On the Living Christ

Enough politics from the mustard seed. Let’s have a bit of faith.

For a variety of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to believe in a living Christ. Most importantly, it means that I do not have faith in the Bible, any doctrine, or any political stance. Of course, I do believe in all those things with greater and lesser degrees of certainty. But the bedrock of my faith is singular: the living Christ as Lord, now and always.

This sort of faith does not seem prevalent in America today. Liberal Christians, in my experience, tend to believe primarily in doctrines related to social justice. Conservatives come perilously close to worshiping the Bible, not the Christ it reveals.

Let me restate: I find both of those things radically secondary. Christ as Lord demands that we recognize his lordship. Our understandings of justice may change with context; the primacy of Christ will not. Likewise – and I’ll lose the conservatives here – Christ transcends anything written about him in the Bible. I believe the Bible is inspired but human; it is not perfect because only One is perfect. Moreover, the Bible can never totally capture the living Christ nor his work for a simple reason: It is written in human language. Human words may be inspired. We could even grant the fundamentalists that they are dictated by God. They would still, however, be expressed in language, a creation of human society. And because language is human, it can never fully describe the transcendent reality of God.

Certainly, the Bible points to the perfect One. But it can never contain the living Christ, who reigns over even it. That’s the Christ in whom I rest my hopes.

Evangelicals, I should add, are right in at least one major way: The most essential thing is a relationship with Christ. Is such a relationship "personal," as evangelicals claim? I just asked a professor of mine what he thought, and his answer seemed good. Certainly, we relate to God as a person because we can only relate as persons. But God in Godself transcends anything we can conceive by the world "person." In other words, God is not my co-pilot or my buddy. Christ is my Lord, who relates to me as person because I can relate in no other way.

As Christians, we thank God for that mercy.