Being a Christian means something definite

Jake Meador exited the church he grew up in at age seventeen, "angry and confused." Reading Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy helped him come back, not to that church, but to the faith.

...[T]he Vanaukens, both before and after their conversion, knew that being a Christian meant something definite—most of all it meant a definite affirmation of the resurrection of Christ. But other Christians across time would remind us as well that it meant a definite resolve to submit to Christ, no matter the consequences. This seriousness meant the materialistic "Christianity" I so often encountered as a child was best rendered in scare quotes and must be strictly distinguished from the real thing. More recently, it also strikes me that a seriousness about Christianity inherently excludes the sort of utilitarian or consequentialist reasoning so ascendant in our own unhappy day. Jesus did not attach conditions to our discipleship. He knew nothing of conditions under which hatred of enemies could be allowed, for instance. So neither should we. ....

Vanauken was seeing where a life of moral seriousness and quiet devotion to the good could lead one–and it enthralled him. More than that, it told him what he was meant for—not perfectly or completely because it was still lacking the ultimately necessary reality of Christ. But it showed him something true and real nonetheless.

These qualities, of course, aren't the essence of catholic Christianity—the essence, I think, is found in the Scriptures, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, the decalogue, and the common practices of the Christian church, carried on down through the centuries. You can have a kind of seriousness without catholicity. But the package that Vanauken encountered at Oxford and that I encountered in Vanauken and which, though I didn't realize it at the time, permanently defined my intellectual trajectory, can't be had without catholic Christianity, I think, for the lofty thing we ultimately are meant for is Christ himself, of course, and we voyage toward him through a life of moral and intellectual seriousness and find in him the spaciousness that so captivated the Vanaukens. At one point they speak of realizing what precisely Eliot meant when he described the Christian life as one of "complete simplicity / costing not less than everything." What they learned from Eliot, I learned from them.

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. .... (more)

Jake Meador, "Constructing Toward Catholicity," Mere Orthodoxy, Dec 2, 2024.