Graham at Leaving Muenster has a characteristically challenging post on where Christianity falls short if it’s taken to be simply a set of beliefs and not a way of life:

I remember hearing Brian Mclaren talk a few years ago about an interview he’d given at a conference. I believe it was with Dallas Willard and they were discussing why a trip to your average bookshop would reveal a great upsurge of interest in Buddhism and New Age, but a sharp disinterest with Christianity.

Willard’s response was simple and – it seems to me – spot on: “Christianity is a set of doctrines, whilst Buddhism offers a way of life.”

At the time, I would have called myself a Christian and I was gutted. I couldn’t deny the truth in McLaren’s words. I knew the riches of Christian spirituality and the writings of Catholic mystics and Orthodox theologians, but these didn’t function as the mainstream of Christianity and seemed to be presented as something of an exceptional and optional extra.

(Note: I don’t intend what follows to be an argument with Graham as such; I’m not sure how much of this he would disagree with. This is more a riff on the idea that there is some fundamental dichotomy between doctrine and practice.)

There seems to be a common sentiment abroad that Christianity has focused too much on orthodoxy and not enough on orthopraxis. A lot of wrangling over dogma and theological formulations, and not enough following Jesus.

In fact, some would go so far as to say that we should focus on following the way of life taught and exemplified by Jesus in the Gospels and not worry about things like creeds and systematic theologies.

For my part, here as elsewhere, I want to say “both/and” rather than “either/or.” I find myself doing that a lot – maybe this accounts for my attraction to the via media of Anglicanism. I don’t think that it’s possible to separate beliefs from pracitce.

The reason for this is fairly straightforward: our beliefs are already embedded in our practice. We do certain things because, at least in part, we believe the world to be a certain way.

Those who would have us just follow the simple way of loving Jesus seem to overlook the fact that Jesus’ teachings are rooted in his proclamation of the mercies of his Father and his Father’s Kingdom. Because God has a certain character, we are called and empowered to live in a particular way.

Beyond this, we know precious little of any “Jesus movement” prior to or apart from the proclamation of Jesus as Risen Lord. It’s a commonplace of New Testament scholarship that all the NT books were written from the perspective of faith in the Risen Christ. In fact, you hardly need to be a scholar to recognize that. And apart from that faith, is there really enough material to base a way of life on the teachings one finds in the Gospels?

Moreover, why would we want to? If the teachings of Jesus are to be separated from the teachings about Jesus, it’s not clear why that particular way of life should be taken to be universally binding. As J.H. Yoder wrote, he is normative as a human being becuase he’s divine. If the church’s Christological claims are of (at best) secondary importance, it’s not at all clear why some other historical person wouldn’t provide us with as good a role model if not better (St. Francis? Mother Teresa? Buddha? Gandhi?). If nothing else, we have better information about many of them.

It’s because Jesus reveals the character and identity of God, or is the agent of God’s kingdom, or is the incarnation of the universal logos, or however we want to elucidate it theologically, that he provides the foundation for a way of life. Certainly there’ve been many nominal Christians (no doubt there are nominal Buddhists too), but I would argue that those who most faithfully followed Jesus also took with utmost seriousness the church’s claims about who he is.