Brass Tacks

In the earliest days of this blog, I explained how hesitant I am to enter into these debates, (see http://tyrannysucks.blogspot.com/2005/07/ive-made-decision.html) because I know that my theological ideas - and particularly the reasons for them - are extremely challenging for a lot of people. I am very, very concerned with the possibility that I might become a stumbling block for someone else's faith, and that's the absolute last thing that I want to happen. In spite of this concern, however, I am not ashamed of my understanding of God even though (as has been demonstrated over the past couple of days) some will be extremely uncomfortable with that understanding.

In light of my comments on this blog, one of y'all has asked me to explain why I am a Christian. There seems to be an assumption implicit in her question: it makes sense (to her) for someone to be a Christian as long as they subscribe to the traditional set of beliefs and ideas about how the Bible should be read and understood, but it doesn't make sense (to her) for someone to consider themselves a Christian if they don't necessarily share those traditional beliefs and ideas. I'll try to address her question in as thorough a manner as possible. While I would normally skirt around some of the issues and ideas that are thus raised, I think this requires me to meet them head-on in order to explain why I am not the same flavor of Christian that many of you are familiar with.

I was given a traditional Church of Christ upbringing, raised to believe that the Bible had been handed down to us with every word just as if God had spoken it himself. It was supposed to be a coherent whole, factually and theologically consistent, complete and unimprovable in any way. It was unacceptable to think of the Bible as having any inconsistency, and any perceived internal conflicts were the result of our limited understanding, rather than differences of opinion among the Bible's authors. Additionally, I was taught that what you believed was a matter of eternal consequence. You could live a near-faultless life, sincerely dedicated to the pursuit and worship of God, but if you had an incorrect understanding of certain points of theology you were in serious danger of going to Hell. For example, if you held all the correct beliefs about the reasons for being baptized, but were sprinkled instead of immersed, the baptism might well not have been effective and you would be condemned. On the other hand, if you were fully immersed with the intention of dedicating the rest of your life to Christ, but didn't have the proper beliefs about God or the correct understandings about the reasons for baptism, you might well be condemned. There was right and there was wrong, and even while God was proclaimed to be good, gracious, loving, and merciful, there were no real in-betweens. When I was young, I never thought to challenge these ideas - they were just the Truth.

My transformation started in middle school. By sixth grade, I believed everything I was supposed to believe, and I wanted to be a Christian and avoid going to Hell, so I was baptized. I thought that even though nothing of my thoughts or opinions had changed between the moment before I went under the water and the moment afterwards, I had been doomed to Hell before and was unquestionably saved afterwards. As Peter said in I Peter 3, it is the water of baptism, made effective though the resurrection of Jesus, that saves us, right? Over the next couple of years, I continued to hold all the right beliefs - and to proclaim them pretty loudly, in certain contexts - while being a hateful little cretin to everyone around me.

For various reasons, in about eighth grade (mostly because I was a teenager - y'all know how it is) I started questioning the point of being a Christian. It just seemed so arbitrary that our purpose in life was to develop a certain set of beliefs and to try to get other people to share those beliefs. My thinking on this idea led me to re-read much of the Bible, critically, and with as fresh a set of eyes as I could muster. As I was studying through my high school years, I found myself struck in a completely unexpected way. I had been raised in church learning lists and hearing stories about events in the lives of Biblical characters, such as the miracle stories and parables. But as I read through the Gospels and the Prophets, I was profoundly impacted by the ethical messages about how God's people were supposed to relate to each other with respect and selflessness. I was also amazed at how Jesus was so willing to disregard "the rules" in favor of a new paradigm whose ultimate concern was how to treat others lovingly - and in adherence to that paradigm he broke the Sabbath, ignored purity rituals, defied social conventions, and openly challenged those who tried to moderate his behavior. I was inspired by his description of the Kingdom of God, in which no one would be looked down upon for being poor, where all - and especially the outcasts - were made worthy of joining in the King's celebration, and where God's radical, all-consuming love offered everyone hope for salvation. And above all, I was moved by Jesus's demonstrated compassion for people. His tenderness with the woman caught in adultery, his tears over the death of Lazarus, his willingness to touch lepers, make time for children, and dine with whores and tax collectors. In seeing Jesus afresh, I grew to love him in a way that wasn't ever possible before.

With that love and appreciation as the new foundation for my Christianity, I went off to Abilene Christian University, where I majored in Bible and Political Science. While studying in the Bible department, I was first confronted with the idea of scholarly Biblical criticism. I learned that biblical books were not always written by those to whom they are attributed. I began to understand how a biblical author's particular and peculiar worldview significantly impacts the way he understands and explains God through his writing. I realized that you can see within the biblical texts the evolution of almost every theological idea - that even within the Judeo-Christian tradition we have been in a constant process of adapting our ideas about God to mesh with our knowledge of the world and our philosophical understandings. I recognized the presence of apparent differences of opinion among a number of early Christian authors and thinkers. (Check out The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament, by Bart Ehrman) I learned how some of those disagreements shaped the canonization of both the Old and New Testaments (read The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, by Bruce Metzger), read some of the books that were not included in the canon (read Lost Scriptures: Books That did not Make it into the New Testament, by Bart Ehrman), and began to ponder the possibility that the men responsible for writing, assembling, translating, and interpreting the Bible were not so very different from myself and my classmates. And as I thought about that, I came to the opinion that we are far more than just recipients of a static theological knowledge; we are active participants in the continuing revelation of God to humanity.

Now, naturally, a lot of these ideas were challenging. After all, if most (or all) of the Bible's authors sometimes lacked a firm grasp on how God should be understood, how would we ever know when they were right and when they were wrong? How can you be expected to live a life pleasing to God if you can't even be certain what God asks of us? This thought was accompanied by one much more daunting - if we can't be certain that the Bible's authors always had a complete knowledge of God, how can we claim that our religion is any more correct or authoritative than any other religion? Without question, other religions make truth claims for their beliefs and they argue for the authority of their own scriptures. How can we accept the truth claims of Christianity, yet reject those of other religions?

At this time, I was deeply engaged in the study of other world religions and I found myself amazed to see in them (behind the metaphysical differences) an elemental similarity: an ideal of selflessness. You see it to varying extents and phrased in different language within the texts of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many pagan faiths. So, about the middle of my collegiate career, I began to seriously consider that God has actually been communicating the same central message to all peoples, all over the world, and that the differences that we see among religions is not the result of different sources of inspiration, but rather the telling indication of humanity's limited ability to fully comprehend and communicate God's message. Human error has resulted in a vast departure from the single divine ideal that is summed up best in Jesus's own formulation of the Greatest Commands: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength... Love your neighbor as yourself." In all of this, I was continually impressed that no other religious thinker - including Paul - seemed to grasp this all-important simplicity as thoroughly as did Jesus himself. Because I continued to believe that Jesus was obviously God's perfect messenger to humanity, and because I was certain that his sacrificial death was an absolute requirement for any of us to be made pure in the sight of God, I had no problem whatsoever considering myself a Christian even while acknowledging a certian basic level of Truth could be found in other religious traditions.

Grad school presented an entirely new set of ideas to grapple with, because at Vanderbilt we were forced to re-think all of our assumptions about the truth claims traditionally made in the Bible, particularly those about who Jesus was as a historical figure. (If you have time, read all three volumes of A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, by John Meier, as well as N.T. Wright's fantastic series on Christian Origins and the Question of God - if you don't have much time, I recommend Wright's The Original Jesus) We studied the way in which the early church developed its ideas about Jesus and looked carefully at the influences that helped to shape those ideas. We learned that many of the ideas we had assumed were exclusive to the Christian tradition - virgin birth, claimed messiahship, claimed divinity, resurrection - all had parallels in other, earlier settings (for a very challenging look at this, read Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, by John Dominic Crossan), and might well have been attributed to Jesus after his life, more as a symbolic way to recognize the unprecedented role he played in the world than as a literal historical account of events surrounding his life. There continues to be constant debate about who Jesus really was (for a good snapshot of this debate, I recommend The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, co-authored by Wright and Marcus Borg) upshot of it all is that most (though far from all) contemporary Jesus scholars discount some of the more fantastic claims that the gospels make about Jesus's life, focusing instead on the radical teachings that he brought about the Kingdom of God and how each of us could play a role in it.

Having at that point spent years contemplating the idea that Jesus's primary importance was as God's ultimate - but not exclusive - revelation to humanity, and that what Jesus taught us about how to understand God was far more important than questions about whether he was virgin-born or bodily resurrected (read Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith), my conviction about the importance of living as a Christian was not shaken in the slightest by these studies. But I watched, heartbroken, as several of my classmates - including a previously-unwavering Church of Christ graduate of David Lipscomb University - abandoned their faith entirely. I was very, very disappointed to find out that this is not at all uncommon among seminary students (whom you would assume to be among the strongest of the faithful) when they are confronted with some of these challenging ideas, and it reinforced my commitment to avoid being the cause of someone else's stumbling. I do not - and cannot - demand that other people share my faith to the detriment of their own. But at the same time, I wish they could understand the blessing of my own faith, and I will steadfastly make the effort to open their minds to my way of thinking. Because I have tremendous comfort in accepting that God doesn't require an infallible scripture to remain Lord of all, that Jesus didn't have to work miracles to be God's chosen Son who reveals God's unlimited love for humanity, and that we are called to live in love for God and for our fellow humans, thereby to be adopted as God's children and participants in the Kingdom that Jesus announced. [Note: I want to be absolutely clear, as I have been in earlier posts, that I am not denying anything about Christianity's traditional claims about Jesus's life. I do accept that the traditional truth claims could be historically accurate. My fundamental point is that I cannot believe that our salvation hinges on our understanding of history. In other words, I cannot believe that a God of love and justice will consign people to eternal damnation simply because they hold the wrong opinion about events that happened two millenia ago. There will, without question, be those who will disagree with me on that point. I respect your disagreement and I am open to hearing what you have to say on the matter, but I can think of nothing that will persuade me otherwise.]

So as for the reader's primary question about why I am a Christian, I respond by saying "How could I not be?" As I stated in one of the recent entries, I believe that Jesus brought the Kingdom of God into the world through his presence, words, and actions. Jesus was unique in his teachings and in his status as the chosen Son of God. When I read Jesus's teachings, I hear God speaking, and when I read stories about how he interacted with others, I see God in action within our world. I don't have to think of Jesus as having done better miracles than other religious figures or making extraordinary claims about who he was in order to affirm that his message was God's message. The path to which he called us is God's will for how we should pursue our lives. Because I recognize these things, I have no choice but to be a Christian.