Two of the most enduring and popular books read by young people (mostly boys) are Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and White Fang.  They are pendant tales of transformation, each with a dog as the central character.  In The Call of the Wild, Buck, stolen from a loving home on the idyllic California coast, experiences cruel and not-so-cruel masters and goes from being a house-dog, to  sled-dog, to wild-dog. White Fang is a photographic negative of the Buck story.   White Fang is born in the frozen north, the pup of a sled dog and a wolf.  He goes from being a wild-dog, to a sled-dog, to a family pet on the California coast.

Both are stories of transformation, about the competing impulses of domestication and natural freedom.  Perhaps the reason that the books continue to be popular with boys is that when you are 12 or 13 the pressure to domesticate, and the “call of the wild” are equally acute.

Both books end happily.  London doesn’t make a value judgment about which transformation is better – the transformation that leads to domestication, or the transformation that leads to freedom.  Which would we choose?

Being saved is a transformation, a literal “metamorphosis:”

 If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation – old things have passed away, Behold! All things have become new.  II Corinthians 5.17

 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…Romans 12.2

So, when we become Christians, which do we become – Buck, or White Fang?

Do we become domesticated, better suited to polite society, or are we reconnected to a true, original identity?

The easy answer is that we become White Fang.  Christian apologists since Athenagoras and Justin Martyr have made the argument that Christians are good to have around because they behave better than pagans.  Certainly the New Testament insists that our behavior remains “excellent among the gentiles”                   (I Peter 2.12), and that we lead lives of “quietness” and “tranquility” (I Timothy 2.2).  But is it not also true that Jesus said “I came not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10.24)?  Were not Paul and Silas described as “men who have turned the whole world upside down” (Acts 17.6)?  Is it true that the real advantage of Christianity is that it makes a person fit in well with society?

Is that all we are, just a civilizing influence?

I believe the transformation that happens when we are saved is closer to Buck than to White Fang.  At the end of The Call of the Wild, Buck isn’t a vicious, ravenous beast.  He is just back where he belongs, back where God created him to be.

Isn’t that it?  Don’t many of us think of Christianity as accepting a lot of external rules and “thou shalt nots” instead of returning to who we really are, to who God always intended for us to be – His own, at one with him in the place he created just for us.

That “new creation” we experience “in Christ” doesn’t chain us in the dog house – it frees us to be one with God.