Tuesday, June 9, 2009

The deepest conviction of the Christian...

Elton Trueblood:
For the Christian, Christ is not the end of the quest; He is the beginning. Starting with Him, we are forced by intellectual integrity to proceed a long way. If we are committed to Him, we trust Him about the being and the character of God, about the reality of prayer, about the possibility of miracle, and about the life everlasting. The deepest conviction of the Christian is that Christ was not wrong! Particularly, we are convinced that He was not wrong in His report about Himself. It is important to remember that our commitment is to one who said, "All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matt. 11:27).

To say that Christ is the fulcrum is not merely to say that He was the greatest figure of history or the finest moral teacher. It is, instead, to see Him as the genuine revelation of the mystery of existence, the one clear light among the many shadows. Commitment is thus vastly more than mere admiration. It means passionate involvement in His life, teachings, death, and resurrection. It is to share with Him when He says, "I am the resurrection and the life" (John 11:25). We are not Christians until we are committed, and we are not committed until we combine, in our faith in Christ, the reasons of the heart with the reasons of the intellect. Commitment to Christ does not solve our problems; on the contrary, it adds new ones. Often it brings not peace but a sword (Matt. 1o:34), because it produces a holy disturbance. In any case, it destroys what is ordinarily understood as peace of mind. Like Archimedes, we still have to do the work of lifting, but we have a solid point from which to operate. ....
Elton Trueblood, A Place to Stand, Harper & Row, 1969, pp. 39-40.

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