Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church

Christians are not perfect, by any means, but they can be people made fully alive.

We admit that we will never reach our ideal in this life, a distinctive the church claims that most other human institutions try to deny.

The gospel presents both high ideals and all-encompassing grace. Very often, however, the church tilts one direction or the other. Either it lowers the ideals, adjusting moral standards downward, softening Jesus’ strong commands, rationalizing behavior; or else it pulls in the boundaries of grace, declaring some sins worse than others, some sinners beyond the pale. Few churches stay faithful both to the high ideals of gospel and its bottomless grace.

The only hope for any of us, regardless of our particular sins, lies in a ruthless trust in a God who inexplicably loves sinners, including those who sin differently than we do.

Could it be that Christians, eager to point out how good we are, neglect the basic fact that the gospel sounds like good news only to bad people?

Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. —Mahatma Gandhi

He learned, like every good novelist, that human behaviour can neither be explained nor predicted, only rendered.

Evil’s greatest triumph may be its success in portraying religion as an enemy of pleasure when, in fact, religion accounts for its source: every good and enjoyable thing is the invention of a Creator who lavished gifts on the world.

Along with Chesterton, I’ve had to take my place among those who acknowledge that we are what is wrong with the world. What is my snobbishness toward my childhood church, for instance, but an inverted form of the harsh judgment it showed me?

When the London Times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton sent in the reply shortest and most to the point: Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton

King clung to nonviolence because he profoundly believed that only a movement based on love could keep the oppressed from becoming a mirror image of their oppressors. He wanted to change the hearts of the white people, yes, but in a way that did not in the process harden the hearts of the blacks he was leading toward freedom. Nonviolence, he believed, 'will save the Negro from seeking to substitute one tyranny for another.

But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaninglessness?

The church of my own childhood, as well as that of my present and my future, comprises deeply flawed human beings struggling toward an unattainable ideal.