There is a very significant and hopeful development afoot in contemporary Christianity. It is a movement away from religion as belief and toward religion as discipleship, away from faith as giving intellectual consent to creedal propositions and toward Christianity as a way of life. This movement is long overdue. It is an effort to recapture the best things about early Christianity, from the time when following Jesus was called the Way. It is an effort to move forward by rediscovering the positive aspects of ancient Christianity before it was radically changed, and radically corrupted, by the Constantinian compromise with empire. It is an effort to return to the days before complex, formal creeds became the test of a Christian. It is a movement back to discipleship rather than orthodox belief as the mark of a follower of Jesus. All of this is very positive.
For far too long the Christian tradition has taught that what God wants from us, and what is required for salvation, is right belief about Jesus Christ so that we can go to heaven when we die. The importance of following Jesus often (not always, but often) got lost. To quote Richard Stearns from his book The Hole In Our Gospel, a book that is itself part of the movement from faith as belief to faith as discipleship, albeit still from quite a conservative evangelical perspective, “In our evangelistic efforts to make the good news accessible and simple to understand, we seem to have boiled it down to a kind of ‘fire insurance’ that one can buy. Then, once the policy is in effect, the sinner can go back to whatever life he (sic) was living….As long as the policy is in the drawer, the other things don’t matter much. We’ve got our ‘ticket’ to the next life.” [1] Mixed metaphors aside, Stearns has a valid point. Much of Christianity has been reduced to an expression of a certain belief about Jesus for the purpose not of transforming the world but merely of getting ourselves to heaven.
As I said, the broad movement in Christianity today toward the faith as a way of life, as a way of discipleship, is a very good thing. Anyone not living under a rock knows how badly the world needs transformation today, and Christians sitting in their pews thinking orthodox thoughts are not going to transform the world. Christians, along with others who share the essential Christian values of justice and nonviolence, who go out and embody the prayer we say every week that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven, just might. I recently preached a sermon on this subject with the title “Follow Me.” You can find it in the Sermon Archive section of monroeucc.org. It is based on what Jesus says to the first disciples that he calls, Simon, Andrew, James, and John. As he walks along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee he calls to these fisherman “Follow me.” Not “Believe in me.” Mark 1:16-20. I really do believe that there is a new reformation afoot in Christianity in the direction of rediscovering discipleship as the way of the Christian, and that is a very good thing.
That being said, I need to insert a caveat into this discussion. In The Music Man Harold Hill always thinks there’s a band. I always think there’s a caveat. The difference is, I’m right. I always think that thinking needs to be nuanced, that it is far too easy for us to fall into enthusiasms that overstate one aspect of an issue and forget an essential counterpoint that must not be forgotten. In the case we’re discussing here the enthusiasm is for the rediscovery of Christianity as discipleship, as action, as a way of living, for action being more important than mere thought. The caveat, the essential counterpoint that must not be forgotten, is the what we think isn’t irrelevant. In fact, how we think matters. It matters a lot.
How we think matters even in the context of a shift from an overemphasis on faith as belief to a healthier emphasis on faith as discipleship because how we think about God and about Jesus will shape how we see discipleship. As Elizabeth Johnson repeatedly says in her classic work She Who Is, “the God symbol functions.” How we think about God has consequences. Different images of God will produce different kinds of discipleship. Different images of Jesus will produce different kinds of Christian discipleship. Perhaps this example will illustrate the point. The Gospel of John is very different from the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In John Jesus’ primary message is that what God wants from us is belief that Jesus is who in the Gospel of John he says he is. In John, when Jesus says from the cross “It is finished,” he means that his work of convincing the Disciples to believe that he came from God and is returning to God has been accomplished. If our image of Jesus is only that he is the Word of God Incarnate and that what he and God want of us is to believe that that is so, and if our image of God is that God will save people who believe that that is so and damn those who do not, then discipleship really does mean doing everything we can to save souls by converting as many people as possible to the belief that Jesus is the Word of God Incarnate. Given that view of Jesus and of God, converting people is precisely the kind of following, the kind of discipleship, that God demands from us.
If, on the other hand, we focus more on the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels we come up with a quite different kind of discipleship. Yes, at the end of the Gospel of Matthew the risen Christ tells the Disciples to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Yet it is still true that in the synoptic Gospels, for all of the significant differences between them, Jesus mostly preaches the Kingdom of God not himself. He teaches the divine values of the Kingdom of God, values of compassion, justice, inclusion, and peace. If we believe that Matthew’s “insofar as you have done it to the least of these you have done it to me” (Matthew 25:40) is more important than John’s “those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are already condemned because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God,” (John 3:18), then our discipleship looks like caring for “the least of these,” not like simply trying to convert them to belief in certain statements about Jesus. The God symbol functions. How we think matters.
Here’s another example. For the last nine hundred years or so (since the publication of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo), most western Christians have thought of God and of Jesus Christ in terms of the classical theory of atonement that says that God the Son became human in Jesus for the purpose of dying as an innocent sacrifice as the price God demanded before God would forgive human sin. In western Christianity the classical theory of atonement virtually swallowed the entire faith whole and became the equivalent of Christianity itself. To be Christian meant, and to many Christians, especially in the United States, still means to believe in the classical theory of atonement. The God of the classical theory of atonement is an angry, judgmental, murderous God who engages in what feminist theologians have taught us to see as cosmic child abuse. (For a more thorough critique of the classical theory of atonement see Chapter 8, “Beyond the Classical Theory of Atonement” in by book Liberating Christianity.) With this angry, judgmental, violent God a great many western Christians have been angry, judgmental, violent people. How we have thought about God has conditioned how we have behaved as humans. When we get rid of the classical theory of atonement and replace it with a true theology of the cross that stresses not God’s anger and violence but God’s love and unshakable solidarity with all of humanity in everything that happens we can become more compassionate people, people who seek not to convert everyone to our way of thinking (often at the point of a spear or the barrel of a gun) but who stand in solidarity with those in need, with those who suffer, the way God stands in solidarity with us in our need and in our suffering. (For a more complete discussion of theology of the cross see Chapter 9, “The Meaning of the Cross, The Demonstration of God’s Solidarity in Liberating Christianity.) The God symbol functions. How we think matters.
So, to use an apt cliché, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The current movement away from Christianity as belief understood as giving intellectual consent to certain theological propositions and toward Christianity as discipleship, as following Jesus, is a very positive development. It is a necessary corrective to a Christianity that had come to be far too much about what we believe in our heads and far too little about how we live in the world. As we undertake that constructive transition let us remember, however, that how we think matters. We are called to be disciples. Jesus says to us as he said to the first disciples so long ago, follow me, not believe in me. Yet let us not lose sight of the undeniable truth that what kind of disciples we are going to be depends largely on how we think, especially how we think about God and about Jesus Christ. How we act in the world matters. So does how we think.
[1] Stearns, Richard, The Hole in Our Gospel, The Answer That Changed My Life and Might Just Change the World, Thomas Nelson, 2009, p. 17.
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