Can a non-scholar be a Christian?

I was, and greatly enjoyed being, a surgeon! Shortly after obtaining my higher degree in surgery I joined a Christian Mission to go to Ethiopia as a missionary surgeon in one of their hospitals. I was expected to and very willingly underwent an assessment of my beliefs as a Christian. Obviously and logically the mission had standards and desired a certain degree of theological unity among its members. Having satisfied them that I was okay and could be accepted as a member I went to Ethiopia, where I worked up to 80 hours a week as the only surgeon covering a population of more than a million, but I also had a vital relationship with the ‘spiritual’ side of mission life. Later on after the communist takeover was overturned I was in government hospitals on their Academic staff.

In one area that I worked in the early 2000’s the population was very largely Muslim. But there was a University with a student body of about 40,000. This student body was made up from candidates accepted from all over the country. A significant percentage of these students were ‘Protestant’ Christians. The Protestant Kale Hiwot church was small in the University town but was the central organizational base for the churches which were scattered over that region of the country which made up one of 13 regions in the whole country. The church eldership was basically made up of mature Christians who had some but not a great theological nor secular education. They were great people but the younger University students were much greater in number. An average attendance at the church which the University students attended would have been nearly a thousand. That was great but the young people kept referring to and using Paul’s phrase ‘we are not under law but under grace’ (Romans 6 v 14) to underpin the thought that, as they were no longer under law, they could act as they wanted and God would turn a blind eye. This sounds, and was, wrong. The kids were basically good kids but some of their actions were not acceptable by the elders! Well the problem was magnified because the majority of the University students, whether they were Protestant or Orthodox or Islamic, in the freedom of their situation and of modern thinking seemed to live on the same basis. The student population came from all over the country and lived in University housing without parental advice or control!

There were 500 recorded terminations among students by an American subsidised clinic in the last 6 months that I was there. There were a number of other places willing to perform abortions whose activity I have not included. Drugs were a problem. I remember an instance where I had to operate late at night on a senior member of our University staff who, when drinking and ‘drugging’ with a younger member of his own unit, was severely stabbed in his abdomen which caused a critical situation. Neither of them were members of the Protestant church to which I referred earlier but both claimed to be Orthodox Christians. So the problem of lack of morals was society wide!

The morals of our Western countries aren’t any better! It is not a theological issue in most people’s eyes. There is a broad sense of personal rights to freedom and consequently a loss of moral standards.

So how does that take me back to the Pauline teaching that ‘we are not under law but under grace’? In the context of his whole book of Romans, where he writes this phrase, Paul has said in the early part that all mankind is guilty under the law as sinners alienated to God. BUT the Grace of God in Jesus and the Easter Event gives us the opportunity to be forgiven! And that in a sense is the core of the Christian message, now God has given us the opportunity to be forgiven by His Grace and not be judged by our law breaking. There is, however, more to the law than the law relating to Justice.

In the Jewish religion the law had different aspects – sacrificial, dietary, health and moral for example. When we think about it, we also think of the law in different ways. Jesus said that He had not come to destroy the law. Most certainly he didn’t come to destroy the moral law. We have a good summary of God’s moral requirements in the ten commandments! (Exodus ch 20). Christianity is not legalism in that we have to obey certain rules to earn our way in God’s acceptance, but it is certainly a call to a high understanding of what God has laid down as moral. I find that so releasing. Most see the commandments as negative and they do have a prohibitive aspect but equally they are there to be a guide and encouragement to a wonderfully rich and peaceful life.