Reverand Theodore W. Cooley, 1984
Prepared as an item for the Allen, Texas newspaper, never published. 1984
It has been several hundred years since the Imitation of Christ was first published. In those intervening years the search for the Christ-like life has taken diverging forms. Yet the book remains the most widely read devotional work in Western Christianity. However, the style of the life which is lived today in imitation of Christ is increasingly divergent. In Latin America we see TV news reports of both traditional monastic communities and liberation theology, both defended as a life in imitation of Christ. In Eastern Europe we have the 1000+ years of Mt. Athos, where the rules of the monks have not changed since the days of the Eastern Roman Empire, to non-establishment Baptist groups in Russia encouraging their own persecution by the deliberate violation of rules, and the Russian Orthodox and protestant bodies, including Baptist, slowly building new churches, opening old ones again for worship, and increasingly seminary enrollments, all while under a communist reign. Each of these believe themselves to be imitating Christ.
In the United States the forms of sincere behavior are perhaps the most divergent in the world. I know a minister who chained herself to the White House gate during the last stages of the Equal Rights Amendment push and others who condemn this legislation as the work of evil powers, both defending their actions as being in the imitation of Christ. I have been a co-worker of a Bible college student who was jailed in 1961 for a lunchroom counter set-in and the successor of a pastor who was for over 30 years both pastor of a Disciples congregation and chaplain of the local chapter of the KKK. Both acted in their understanding of the imitation of Christ.
Common to these examples is the acceptance of social norms as religious standards. Christ can be read as a revolutionary, a pharisaic rabbi, a liberator, a wise teacher, a challenger of the accepted, and as an enforcer of the social norms. None of these are true completely, and part of all of them have some validity. We commonly, and falsely, understand our imitation of Christ by our expectations within our particular social niche.
This social determination is especially true in Allen. We have so equated growth with progress and the social (read religious) will of God that those parts of the community not included in the climb of success, the older residents, the minorities, those that are intellectuals instead of technicians, are commonly considered outside of progress. Thus they live outside the life of the imitation of Christ as the metroplex is determining it. This is so far advanced in Allen that we are in danger of becoming an one-dimensional community in income, age, race, and rather babbitt-like mindset. It is as if the only requirement to imitate Christ is to perform a mental frontal lobotomy so that we might be as mindless as everyone else. The beautiful vitality of the Christian life throughout the world, the religious motivation and fulfillment which brings joy in life is being missed. The Imitation of Christ is still in the bookstores and in many libraries, both personal and in different congregations. Life of excitement and growth as God would have it take place is still an option for our lives. All we have to do is to ignore the social pressures of those around us and enter into the presence of Christ the Master of the perfection of life.