The 'Imitation of Christ' in Christian Tradition: Its Missing Charismatic Emphasis

Abstract

Popular American culture, with its increasing focus on the spiritual, has generated a minor fad among teenagers: a WWJD? (“What Would Jesus Do?”) bracelet, which, while bouncing on the wrists of video game players and entangling the TV remote, clicking in gangsta rappers on MTV, seeks to draw its wearers toward an “imitation of Christ.” The WWJD bracelet expresses this more or less continuous tradition throughout church history to replicate the life of Christ, the tradition having deep but somewhat selectively attended roots in the New Testament itself. The devotional classics ranging from St Thomas a Kempis’s Imitatio Christi to Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps easily spring to mind as examples. But this notion of “following Jesus,” “discipleship” or “spirituality” calls up a historically conditioned set of restrictions on how far that “imitation” may be applied. Traditionally, aside from minor movements in the radical reformation or from certain restorationist groups, we understand that a replication of Jesus’ life is properly restricted to piety and ethics.