Frederick Buechner

Buechner Themes

What It Means to Be a Christian

If you tell me Christian commitment is a thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: 'Can I believe it all again today?' No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. 

— The Return of Ansel Gibbs (1958)

In the opening pages of his second memoir, Now and Then (1983), Frederick Buechner recalls his conversion experience with arresting detail:

The preceding year I had become in some sense a Christian, though the chances are I would have hesitated to put it like that, and I find something in that way of expressing it which even now makes me feel uncomfortable. "To become a Christian" sounds like an achievement, like becoming a millionaire. I thought of it rather, and think of it still, more as a lucky break, a step in the right direction. Though I was brought up in a family where church played virtually no role at all, through a series of events from childhood on I was moved, for the most part without any inkling of it, closer and closer to a feeling for that Mystery out of which the church arose in the first place until, finally, the Mystery itself came to have a face for me, and the face it came to have for me was the face of Christ.

For Buechner, then, “being a Christian” revolves around this mystical experience of the person of Christ. In one of the sermons included in The Hungering Dark (1968), he writes that this “is much of what the Christian faith is”: “for a moment, just for a little while, seeing the face and being still; that is all”. This encounter, he suggests, is transformative, so much so that, “nothing is ever the same again”.

In The Magnificent Defeat (1966), Buechner approaches the same idea via an image drawn from the works of William Blake and T.S. Eliot. “[A] Christian”, he writes, “is one who has seen the tiger”. This image is “wonderful”, he continues, because “it cuts through so much rubbish”:

Not the soulful-eyed, sugar-sweet, brilliantined Christ of the terrible pictures that one can buy. But this explosion of a man, this explosion of Life itself into life. We look at him. We glance up from our grazing for a moment, and there he stands, and suddenly we see what a tiger looks like, what a human being really looks like, and if we thought that our goathood was a problem before, our own half-baked, cockeyed humanity, we reach the point here, if we look hard, where the contrast becomes so painful that one or the other of us simply has to go. Either we crucify the tiger just to escape his terrible gaze, or we at least risk the crucifixion of our own goathood, which must go if it is to be replaced by tigerhood. In either case, our first cry when we see him is a cry of woe: if this is what it really is to be human, then what am I? If this is true life, then what is this that I am living?'

In The Alphabet of Grace (1970), Buechner addresses the problems and inconsistencies of being a Christian in the day-to-day. He even goes so far as to claim that he is a “part-time Christian”, explaining that he feels this to be the most accurate way of describing his experience “because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith”. Elsewhere, he also suggests that there are many who would not claim to be “Christian”, yet in some senses are. “There are many people in this world”, he writes in The Sacred Journey (1982), who are “strong, compassionate, and at least in that sense, Christian by instinct”. 

What might be considered to be Buechner’s “final answer” on the question is found in his second lexical work, Peculiar Treasures (1979), in which he provides the following definition for the noun, “Christian”:

Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily believes certain things. That Jesus was the son of God, say. Or that Mary was a virgin. Or that the Pope is infallible. Or that all other religions are all wrong. Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily does certain things. Such as going to church. Getting baptized. Giving up liquor and tobacco. Reading the Bible. Doing a good deed a day. Some think of a Christian as just a Nice Guy. Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me." (John 14:6) He didn't say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn't say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could "come to the Father." He said that it was only by him—by living, participating in, being caught up by, the way of life that he embodied, that was his way. Thus it is possible to be on Christ's way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ, and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don't even believe in God. A Christian is one who is on the way, though not necessarily very far along it, and who has at least some dim and half-baked idea of whom to thank. A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else. Just better informed.

In the same work, he adds the following:

A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, "I can't prove a thing, but there's something about his eyes and his voice. There's something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross—the way he carries me.”

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