There are some who might argue that a chapter on the Christian life is the single most important within a systematic theology, if for no other reason than that it is here that “the rubber meets the road,” as it were. There has developed, at least in certain streams of Christianity today, a kind of fear of doctrine, extensive thinking and talking about God in relative isolation from the actual practical needs of congregations or individual Christians, for fear that they might lose touch with the actual life and practice of Christian faith and become lost in a stuffy intellectualism.
It is my contention that this need not be the case (though it often has been), though it will not likely convince such people as any talk of “systematic theology” has quite probably prevented them from even considering to read this work. Indeed, this fear of a divorce of our speaking about God from the daily life of the Christian, and thus the fear that Christian doctrine would become “irrelevant” to ordinary people is often held by those who identify themselves as conservative. This is particularly ironic because the cry for “relevance” is the product of classical liberal theology, where Jesus is considered in isolation from his significance as the incarnation of the God of Israel.
It was contended back in chapter two that, because in Jesus, God took on human flesh and dwelled among us, the gospel is intrinsically relevant, that it implicates our humanity in such a way that we can accept it, reject it, or debate the finer points of belief, but we cannot finally ignore it. In Christ, the eternal has entered into the temporal, the infinite has entered into the finite, the divine has entered into the human and an event like that cannot be anything less than supremely relevant to our daily lives. The only way the fact that God has become a human being can be seen as irrelevant is if, in fact, we do not actually believe that it has happened.
All of this is to say that, when we turn our attention to the Christian life, we must not do so as if we are developing a way of life that is somehow cut off from the actual life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Indeed, just as in every other aspect of Christian thought, we must consider Jesus to be the focal point of all our reflection, we must allow it to speak first and loudest in our wrestling for comprehension of the Christian life. More than anything, we must be certain that we do not invent something that in any way bypasses God’s revelation in Christ. We are not free to develop a way of life that is anything other than Christian, that is, we are not free to develop a lifestyle or ethical code that is not based in every way, from beginning to end, on the actual person of Christ.
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