Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
It started with teachers. And it also started innocently enough. Initially, I had no intention of making the impersonations front and center; they were simply a factor in a faithful retelling of a story or anecdote. Take, for instance, one former principal who carefully overenunciated every word and spoke with a Sean Connery lisp (we middle-schoolers waited with bated breath for him to tell us to sit). I recall the student body enduring a lengthy disquisition on the moral pitfalls of chewing gum in class, in which he managed to stretch the word gum into a languorous moan of doubt: guuuuum. I faithfully reproduced this monologue for my mom when she asked me about my day, and to my surprise she laughed. A lot.
Once I realized that this talent could be exploited for the amusement of others, no one was safe. I developed a reliable roster of impersonations that could be deployed at will; I took requests—I still do sometimes, so be careful. Friends asked me if I practiced in front of a mirror, but the truth is that the process is a lot more organic, and it often begins with admiration and affection. Though some of my increasingly exaggerated renditions could verge on cruelty, I liked the way my principal talked, and I relished his idiosyncratic speeches. I wasn’t actively trying to plunder his mannerisms for amusement and profit. I simply wanted to convey a measure of his distinct personality.
Then there were the impersonations that moved to earnest imitations—the cases where my admiration was so strong that I sought to emulate someone else’s personality. We rack up a pretty sizeable roster of these characters over the years. Plenty of them are celebrities, but occasionally one of these mythic creatures steps right into the awkward circumstances of our lives. For me, one of the more memorable cases took place in middle school. This was the year immediately preceding our move from Austria to the United States, and it involved a boy two grades ahead of me. We’ll call him Rich.
Rich called himself a punk, and he’d leave his signature—“Punk’s Not Dead” (the a was always an anarchy sign)—all over our school, and all over Vienna. He smoked prodigiously and swore fluently. He was also a pretty decent skateboarder and occasionally sauntered into class with both a black eye and hickeys on his neck like he’d been necking with a vampire. There were many rumors: he did drugs; he got kicked out of his house; he was wanted by the police; he was close to getting expelled. Whether all this was true is anyone’s guess, but there was undeniably dangerous energy about him. The only thing that seemed to make Rich laugh or smile was destruction, whether vandalism or simple damage to school property. I remember him purloining a crude sculpture from art class—the work of some aspiring artist with more sincerity than skill—and chucking it out the fourth-story window into the crowd exiting a grocery store. At the time our school occupied the top floor of a large building in the city. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but an elderly lady did get quite a scare when the sculpture unceremoniously shattered in her grocery cart, apropos of nothing.
I realize this is hardly a charming portrait, but I was spellbound by the kid. He seemed to be from another world—one in which the traditional rules and boundaries didn’t apply. Though he usually showed up to school, you got the distinct impression he’d bail as soon as something more amusing caught his attention.
I wanted to be Rich, so I went all out in the impersonations department. I walked like him, talked like him, and dressed like him. Once I even bought his pants. That’s right! I paid money for Rich’s trousers. They were unwashed and smelled of cigarettes and skater’s sweat. Does it get any more authentic? I tried my hand at smoking, too, but quickly abandoned it when I realized that eliminating the incriminating odor required a level of deceptive ingenuity I simply didn’t possess. I also started calling myself a punk and scrawling Rich’s mantra into school furniture, on train station walls, and on my notebooks and backpack. It was even on the front of my journal. When he caught a glimpse of this, Rich let me know in very unsparing terms that, unfortunately, journals just aren’t very punk.
In case that journal didn’t give it away, I was nothing like Rich. His clothes looked ridiculous on me, his words sounded hollow in my mouth, and his cigarettes were meant for stronger lungs than mine. Unlike Rich, I had a stable home, I’d never been in a serious fight, and I couldn’t skate to save my life. Sure, I could pop a Dead Kennedys’ tape into my Walkman, but you can’t buy true street cred, even when it stoops to sell you a dirty pair of pants.
In the end I couldn’t take the impression to its full realization, which would’ve ended with me closing the gap between my costume and personality. What stopped me was more than my mom’s tears and my dad’s patient words of admonition—I remember him reading me the full definition of punk from the Oxford English Dictionary as I winced on our living room couch. Rather, I recognized that Rich’s persona had a limited shelf life and that Mom and Dad, for all their missionary getup, Oxford dictionaries, and churchy talk, were offering me something that wouldn’t burn away like chaff in the fires of time.
Imitation is a test of character. If the character in question is insubstantial and superficial, the imitation is easily discarded. If the character is robust and full of life, the imitation has something precious: durability. Even at my young age, I could see the fragile nature of Rich’s coolness, that his punk persona, though difficult to achieve, was all-too-easily punctured and deflated. Witness the multitude of former punks (or any other former citizens of a subculture) who traded in their leather jackets and liberty spikes for venti lattes and cubicles at ad agencies. In sharp contrast, my mom and dad knew “the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need” (Philippians 4:12). This secret had sustained them as they went about their lonely ministry work in a strange country, and it had sustained them when they were briefly imprisoned for their faith.
From the drive for personal fulfillment to the realm of politics, the abiding feature of all worldly imitations is that they lack durability. In the end the only imitation that will stand is the imitation of our Lord and Savior. One of the greatest threats to this imitation is the constant pull away from an eternal perspective to an earthly one.
In his Devil’s Dictionary, professional cynic Ambrose Bierce defines a Christian as “One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”1 As clever as this is, he could’ve saved some ink and just said “See hypocrisy.” Of course, hypocrisy is a perennial charge brought against believers from those outside the church, but these days it’s also one of the main reasons young people in the church are heading for the exits.2 While the decline is less precipitous than in years past, the reasons for the departure have grown steadily more serious. Along with the perception of hypocrisy, a growing sense of political alienation is causing numerous young men and women to reconsider the faith of their parents. In this sense the 2016 election is a watershed moment. While it’s always tempting to see the challenges of our day as utterly unique, the temptation to become overinvested in our temporal world order is a perennial struggle of humanity through the ages—a frantic search for an imitation that lasts.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby offers a poignant depiction of this deep longing, with a distinctly American inflection. Gatsby is a kind of self-made man. Born to “shiftless and unsuccessful farm people,” James Gatz disowns his legal name, casts off his former identity, and assumes the mantle of Jay Gatsby, a name that “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”3 But Gatsby believes he can do more than reinvent himself; he believes he can turn back the clock and reclaim some cherished past. For years he has steadily nurtured an impossible love for Daisy Miller, a flame of his youth who went on to marry a brutal and unfaithful man. Through a friendship with her cousin, Nick Carraway (the novel’s narrator), he hopes to pull her back into his orbit. Slowly, we learn that he has arranged his entire life around Daisy. But, as Nick tragically observes, it’s no longer Daisy that Gatsby desires but the ideal Daisy. When they finally meet again, we are told that she “tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”4 It’s a kind of romance we know all too well.
One of the most moving exchanges in the book takes place between Gatsby and Nick as they discuss his plans for Daisy. After warning Gatsby that he needs to temper his expectations because he “can’t repeat the past,” Gatsby responds, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” Nick then tells us, “He looked around wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”5
Gatsby is animated by an Edenic longing that aims to restore the world to some former state of purity and innocence. As idealistic as this may sound, its outworkings are deeply practical. For some, it’s as if the desired past were lurking here in the shadow of the White House. For others, Eden lies well down the road and will require an arduous journey. Broadly speaking, two powerful expressions of this Edenic longing manifest as either nostalgia (we need to return to an idyllic past) or utopian fantasy (we need to work together to establish a blissful future world). But the keys to Eden are not to be found anywhere in this world. Eden is not our destination.
The late Roger Lundin reminds us,
The Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. . . . That’s why we can’t go back to the innocence of the childhood we have lost. The way back is barred. The Christian life is about the way forward, but the way forward is the way forward through the cross and the empty tomb. The older I get the less nostalgic I become and the more I become oriented towards the future.6
Nick Carraway is right. We can’t repeat the past. But Lundin is also right. As Christians, we move forward through the cross and the empty tomb toward a heavenly city that infinitely exceeds all of our quaint, terrestrial aspirations. Jay Gatsby is an illusion, but the life that Christ offers to us—the one he has crafted with the finesse of an artist—is one with a destination and one where growth and maturity don’t come at the cost of death. As Paul tells us, the body that is sown perishable is raised imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42).
If we would learn from Gatsby’s example, we must learn to outgrow him.
As a little boy my son, Dylan, watched me with awe as I mowed the grass. The look in his eyes almost made me believe I was the god he thought I was. At the time he had his own mower—a charming little toy that was fueled with soap and produced an iridescent bouquet of bubbles that floated away like stray balloons whenever it was pushed. Together, we pursued our suburban husbandry, my mower shooting out jets of fragrant grass, and Dylan’s, evanescent bubbles. I smiled, neighbors laughed, and my wife aimed her phone in our direction; we were just so adorable. But I also remember when she told me that Dylan had repeated one of my carelessly muttered expletives for the benefit of the entire daycare staff. And I remember Dylan observing my fit(s) of road rage from the shelter of his car seat, eyes wide, taking it all in. The look in his eyes almost made me believe I was the devil he saw at that moment.
There’s a deeply practical aspect to Paul’s exhortation for us to imitate God as “beloved children.” For better or for worse, that’s precisely what kids do. They imitate the people closest to them. In the case of small children, that’s usually Mom and Dad. There’s a pronounced temptation to outsource a child’s spiritual education to spiritual experts (pastors, counselors, youth workers, conference speakers, etc.) who are supposedly better equipped to handle the complex challenges they face. While we’re grateful for the help of those who minister to young people, this help cannot take the place of a parent’s responsibility to their child. Even with the best of intentions, this maneuver amounts to an abdication of one’s calling. We may not be able to parse the latest statistics from Pew Research, and we may not follow all of the exotic new trends punctuating youth culture, but none of this changes the fact that the Lord has entrusted the stewardship of our children to us. Contrary to popular opinion, a child’s spiritual education does not belong to experts; it belongs to their parents. How do we as parents carry out this spiritual education? In a word, through proper imitation—and as we’ll see, proper imitation is discipleship.
If we survey the Pauline descriptions of Christ’s followers, a kind of poetics of discipleship emerges. In the concluding verses of Romans 13, Paul exhorts his readers to “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (v. 12). To this fetching metaphor Paul adds an even more striking phrase: “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (v. 14). Rather than give us a purely negative vision of abstemiousness—a rigid list of don’ts for stifling the flesh—Paul offers these vivid portraits of a Christlike demeanor, comparing our comportment to a kind of sacred garment. Christian disciples, Paul is saying, are those who are wearing Christ. Few things are as practical and visible as the clothes we wear. Why then do so many of us assume that Christlikeness is something private and largely inconspicuous, an inward conviction reserved exclusively for “sacred” spaces like churches and prayer meetings?
But Paul doesn’t limit his metaphors to clothing. Indeed, his descriptions of Christian devotion span the gamut of the senses, engaging the heart, mind, and imagination of his readers. To this end he calls Christians a fragrant “aroma of Christ” (2 Corinthians 2:15). Later, Paul calls the Corinthian converts “letter[s] from Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:3) and in his epistle to the Ephesians he calls us Christ’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (2:10). As this rich imagery makes plain, Christians do much more than offer a message or a worldview to a hungry world; we offer a vision: our lives tell the story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I think of the words of one of the elders at my church as he served me Communion: “Taste and see that the LORD is good, brother” (Psalm 34:8).
Dallas Willard offers a shrewd observation about discipleship: “Another important way of putting this is to say that I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner that he did all that he did.”7 Willard is making a crucial distinction. To see its practical outworking, let’s apply it to my misguided middle school efforts. In essence the problem with my Rich imitation was simple: I wasn’t Rich. Lacking his knowledge, background, and skills, my bald mimicry was doomed to failure. If, on the other hand, I had learned how to do everything I did in the manner that Rich did what he did, I would’ve succeeded—much to my detriment.
A disciple, however, has learned Willard’s distinction and knows that a manner of life can be embodied only if it’s properly integrated into one’s own personality. Let’s call to mind Paul’s startling image of “putting on Christ” once more. Clothing offers a uniquely intimate picture of a person’s peculiar manner because everybody wears it differently. An entire student body may wear the same school uniform, but it will look different on each person. Common clothing cannot efface individuality, and this fact is registered by the diverse shapes and contours of our very bodies. Similarly, if I want to imitate Christ by “learning to live my life as he would live my life if he were I,” I need to think creatively about what it means to put him on, to wear him. Though we’re united in our purpose to love God supremely and love our neighbor as ourselves, we will each wear Christ uniquely. Your particular gifts, voice, and personality are not accidents—they are integral to Christ’s workmanship in your life.
Since the word disciple is in danger of being overspiritualized, let’s explore it in practical terms. The relationship between a mentor and protégé is a picture of discipleship. From sommeliers to sculptors, skilled craftspeople are always disciples, and their exquisite degree of refinement points back to a rigorous period of apprenticeship with a teacher. For Christian disciples, Christ is that teacher, and all of the lovely qualities that Paul outlines in his letters point back to our divine tutelage. The implications here have a deeply practical bearing on our day-to-day lives: “A successful baseball player who expects to excel in the game without adequate exercise of his body is no more ridiculous than the Christian who hopes to be able to act in the manner of Christ when put to the test without the appropriate exercise in godly living.”8 Though we each wear Christ differently, the spiritual protocol prescribed by Scripture forms a crucial point of unity. It’s impossible to overstate the pedigree of the spiritual curriculum, which we commonly call the spiritual disciplines. In Willard’s words, “The disciplines for the spiritual life, rightfully understood, are time-tested activities consciously undertaken by us as new men or women to allow our spirit ever-increasing sway over our embodied selves.”9 Through prayer, fasting, silence, study, contemplation, acts of mercy, and many more, Christ’s disciples learn the practical implications of the colossal truth that it is no longer they who live but Christ in them.
Discipleship is a basic feature of human life. All of us are disciples. The only question is the person we choose to follow. All of the teachers Rich chose to follow were skilled athletes, streetwise, and thoroughly committed to the notion that we are the masters of our own destiny. As misguided as this is, it’s a default mindset for many of us. Though the deep motivations of his heart were inscrutable to mortal eyes, Rich’s discipleship was readily evident to all of us. It’s part of what drew me to him in the first place. So what stopped me from making him my teacher?
In chapter four my dad told you his stories about the “bad man” that culminated with that revelation that said bad man was in fact none other than himself. Though I wouldn’t have articulated it like this at the time, this was my first encounter with spiritual transformation. I simply couldn’t reconcile the hardened criminal I had in my mind with the loving dad who sat on the foot of my bed. Yet I knew my dad to be honest; I trusted him. For the first time I saw a converted person for the miracle that they are. Instinctively, I knew that this kind of transformation cannot happen unless a person is changed at their very core. Nothing changes the core of a person but the living God. I also knew it doesn’t happen overnight.
We often place a high premium on radical conversion stories while ignoring the long, unglamorous road of spiritual recovery. Growing up I had the tremendous privilege of seeing my parents grow in Christ. They weren’t perfect, but I saw them with their heads in their Bibles; I saw the way they welcomed strangers into our home and fed and clothed them and nursed them back to health if they were sick. I knew that my dad’s extensive travels were concentrated on spreading the gospel, strengthening believers, and repairing the divisions in the church. Though both of my parents had been imprisoned for their faith, this steadfast commitment was evident in the seemingly insignificant moments, from wrangling us for church on a Sunday morning to Mom’s insistence on the necessity of us sharing family meals at the table. These stray moments were anything but trivial, mundane, and quotidian; they were as sacred and precious as the kind of joy that can’t be extinguished by the dolorous precincts of a prison cell.
To Christ alone belongs the only kind of discipleship that is inexhaustible. The riches of his love will never fail us. They can and will transform a prison cell into a palace, a hardened criminal into a loving dad. By wearing Christ, my mom and dad communicated to me in word and deed the only kind of discipleship that has true permanence. They were following Paul’s blessed injunction: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). As captivating as Rich was, his thin charade paled in comparison.
Given Paul’s highly practical reading of discipleship, let’s consider the qualities that ought to characterize our public life as Christians. How might we repair the daunting generational rift and join together as parents and children in our common life together, even in the face of serious differences?
James K. A. Smith offers a powerful rejoinder to our short-sightedness, calling for Christians to recover “a kind of holy ambivalence about our relationship to the political, a sort of engaged but healthy distance rooted in our specifically eschatological hope, running counter to progressivist hubris, triumphalistic culture wars, and despairing cynicism.”10 With this quote, Smith has deftly outlined four political postures: (1) holy ambivalence, (2) progressivist hubris, (3) triumphalistic culture wars, and (4) despairing cynicism. Before we consider “holy ambivalence,” it’s worth exploring the remaining three, because they each constitute serious temptations for all of us.
Though we may be tempted to immediately associate it with the various radical approaches to freedom and human identity that run the gamut from sexual revisionism to the numerous transhumanist projects gaining traction among our cultural elites, progressivist hubris fits well with any philosophy that sees humanity as the measure of all things. In this sense it taps into that deeply American pursuit of prioritizing the journey over the destination, essentially arguing that we’re always moving forward, never looking back, and, on principle, never arriving at a permanent place. Seen in this light, plenty of so-called Christians embrace a version of this political philosophy. It crops up whenever we see our lives like our own and try to take hold of a version of Christianity that offers minimal interference with our preferences.
Triumphalistic culture warring also cuts across political divides, and it arises from a sense of moral superiority. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identify a corrosive mindset that’s informing the growing tribalism on university campuses and the wider culture—namely, the belief that life is a battle between good people and evil people.11 Here, we don’t want to be naive. History repeatedly teaches us that few things are as dangerous as an unassailable conviction of one’s moral superiority. Such a mindset can be a recipe for chaos since it removes all constraints on general principle. If we’re dealing with people we believe to be misguided or misinformed, we can continue to aim at persuasion. If we’re dealing with “evil” people, we can enter into an “ends justify the means” frame of mind. Recall Alan Jacob’s use of the vivid phrase from the anthropologist Megan Phelps-Roper: the person(s) occupying the “evil” side of our political divides is our “repugnant cultural other”—a designation that sounds appropriately sci-fi in its utterly alien connotations.12 Once again, a more revealing question for Christians is whether we can make the leap from “repugnant cultural other” to neighbor.
With the proliferation of headlines highlighting the appalling scale of moral degradation in our leading cultural institutions has come a fashionable emphasis on despairing cynicism. Indeed, the notion of strategic withdrawal from culture has birthed a veritable cottage industry in the world of publishing.13 Since it tends to focus on the spiritual decay of our culture, this posture is much more prevalent among religious-minded people, those who belong to high church traditions in particular. For all my reservations I’ll confess that in my darker moments I find this option compelling, and I remain somewhat sympathetic to it. There’s good reason, for instance, for Christians to take into careful consideration what it means to belong to Christ rather than the world, and consider how many of our well-meaning outreach efforts often lead to compromise and assimilation. All too often our efforts at reaching Christianity’s “cultured despisers” terminate in our own seduction. Given the current state of the North American church, we can’t afford to be naive about our susceptibility to temptation.
However, cynical withdrawal can and often does foster a spiritual elitism that’s a close cousin of the “life is a battle between good people and evil people” mindset. In this version we see ourselves as a blessed remnant who must flee the surrounding squalor to preserve our spiritual integrity. While it’s true that we are set apart and “in the world but not of it,” we must not allow our political posture to descend into a sense of moral superiority. Not one of us is exempt from the human condition, and God help us if we think we are. Times of strategic withdrawal have their legitimacy, but we cannot indulge in a political posture that fails to recognize our cultural and political opponents as neighbors.
Holy ambivalence is a marvelous term for capturing the needed political balance: To those who naively champion a progressive journey without a destination, Christians offer a reminder that what we desire is nothing less than a heavenly city, and that this is our destination (Hebrews 11:16). To those who fly the culture-war banner, Christians offer a stark warning against the dangers of overlooking our heavenly citizenship and confusing earthly kingdoms with the kingdom of God. To those who offer a counsel of despair and withdrawal, whether it’s cloaked in hopelessness masquerading as realism or spiritual elitism masquerading as piety, Christians offer a reminder that “church is not a soul-rescue depot that leaves us to muddle through the regrettable earthly burden of ‘politics’ in the meantime; the church is a body politic that invites us to imagine how politics could be otherwise.”14 No matter the news or current upheavals, Christians can confidently affirm the conviction that Christ’s consummation of history will usher in the restoration of all things—and recognize that it is the very height of realism.
In Acts 1 the disciples ask their risen Lord about his political agenda for their nation, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” (v. 6). David Gooding points out that the full scope of this question is contained in the unblushing prophecy of Joel 2:28-32, where we are told of the “terrible day of the Lord, when God would ‘restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem,’ visit the gentile nations with apocalyptic judgment, break their domination over Israel, and restore Jerusalem as the centre of the divine presence.”15 You might say that Christ responds with blessed ambivalence: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:7-8). But these words aren’t the full response:
And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:9-11)
Christ’s ascension offers a picture of our engagement with the world—a picture of holy ambivalence in action, encompassing both Christ’s immanence and transcendence. To those who do nothing but stare expectantly into the heavens, the angels reply, “This Jesus . . . will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Therefore, we don’t loiter; we wait. Our mission is to be Christ’s witnesses to the very ends of the earth, and we go about this business with the full knowledge that he is returning to “judge the living and the dead” and to “wipe away every tear.” Neither justice nor mercy will be forsaken. For this reason our political thinking is never a counsel of despair but one of fierce, stubborn, and realistic hope—hope borne of the conviction that our Lord has not abandoned his throne. But Christ’s ascension also protects us from the kind of zealous overcommitment to earthly causes that easily calcifies into idolatry. This is why the myriad failures of our leaders and institutions are sources of grief and lament. However, they ought not to leave us in despair. After all, if our final hope is in Christ and his coming kingdom, that hope remains secure, even in the face of surrounding calamities. Regarding our cultural engagement, political and otherwise, holy ambivalence means we avoid total immersion while remaining invested. This is part of what it means to be in the world but not of it. Given its bodily nature, Christ’s ascension affirms the rugged and earthy aspects of our mission.
We can and must get our hands dirty for the kingdom. But Christ has also transcended the earthly realm and has ascended his throne, and this grants us the eternal perspective (apocalyptic realism) on our earthly existence. This eternal perspective in turn grants us an indefatigable ability to both inhabit and transcend our circumstances, no matter how dire, because it is rooted in the reality of Christ’s kingship.