Why I Left, Why I Stayed by Tony Campolo

Author:Tony Campolo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

THE DARK SIDE OF GRACE: WHY JESUS DOESN’T WORK FOR ME

by Bart Campolo

MY FATHER’S ACCOUNT OF his conversation with those UPenn students reminds me that such immediacy was always the evangelical gold standard for Christian discipleship. Every time another testimony, praise song, or devotional book described intimacy with Jesus, I felt my lack of it so much that it hurt. Listening to the hymn “I Come to the Garden Alone,” I ached for Jesus to walk with me and talk with me and tell me I was his own. I believed he was real, but much to my chagrin, Jesus certainly wasn’t my best friend.

Occasionally I was honest about my frustration, but more often I described the relationship I wanted with Jesus as if I already had it to cover my embarrassment in the midst of fellow believers. It wasn’t until the latter part of my Christian journey that I realized how many of us were like the townspeople in Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes, fearfully pretending—and sometimes even convincing ourselves—we were seeing what our peers were so excited about, only to discover that everyone else was doing the same thing.

I spent many years hearing and preaching about the critical importance of an intimate, personal relationship with Jesus, but I never fully understood what those words meant. How could I possibly have a personal relationship with someone who lived and died more than two thousand years ago? I wondered. Even if I granted that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, the right hand of God seemed much too far away for us to really get to know each other. Besides, I thought, wasn’t it the Holy Spirit that I was supposed to be relating to on a daily basis?

Trust me, I’m not kidding here. In all the time I was a Christian—including my four years as a religious studies major at Haverford College and Brown University—I never figured out the salient difference between the resurrected Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Try as I might, the doctrine of the Trinity always eluded me, on both a theological and practical level. Even during those transcendent moments when I felt certain I heard the voice of God, I was never quite sure which member of the Godhead was doing the talking.

What I did know, however, was that my father and the rest of the evangelical community almost always describe their faith in terms of Jesus. To them, Jesus is and always has been God’s ultimate expression, and his red-lettered words are the keys that unlock the true meaning of the Bible. Jesus is Lord and Savior. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus is the answer. In a very real sense, when it comes to that kind of Christianity, knowing Jesus in a personal way is the whole ball of wax.

To me, however, Jesus is almost entirely inaccessible. I’ve never seen his photograph, listened to a recording of his voice, or read a single

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