Just one question

The entrance exam for membership in God's kingdom has only a single question on it, and that question is true/false. Is Jesus who he says he is? (Or more formally:  Is Jesus who and what is claimed, in the New Testament and in the testimony of the historic church?) Answer yes and you are in. Your life after that will include some trials and troubles to show whether you really meant it, but those who answer "true" and do so truly are the Christians the Bible talks about.

There are some people who answer "false." These days Christianity has many detractors who attempt to critique it. They have the facts of the faith before them but reject it. Little need be said of them; they will cease to trouble us by and by. Where we are going they cannot follow.

There are some also who say no out of indifference to the subject matter; they hear about it, they shrug and think the matter silly, and take no interest. How, they ask, are they to credit claims made about unseen things and a world beyond our own? Their stance on metaphysics is that there is no such thing. This is a fashionable position to take, and it is easy in the sense that it simplifies or eliminates many complex considerations including a number of moral questions.

The person who says yes but means no is simply a hypocrite, and is in a different class from the naysayer. He is sooner or later seen for what he is. He may be, for example, the preacher who promulgates self-serving instructions that just happen to enrich him, and enhance his power or prestige beyond any sensible bounds. But he does it cynically, not believing his own words, so that his soul is easy with it: He is internally consistent in his own beliefs. Here are sheep; it is only sensible to shear them.

Christianity provides for the hypocrite ready means to ends of his own, since so many other people around him really do want to honor God, and are easily manipulated by claims made in the name and place of the Lord. I suppose there will be some hypocrites in sheep's clothing until the world ends.

A more complicated problem comes from those who outwardly say yes but inwardly mean maybe. So long as their life experiences comport with what they expect and desire of God, well and good. But let unexpected difficulties come upon them and they may turn to judging the faith by their own expectations. If God does not do what they presume he ought, they may conclude he is not there, or that even if he is there in some mysterious sense, he is not worth following. In either case, the entity envisioned cannot really be God, for he is not doing what God is, they think, supposed to do.

The other possible outcome for the maybe-sayer is that he notices, and takes to heart, that when the scriptures speak of the trials of the righteous they leave the matter open ended. They do not set any specific limits on what he will have to put up with. So, yes he believes--though no, things are not going at all as he supposed. His maybe turns into a yes through life's trials, as some other people's maybes turn into noes.

It sometimes takes quite a long time for someone to resolve the question of whether his maybe works out to a yes or a no. When worked out the result may be, to those people around him, inspiring or dismaying: a heroic affirmation of the faith or an appalling apostasy. But every maybe-so commitment resolves one way or the other--to meaning yes in the end, or no not really. In the final judgments to be rendered upon us all, there is a category for the faithful, another for the faithless, but there is no door marked "maybe."

A big problem for the churches, in the search for unity and in numerous other ways, is that some of our leaders are secret naysayers or else they are still, inwardly not outwardly, stuck in the maybe-sayer category. A lot of things would go better for us if our leaders were all tried and true. Things would be easier for us if, as well, it had always been so in the past. Some of the old differences that divide us are transparently self-serving, spiritually uninspired doctrines that seemed needed at the time--for expediency.

This one question turns out to mean quite a lot, doesn't it?