Ten Ways Christians Tend to Fail at Being Christian

From the Huffington Post:

1) Too much money. "Wealthy Christian" should be an oxymoron. In Luke 12:33, Jesus says, "Sell your possessions and give to the poor." In Matthew 19:21, he says, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor." In Matthew 6:24, he says, "You cannot serve God and Money." Christians are generally pretty huge on cleaving to the word of God. I just don't see how those particular words could be clearer.

And

3) Too quick to believe that we know what God really means by what he says in the Bible. The Bible is an extremely complex, multi-leveled work. We're sometimes too quick to assume that we grasp its every meaning. Take this passage, for instance, from Luke 8: 9-10: "His disciples asked him [Jesus] what this parable [of the sower] meant. He said, 'The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, "though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand."'" Huh? And that's Jesus "explaining" what is generally regarded as one of his most readily understood parables! Are we really all that confident that we always know exactly what Jesus meant by everything he said? Wouldn't we do well to sometimes admit that the words attributed to God manifested on earth are just a tad, well, Greek to us?

And

10) Too uneducated about Christianity. Generally speaking (which of course is the most offensive way to speak about any group of people), Christians tend to embarrass themselves by knowing so little about either the Bible or the history of Christianity. Believing that the Bible is the word of God, for instance, is one thing; knowing nothing about the long process by which men decided which texts would and wouldn't make it into the Bible is another. It's not that all Christians should be full-on theologians or historians. But if you're a Christian who doesn't know the Great Schism from The Great Santini, or the Diet of Worms from ... well, the diet of worms, then you've got some homework to do.

More here.

Back in the heyday of my church-going years, I would pat myself on the back, from time to time, because I was far more interested in Bible study than my peers. I don't mean the "daily devotional" kind of crap, where you pick a verse and kind of pray and meditate on it. I mean, I was into discussion with my Sunday school teachers. I was into carving up Scriptural meat. And, despite my occasional self-congratulatory attitude, I really was into this kind of shit. I really enjoyed a good theological debate. I really wanted to know what it means to be a Christian, and what all the possible ramifications of that are.

It's that same attitude, the desire to really mix it up with people, intellectually speaking, that keeps me going today, that motivates my writing here at Real Art, most of my artistic endeavors, and much of my casual conversation with friends and anybody else foolish enough to listen to me. Unfortunately for Jesus, it's also that same attitude that ultimately led me to dismiss Christianity and the Bible as a bunch of bullshit--okay, to be fair, there are large chunks of Christianity and the Bible which aren't bullshit; rather, I mean the totality of it all.

And that's the problem with the essay excerpted above.

There are, of course, many Christians who are quite capable of maintaining both an intellectually honest worldview while at the same time maintaining their devotion to God as they understand Him in terms of the Bible. Typically, but not always, these people either attend, or have attended seminary. Most Christians, on the other hand, don't even try to attempt this balancing act. Most Christians are just like my youth group peers who I condemned for not having any intellectual excitement about their religion. That is, they leave the thinking to preachers, priests, and theologians. Bible study is something they ditch, or simply endure because they know it's what they're "supposed to do." Trying to reconcile intellectually the wrathful God of vengeance in the Old Testament with the loving, forgiving Son of Man in the New Testament is not even on the list of things to do. They just kind of seize upon the ideas they like, and ignore what they don't like or don't understand.

Indeed, one of the most appealing aspects of Christianity for many is that you don't have to think. You don't have to worry. You don't have to do anything. Just rejoice in the fact that you're "saved" and God will sort out the rest. Pray a lot and the Lord will intervene to make your life wonderful. Getting Christians to try to actually understand their faith, to really study the Bible, to get their brains involved, strikes me as self-defeating. People don't go to Church in order to understand reality: they go to church so that they can avoid understanding reality. If we really had all of Christendom taking an intellectual approach to matters of faith, Christianity would collapse on itself in, like, ten seconds.

So, of course, I fully support this essay writer's assertions that Christians should really make good-faith efforts to understand what they're all about, if only because it would serve to defang the beast, as it were. It's just that it'll never happen. Not in a million years.

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