Becoming a Christian

            Christianity entered into the world not to be understood but to be existed in.   He makes it clear that the Christian style of life cannot be indiscriminately blended with any and all human desires. Nor are Christians left to their own devices as to what style of life to lead. And that life which they are to follow or pattern themselves after is the life of Jesus. On the basis of the New Testament, record concerning the life and teachings of Jesus, he sets up an ideal “pattern” to which the individual Christian is supposed to conform. The life of Jesus is the model which the Christian is obligated to attempt to imitate. A Christian is a person of will who no longer wills his own will but with the passion of his crushed will radically changed, wills another’s will. Christianity is not so much related to transforming the intellect but to transforming the will. But this transformation is the most painful of all operations, comparable to a vivisection. Biblical Christianity is concerned with our will, with changing the will. Everything touches this; all the instructions (renouncing the world, denying one’s self, dying to the world, and so on, also to hate oneself, to love God) are connected with this fundamental idea: the transformation of the will.       

             Real conflict between Christianity and man lies in that Christianity which is Absolute and teaches that there exists something absolute, and demands of the Christian that his life must express the existence of something Absolute. Initially and principally Christianity is and must be so terrifying that only an Absolute can drive a person to it. A Christian is literally a stranger and a pilgrim. Relationship to Christ is the decisive thing. You may be thoroughly informed about Christianity as a whole, may know how to explain it, to present it and to expound it but if with all this you think that your own relationship to Christ is a matter of indifference, you are a pagan.  This is Christianity: Let a person begin seriously to realize his need for Christ. Let him literally give all his fortune to the poor, literally love his neighbor, and so forth, and he will soon learn to need Christ.Christianity is a suit that at first glance seems attractive enough, but as soon as you actually put it on then you must have Christ’s help in order to be able to live in it. Christianity came into the world as the absolute not for consolation, humanly understood; on the contrary it speaks again and again of the sufferings which a Christian must endure, or which a man must endure to become and to be a Christian, sufferings he can well avoid merely by refraining from becoming a Christian. In a strict sense, being a Christian means ‘to die to the world and then to be sacrificed; first a sword pierces the heart (to die from the world) and then to be bated cursed by men and abandoned by God (i.e. sacrificed).

            There is an endless yawning difference between God and man and hence in the situation of contemporaneousness to become a Christian (to be transformed into likeness with god) proved to be an even greater torment and hence also a crime in the eyes of one’s neighbor. And so it will always prove when becoming a Christian in truth comes to mean to become contemporary with Christ. And if becoming a Christian does not come to mean this then all the talk about becoming a Christian is nonsense and self-deception and conceit is part even blasphemy and sin against the second commandment of the Law and sin against the Holy Ghost. 

            If thou canst not prevail upon thyself to become a Christian in the situation of contemporaneousness of with Him or of He is the situation of contemporaneousness cannot move thee and draw thee to Himself then thou will never become a Christian. Thou mayest honor, praise, thank and reward with all worldly goods to him who maketh thee believe thou nevertheless act Christian but he deceiveth thee.

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