Imagine

Hearing John Lennon's "Imagine" on the TV last night challenged me again to consider why it is so appealing to think of a world where everyone just got along instead of turning to "religion" for an external motivation.  One could go various directions with this, but it reminded me again of the difficult balance between loving truth and loving being right.
Christian faith has to rest on a foundation of what is true. That's why history is so important to us, with Scripture constantly linking its metaphysical teaching to real places, persons and dates.  That fact alone distinguishes the Judeo-Christian tradition from all others. So, assuming that premise, a simple answer to imagining John Lennon's idyllic world is that it is not true. Of course most people do not accept that assumption, and in fact find it the most obnoxious aspect of Christianity.
There seems to be a couple of easy distractions from our pursuit of truth. First is the idea that truth should work. If the J-C life is true, then it should work out the best in practice. Christians should be happier, healthier, and more successful than others. And, despite glaring exceptions, that is generally true. But that also becomes an enticement to become more concerned with what makes life go better for me, i.e. pragmatism, or "prosperity gospel" than what is actually true. We are more concerned with the benefits of the Christian lifestyle than the truth, or the Living God it is based on. And in that way, the successful Christian congregation is no different than any other sect or tribe, seeking to enhance its own position to the neglect or even at the expense of others.
The second distraction from loving truth grows out of the first. Being part of a group that seems to us to have all the correct doctrine, with prosperous lives to back it up, can lead us to the arrogance of assuming we are right. This is quite different from the humility of loving truth. We enjoy the happiness of a disciplined Christian lifestyle in a mutually loving, supportive Christian community, along with the health and economic benefits it brings. And in that protected context, we can further fine-tune our truth claims, alienating us not only from a skeptical non-Christian world, but even from other professing followers of Jesus who are doing the same thing we are doing.
And there is the difficult balance. If our belief is true, then it should work out well, and we will be right in believing it. But, as Satan's challenge over Job, we will be close to finding more pleasure and pride in our success and ideology than in worshipping our Creator and Saviour. The church needs always to be on guard against this, to watch for signs of pragmatism or arrogance displacing our central focus on the Living God. Our "Amen" needs to be an affirmation of God's goodness rather than our own having it right. -philw