Thoughts.

I’ve been reading A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. It is a story of two people discovering their life together and sharing in the depths of humanness. As a love story, they describe their ideals of their life and how they decided to live it out together. After boating around islands for few years and completing Master’s studies at Yale, they head to Oxford in England to further their education. It is at Oxford that they meet for the first time Christians who they consider as acceptable people, intelligent and reasonable, but also caring and driven in life. As agnostics, they decide they had not yet given Christianity an actual fair chance but had simply dismissed it altogether. Here are few quotes from the book as they take a real look at Christianity for the first time to see what it is actually about:

“If we had been asked at that time what we meant when we spoke of someone as a Christian, we should have said that we meant someone who called himself a Christian. If pressed, we should have added that he was someone who believed that Jesus was God or one with God, or, at least, said he believed that. But there are people who are so nice in their understanding of the word ‘Christian’ that they don’t use it at all. Who are we, they say, to pretend to know who is truly a Christian in God’s eyes? This is, indeed, very true, very nice. But a word that cannot be used is not very useful. And we need – we must have – a word for believes; and we must, therefore, hold to the age old, New-Testament use to designate a believer: someone who says he is a believer. Someone we believe when he says it. No doubt there are those well loved of God who are not Christians; no doubt there are false Christians in the churches; God can sort them out as He chooses. In the meantime, we must stick to the plain, definite, original meaning of the word: one who accepts the teachings of the Apostles, one who believes…We, then, were not Christians. Our friends were. But we liked them anyhow.”


“The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians – when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity – and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order.”