Book Comment: After You Believe

"Keep getting old as long as you can."

Kris Kristofferson (b. 1936, Texas) 

Country music singer, songwriter, 

Golden Gloves boxer, Rhodes Scholar, 

U.S. Army captain

Kristoffer Kristian Kristofferson (yes, that's his real name) expresses the aim of most people for their lives.  Christians have a different perspective but we haven't always ourselves really understood it.  Many still don't.

In his book, After You Believe.  Why Christian Character Matters, N. T. Wright, the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, asks the question of what you do after you become a Christian.  Do you just wait to die and go to Heaven?  Does it matter once you are "saved?"  Isn't what we're really concerned with the "sweet by-and-by?"  Wright thinks it matters very much what we do in the "interim," and he clearly shows that Jesus and Paul thought so to.

Wright speaks of two approaches many Christians have adopted: 1. A Rules Mentality,  which in essence places the believer into legalism and ritualism, and 2. Spontaneity, going with what "feels right," since we are no longer under the Law.  This in essence places the believer into antinomianism.

Bishop Wright says neither of these approaches is correct.  Our duty is to develop Christian character and become who are intended to be in Christ.  The Kingdom of God is in the world now, and we are citizens of that Kingdom.  In the next life, in the Kingdom, we are to be kings and priests; since the Kingdom is here now, we are to begin being kings and priests now, fully revealing the image of God.  He call this the development of Christian virtue.

Wright is an Anglican and Anglicans say that they are "protestant, yet catholic."  I am very Protestant and I get a little squirmy when Wright explains things in more "catholic" ways, but what he's really talking about are sanctification and holiness and he is exactly correct.

Under the leading of the Holy Spirit, we are to experience what Paul calls "the renewing of your minds."
Classical pagan virtue found many of the Christian attitudes to be puzzling, especially those involving self-denial and self-sacrifice.  By practicing the Christian virtues (love, faith, hope, charity, self-giving, looking away from oneself, etc) under the leadership of the Holy Spirit (assuming the Mind of Christ) we gradually grow into them so that they become second nature.  Once they become second nature to us, we will not have to stop and decide how to act when the fecal material really hits the spinning blades.  We will know how to act.