Articles
Evaluating Christianity
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Then Jesus answered and said, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?" (Matt. 17:17)
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Enemies of Christianity have a variety of measures by which they attack the integrity of the faith. Their targets are numerous: pedophile priests; money-grubbing faith-healers; the embarrassing squabbles and divisions that have torn the religion to shreds; the atrocities throughout history committed in the name of God; the sanctimonious co-worker in the next cubicle who wears his religion on his sleeve. It's hard to argue against this array of evidence. Christianity's historical track record is indeed a sorry one.
But why stop there? Go all the way back to the Bible itself, and we see evidence of the failings of its practitioners at the very beginning. The apostles of Jesus are portrayed in the gospels as bumbling, narrow-minded simpletons who drove Jesus Himself to exasperation. In this text, Jesus was not addressing His enemies, but His own disciples, who had embarrassed themselves by their failure to heal a demon-possessed boy (v. 14-16). Ours is not the only generation of believers to be labeled "faithless and perverse"--by the Founder of the religion, no less.
Evaluating Christianity by the failings of its followers is like judging a book by its cover--it's easy to do, but overlooks the real substance of the product. Christianity's quality lies not in its people but in its message. It is true and valid, not because its adherents are so perfect, but precisely because they are not. At its heart, Christianity is the story of what God has done for fallen humanity through Christ Jesus. The defects of those who flock to its message merely reinforce the need for that divine grace.
If you are troubled by the hypocrisy of those who claim to follow Christ, that's good; you ought to be troubled! But consider the standard by which you are judging them as hypocrites. There is a higher ideal by which all of us are judged, whether believer or unbeliever. That ideal is embedded in the foundation of Christianity, the story of a perfect Man who lived life as God intended it to be lived, and offered that life as a ransom for our faults.
It's a gift that compels me to evaluate myself rather than others.
--David
