First off, I am obviously a Christian. I believe everything in the Apostle's Creed and that is the rock basis of my faith. I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. Without a real, present God, none of this can happen.
I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord. I do believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Christ, I believe He was the Son of God and I recognize Him as the guiding force in my life. Now, whether I listen to that force all the time or not is irrelevant to this conversation. I'm just trying like everyone else. But I believe that He is something much more than a dead leader.
Now things that aren't totally necessary to my faith, but I still believe: that He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. If one day that turns out to be something we've misunderstood, it won't rock my core.
This next bit, however, is quite important. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, He rose again. He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father, from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I remember reading Mere Christianity and CS Lewis saying something like the early Christians were convinced by one fact: the Resurrection. My faith hangs on that too. If Jesus of Nazareth died by crucifixion and stayed dead, then I might as well leave him on my cross because the world was not changed. But if He arose and defeated death and changed the order of the universe and freed me from captivity to sin and death, then I need to live out some thanks for that. The distant God the Father didn't save me until Jesus did.
And finally, I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Put a parenthetical note around the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. I'm not sure it means what I always thought it meant and I'm not sure how much the gospels preach it but I'll build up that house over time. I believe in the church universal with all my being and I want to see her on this earth as she was meant to be. The Holy Spirit is the practical result of what happened when Christ came.
So that's the basics. From that, I build a little hesitantly. I am a huge fan of prevenient grace, God through the Holy Spirit working in you even before you know it. I also believe that what Christ did enables us to be delivered from sin and death by justifying grace and I believe that through the Holy Spirit again, He gives us sanctifying grace to make us more holy, to make us better. I mean, what can I say? I'm a Wesleyan sucker. But I will admit that this is all dogma that I like. I like the 'Wesley quadrilateral' too, where you make decisions based on scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Let me unpack that a little for you, as my professors are fond of saying.
Here's where I get a little annoying to other Christians, I think. I'm probably a good bit too liberal but, you know, I was this way even before I went away to college. I think I kinda hid this while I worked at camp because there's no reason to confuse kids and there's no reason to kill a good message. But this is what I think. This is how I read my bible and what other people have to say about it and this is why I get a little annoyed at people sometimes. I believe that the Bible was written by men and men with a purpose in mind. I love what my Hebrew Bible professor said about the Old Testament: It's the story of a people trying their best to worship a holy God. It was complied and edited by men who legitimately thought they were doing good by combining multiple sources and traditions together to help preserve their culture and the worship of their national God who I think is the God who created the universe. But that doesn't mean that it was written with me in mind, this far away. Even Paul's letters weren't written with me in mind. I think it's wonderful how the Holy Spirit can take things that weren't intended for me and show me something that I need to see in order to worship God with my words and my life. But that doesn't mean that I agree with the story of Joshua, which is neither historically accurate nor faithfully comforting. Maybe I'm too much of a pacifist, but I think that do not murder means don't kill, regardless of who the person you're killing is. I'm guilty right now of using the commandments in Exodus without a complete understanding of their placement in the Bible due to the historical and cultural influences at the time, so I'm as bad as the next person, but I see that I'm that bad and I see that, even from a faith perspective, you can't just sit down and say, 'What does this mean for me?' Read the Bible allegorically all you want and maybe that's the meaning that you're supposed to get out of it, but don't dream for a second that it's all about you.
I'm big on tradition, too, because it's comforting, but I'm also big on reasoning. There's an agnostic in my learning community who said that he reads Job as the powers that be, whatever they are, sending a message to man, saying, 'How dare you presume to know what I think, what I mean and what I want? Stop with your pathetic little religions. You can't even comprehend who I am.' He takes that a step farther to express his disbelief that any race can claim to have any kind of special relationship with that power that is. This makes reasonable sense to me. If I didn't have proof in the form of Christ that God cares, I might be inclined to believe what he says. I'm big on thinking for yourself, for not taking any doctrine that's shoved at you without comparing it to what makes sense and what's in the Bible, taking into account everything the Bible's got in it. I'm not saying there's layers and layers of interpretive meaning in the Bible, though I do know that you can read something new in it every time you read a passage, something that didn't make sense to you before that's revealed by the Holy Spirit. You just gotta think. God gave you a brain and free will for a reason. Now that reason might be different from what I think it is, but there's always a decent reason with my God.
And then, just to roundly make people mad, I hate altar calls. I'll come up and pray, but I am not going to tell you that every person who ever walked up in front of a congregation understands what they're getting into. There's an ocean to Christianity, to the following of the Christ, that cannot be summed up in 20 seconds praying at an altar. I hate the idea that it's all just about our 'personal relationship with Jesus Christ.' I think it's important, don't get me wrong, but there's so much more to be done for the Christian community and the community at large that gets left out when we're just good out of our personal relationship. We were made for community (arbitrary statement with proof following sometime). So I hate it when religious leaders pray out loud and give someone a single prayer to pray that's going to make everything better because that's not all that it's about. No, I realize that there's a moment, that there was a moment, when I realized that I needed help from God and that God had already made plans for this and carried them out almost 2,000 years ago. But that doesn't coincide with the time that I answered an altar call and I don't think it has to. So I hate the word 'saved.' I'm not as much of a fan of the emphasis on a personal relationship as I used to be. And I am so against forgetting how big God is and how much we don't know about Him yet and how much we presume that we understand, because at the end of the day we're all trying to control things too big for us.
So that's it. Explanation over. I mean, there are logical consequences and there are things that the jury's still out on, but it's a springboard to launch off of, you know. It doesn't mean that I hate Baptists and it doesn't mean that I doubt the validity of your faith if you recognize that your journey started at an altar. We're all different and we've all got different ways of relating to the Creator. I'm not saying that there's not a universal truth, I'm saying that it's not that easy. It's not all mind and it's not all heart. And I'm not judging (as much as you think I am) and I'm not saying I've got it all figured out. But you can't say to me that 'Well, I can't give you a reason why, it's just what my faith tells me.' That is a sidestepping of the real point. Your faith is not your answer without thought. I agree, sometimes there are things that just don't make sense, that are wonderfully nonsensical, like the God of the universe that loves even me. But not every cold, hard fact and implication of your faith can be explained away with warm fuzzies. And that's where I stand.
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