Being Human vs. Being Christian

Glenn of Fully Devoted has commented on my post The Final Authority. Here's what he says:

For me the question is this -- where is the offensiveness in your relationships with those who do not accept Christianity coming from? Is it the "offense of the gospel" IE: people just refuse to accept that Jesus is in fact the only way to God -- or is it your approach? What I believe may offend you -- how I live out my faith and try to share it doesn't need to.

Well, the point of that post was this: If you are a Christian, what you believe and how you live are inseparable. Your scriptures and historical creeds beseech you to put the concerns of your gospel foremost in your lives, and part of that means putting the concerns of your gospel foremost in my life, too.

You may not personally be a jerk (in fact, a lot of the Christians I know are very nice people), but your faith requires you (1) to view me through a particular filter (i.e., as an outsider--a catch-all term I'll use to encompass terms so various as "heretic," "sinner," and "unsaved," among others), and (2) to do everything you can to neutralize my outsider status, mainly by working, with whatever methods, to fit me with a similar filter (i.e., "convert" me, "win" my soul, or whatever your preferred terminology is). That's just your Great Commission. You are allegedly an emissary of God, as well as a missionary of your gospel (which means, as I once explained to some fourth graders, that your job is to make more Christians).

There are lots of techniques for doing this. One of the popular ones these days is being a "living witness," or something along those lines. (Correct me if my terminology is wrong or out of date.) This does not involve active proselytization, but means you're just supposed to live in such a way that I will look at your life and say, in effect, "I wants to get me some o' dat!" (As an Important Person reminded me recently, this is an old technique. Francis of Assisi said, "Preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary.") A lot of Christians seem to think this passive, living witness kind of thing will win them personality points with we outsiders. Well, so long as being a living witness just means that you're friendly, responsible, reliable, and a good citizen, that's all well and good. But that's problematic, because as far as I'm concerned, if you're just behaving well, you're no testament to your faith or your God. You're just a great person. Unfortunately, Francis seems to have forgotten, or never realized in the first place, that the Christian faith is a thing that is utterly dependent on words and ideas. You cannot express your faith without words or ideas. These things are absolutely necessary. No matter how much you think that living according to the precepts of your gospel is going to portray to me the content of those precepts (which is essentially logos, or words and ideas), it just isn't gonna happen. But you and I will get along splendidly.

So, sooner or later, the explicit content of your religion has to be presented to me, the outsider. If not, you are not doing as your God has commanded. This is bound to irk me, because despite the fact that you and I have been getting along splendidly as just plain human beings, this revelation of your gospel will also be a revelation to me that perhaps you really don't care so much for me as a human being as you care for me as a potential carrier of your religion (i.e., another insider). For those of us on the outside, this is one of the creepiest things about Christianity. Here are these people who are by all appearances completely normal. They eat, sleep, and shop just like we do. But there will always be that moment when apparently it isn't good enough for us to simply be another person to them; we must also have the same metaphysical outlook. To be quite honest, having a Christian suddenly reveal this odd barrier can be quite disconcerting. It's like they're putting up a glass wall between us and telling us that the only way we can really connect is if we will agree to recite this weird string of words (either a "sinner's prayer" or a "creed"). Worse, when someone you love does this, the emotional pain can be almost unbearable.

The weird thing about Christianity is that it mainly exists as words, ideas, text, and philosophical abstractions. I don't mean things like churches, Christian stores, or Christian literature, and all those tangible trappings. I mean the essence of the faith. Christianity is words. This makes sense, of course, considering that you believe in a God who created the universe with words, and your fourth gospel equates your savior with logos, or words and ideas. But here in the everyday world, it's weird. Because people can recite words without actually meaning them. Lots of people do, in fact, especially in the more liturgical branches of the church. Some people just say the words because they always have, or to appease a spouse or loved one, or because they reap some benefit from the poetic cadences. What I'm getting at is that Christianity is essentially a shared linguistic interface. I could break down that imaginary glass wall just by talking like a Christian. All I have to do is address my existential concerns to this being called "God," and express the events in my life in terms of the Christian metanarrative. Nobody would be the wiser. Except me.

This is where the "offense" part comes in. Why should I have to perform these vocal and linguistic patterns, adjust my language to have a theological slant, and participate in rituals, ceremonies, and traditions designed to reinforce and perpetuate these patterns? Further more, why should you as a Christian see me as an outsider, or even less as a person (as I know some Christians do, even ones who are related to me), simply because I refuse to be complicit in your linguistic and philosophical system?

You may argue that the linguistic and philosophical system I describe is just a man-made superstructure over the deeper, more natural state of humans as creatures fundamentally connected to God, as many Christians have. But if that's the case, then why isn't my existence as a human who refuses to have a theological, linguistic, philosophical, metaphysical structure recognized as the more natural way to live? Why am I chastised, ostracized, or otherwise alienated because I don't want to participate in what I see as a silly, made-up falsehood? Ultimately, if reality is the same for everyone, I am living under the same divinity that you call "God," except I choose not to address that divinity as anything other than the entities by which it manifests itself to me in the natural, tangible experience of my day-to-day life. Perhaps the only difference between you and I is that you project a human-like personality on whatever is "out there," while I do not. An atheist denies theism, which is theology, which is a human attempt to put a human face on what is fundamentally not human. What is offensive to me about Christianity (and about any other religion that bothers to look down on me for being an atheist) is that most Christians refuse to recognize that my perception of my own existence is not that I am fundamentally disconnected from ultimate reality because I have no theology, but that I am more closely connected to ultimate reality by having removed theology from my life. This is how I see things, and how I most comfortably exist.

In my opinion, religious and theological belief systems are nothing more than self-perpetuating idea systems (or "memeplexes," as Richard Dawkins calls them) that prey on the tendency of the human mind to find patterns in its environment. People want to see simplified order. They want to see something that makes sense. "God" is an anthropomorphized simplification of a reality so complex that it is beyond our ability to comprehend. Would I like the universe to be as simple as a personality to which I might appeal regarding my existential concerns? Certainly! But I don't believe the universe is quite that simple. Hence, I am an atheist.

Unfortunately, however, Christianity, as a category, is not built on shared humanity, but on shared theology. So even though we all have to live within the same universe, and relate and respond to the same existential circumstances, Christianity asserts that only those people who have the proper ideas about that universe are in the correct relationship with it, while the rest of us are not. That is what offends me. No other animals are expected to uphold a particular theology--simply living is enough for them. But people, according to Christianity, are expected not only to live, but to assent to certain mental propositions that are, on the whole, unnecessary to existence. (I know this because I do not make such assent, and yet I continue to exist quite normally.)

This is the paradox in Francis of Assisi, and in Christians who assume they are being Christians as "living witnesses," without actually pushing the logical content of their religion. Yes, simply living rightly is the best you can do. However, that does not make you a Christian, because it does not clearly delineate your theological category. It only makes you a human being. And that, after all, is not so bad. It just isn't Christianity.