Journey Toward the light - Scene 5

Recap: Van and Davy are getting closer to their Encounter with the Light. After meeting Christians (who surprised them with their intelligence and wit and joy) at Oxford and after reading dozens of books and even the Bible, they are drawing some conclusions:
1. Christianity is perhaps not as foolish as they had previously thought.
2. Christians do not have to be unintelligent, self-righteous and boring, as they had thought.
3. A great many intelligent scholars had embraced Christianity and found in it consistent answers for understanding the meaning of life.

Van writes:

Davy and I, we later decided, were immeasurably helped in our serious look at Christianity by where we considered ourselves to be: we did not suppose at all that we were Christians, just because we were more or less nice people who vaguely believed there might be some sort of god and who had been inside a church. We were outside the fold.

Thus we were perfectly aware that the central claim of Christianity was and always had been that the same God who made the world had lived in the world and been killed by the world; and that the (claimed) proof of this was His resurrection from the dead.

This, in fact, was precisely what we, so far at least, did not believe. But we knew that it was what had to be believed if we were to call ourselves Christians. Consequently we did not call ourselves Christian.

Van realized that there are a great many people who no more believed this central claim of Christ "than an Easter bunny!" yet they called themselves Christians on the basis, apparently, of going to church, being nice and respectable, and accepting some "assorted bits of the Sermon on the Mount."

He continues:

I wrote sardonically that such people were proof that there can be smoke without fire. But Davy and I were not too close to Christianity to see it. We didn't mistake the foothills for the mountain. We saw it there only too clearly, solitary, vast, ice-capped, and apparently unscaleable, at least by us.

For we knew we had to believe. Christianity was a faith.

And by now we knew it was important. If true--and we admitted to each other the possibility that it was -- it was, very simply, the only really important truth in the world. And if untrue, it was false. No halfway house. All or nothing.

It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing.

From A Severe Mercy, by Vanauken