To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. "In him was life; and the ife was the light of men." All Christian doctrines -- those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement -- are explanations, consequences, but not the "cause" of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become "valid" and "consistent." But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or of that "proposition" about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. "For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us" (I John 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from "religious belief." Its starting point is not "belief" but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile. "For we know in part, and we prophesy in part...whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away." Only love never faileth (I Corinthians 13) And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the "content" of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crewtwood, NY, 1995), pp. 104-105.
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