe’s eloquence and wit but he focuses on what you could call ‘the strong meat of belief’, bridging that gap between academic and popular theology.
He is at his best when he outlines for example what the Church tends to be against what it could and should be. He comments that people should look at Christians and be puzzled by our astonishing liberty and freedom, but that often Church and the Christian community is usually seen as something which is telling people why they must not do what they want and must do what they do not want. What we need to be is a place of evident freedom, courage, joy and hope- somewhere that is a home for everyone, especially those whose lives are a mess. As the author makes clear “..It is fitting that the first Christian to make it to Paradise was the thief who was crucified beside Jesus.”
The image of what we should be as a Church in order that the unchurched are willing to learn from us is a place where we can speak convincingly about God being a place of mercy and mutual delight of joy and freedom- as Radcliffe says “If we are seen to be timid people, afraid of the world and afraid of each other, then why should anyone believe a word of what we say?”. What a challenge!
Tags: Christian, Timothy radcliffe, Michael ramsey, Archbishop, what is the point of being a christian