Easy faith
Huffpost Religion recently ran an excerpt from Desmund Tutu's new book God is Not a Christian. It begins:
They tell the story of a drunk who crossed the street
and accosted a pedestrian, asking him, "I shay, which ish the other shide
of the shtreet?" The pedestrian, somewhat nonplussed, replied, "That
side, of course!" The drunk said, "Shtrange. When I wash on that
shide, they shaid it wash thish shide."
Tutu's
point is that context determines perspective; he's implying that the strongest
determiners of faith are accidents of birth. Other stories, like the one about the blind men and the elephant, make the same point. Such parables are meant to
discourage exclusive claims to truth.
Tutu's
assertion points to Kierkegaard's timeless concern:
Truly, if at one time it was difficult to become a
Christian, I believe now it becomes more difficult year by year, because it has
now become so easy to become one.
Kierkegaard
saw that the difficulty is that "now one is a Christian as a matter of course."
It's
an incisive and personally convicting argument. It challenges us to testify to why
we hold the faith that we do--without appeal to environmental factors such as
family, geography and dominant culture. It challenges us to not be Christian
only by virtue of a baptismal certificate, because one of the most tragic
things Christianity can become is mere habit.
