Due to sick kids, sick me, college basketball and catching up on Heroes, I have made little progress in the past week on the books I’ve been reading (and I’m a slow reader to begin with.) I did want to share a couple of quotes I found challenging from Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Influence.

I remember when one of my colleagues said, “Shane, I’m not a Christian anymore. I gave up Christianity in order to follow Jesus.”

I wondered what it would look like if we decided to really follow Jesus. In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what a fully devoted Christian looked like, or if the world had even seen one in the last few centuries. From my desk at college, it looked like some time back we had stopped living Christianity and just started studying it. The hilarious words of 19th-century Danish philospher Soren Kierkegaard resonated in my thirsty soul:

“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole like will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”

And later:

Emile Durkheim, the classic forefather of sociology, wrote extensively about “totemism,” the human tendancy to form our conception of God in our own image. He said that oftentimes what human beings do is take the values and traditions that we most admire about ourselves and project them onto a totem. Eventually, we stand in awe of that totem and end up worshiping an incarnation of the things we love about ourselves. As George Bernard Shaw said, “God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor.” We create a Western conception of the Mediterranean peasant revolutionary who lived two thousand years ago, whom we can relate to and who cares about what we care about (eats at McDonald’s and votes Republican).

I did a little survey, probing Christians about their (mis)conceptions of Jesus. I learned a striking thing from the survey. I asked participants who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus” whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. Later in the survey, I sneaked in another question. I asked this same group of strong followers whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.