Am I A Christian?

Books like Resurrection or The Brothers Karamazov give me an almost overpowering sense of how uniquely marvellous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it. Likewise, listening to Bach, reading Pascal, looking at Chartres Cathedral or any of the masterpieces of Christian art and thought. As for the Gospels and Epistles, I find them(especially St John) irresistibly wonderful as they reduce the jostling egos of now - my own among them - to the feeble crackling flicker of burning sticks against a majestic noonday sun. Is it not extraordinary to the point of being a miracle, that so loose and ill-constructed a narrative in an antique translation of a dubious text should after so many centuries still have power to quell and dominate a restless, opinionated, over-exercised and under-nourished twentieth-century mind?

Learned theologians bend their powerful minds to demonstrate that God is dead and his church, therefore, become a useless excrescence.

One may marvel that, when pretty well every item of Christian belief and of Christian ethics has been thus subjected to some degree of denigration and attack by those ostensibly responsible for upholding and propagating them, congregations of sorts nonetheless continue to assemble in parish churches on Sunday mornings, and ordinands and novices, though in dwindling numbers, continue to come forward with seemingly authentic vocations. The church of Jesus Christ has to stagger on under the guidance of those who increasingly sympathize with, when they do not actually countenance, every attack on its doctrines, integrity and traditional practice. By one of our time's larger ironies, ecumenicalism is triumphant just when there is nothing to be ecumenical about; the various religious bodies are likely to find it easy to join together only because, believing little, they correspondingly differ about little.

Institutional Christianity, it seems to me, is now in total disarray, and visibly decomposing, to the point that, short of a miracle, it can never be put together again with any semblance of order or credibility. In their present state of decomposition the various Christian denominations are not even an impediment to Christian belief but just a joke.

The surrender of institutional Christianity to the promoters of a kingdom of heaven on earth has been so abject, the assumptions of scientific materialism are so widely accepted and arrogantly stated, that an aspiring Christian today is left in a kind of catacomb of his own making, utterly remote from the debates and discussions going on around him, whether about "permissive morality" or about the basic dogma of the Christian faith.