Christianity is hard

A while back I referenced 1 Corinthians 1.17. Well I'm referencing it again. But with a different focus.

The message of Christianity is easy. The point of Christianity is easy. The message simply being that God came to earth in human form to provide a way for salvation. The point of being a Christian is, now that we're saved, to spread this message and live as if we're saved, that is, live a life worthy of being called a "Child of God."

But Christianity itself is hard. The deeper parts of it don't make any sense. It seems to be full of contradictions, misinformation, and theories that our minds can't grasp.

Lately I've been reading Mere Christianity for class, and C.S. Lewis writes that one of the reasons he believes Christianity to be true is because it's so difficult. The universe itself is difficult, and while other religions may have answers for everything, they still have holes, and come out to be simple. Christianity on the other hand does have answers to everything (though a lot of the time we don't know those answers, but someone else might even if we've never met them), there are no holes, even when it seems like different ideas contradict themselves.

For example, the idea of faith and works. Paul has an emphasis on faith, while James seems to have more of an emphasis on works. Really looking into what each are saying, they really do come out to contradict each other. But Christianity takes these two opposing views, and makes them work together. This can be called a chiasm or chiasmus. And how Christianity makes these two ideas work together is it says that because of our faith, we do works, which make our faith something real, tangible, see-able.

And Christianity is full of these. How many times have you read the Bible and went, "Well this is saying A, but if we look here we see it say B. How can this be true then?" This is where context comes in. A could just be how B happened in that particular situation. Or if you take the two and put them together in the context of all of scripture, you could pull out F, which is the mixture of A and B and possibly more ideas.

What I'm not saying is that you can twist scripture to make it fit what you want it to. What I am saying is that sometimes you need to look at the whole picture to understand how two seemingly opposing ideas or teachings actually work together. Is this hard to do? Yes. But Christianity is not easy. The message and point are, but Christianity itself is not. It calls us to think, critically, rationally, carefully about all aspects of life. What we read, what we see, what we experience. But it will always, eventually, make sense. Even if you can't understand it this side of heaven.