 |
| (Credit: Tim Snell, Flickr Creative Commons) |
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is famous for saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Those words have become something of a Philosophy 101 cliché since Socrates first uttered them centuries ago, but cliché or not they’re as true today as they were in ancient Greece.
And should be just as convicting.
Particularly for those of us who call ourselves Christians.
I worry that far too many of us attach the name “Christian” to ourselves without ever really stopping to consider what that name implies or the demands that name makes (or should make) upon on our lives.
For example, even though it’s delicious, we wouldn’t call ourselves vegetarians if steak was a regular part of our diet because vegetarian describes not just an ideology, but a particular way of life. You can’t just believe that vegetables are a good thing. To be a vegetarian, you have to actually live like a vegetarian. And if try to eat meat while claiming to be a vegetarian, people will call you out on it in a heartbeat for your gastronomic hypocrisy.
In theory, the name Christian should work the same way. Yet we seem to feel free to call ourselves Christians so long as we simply believe in Jesus and agree to a certain list of beliefs.
But is that really all that Christianity is about?
Believing something the Bible says even the Devil believes?
Shouldn’t Christianity be more than just a list of beliefs? Shouldn’t it also be a particular way of life? And shouldn’t that particular way of life resemble the life of the person who gives Christianity its name?
And if it should, then don’t we have an obligation to our integrity (to say nothing of our faith) to pause, examine our lives, examine the Church, and ask a really hard question, “What’s so Christian about Christianity today?”
