This is the conclusion to a book I'm working on with the title How Can I Be Christian. It is about as good a summation of my Christian faith that I can create.
Conclusion
(c) Thomas C. Sorenson, 2024
So how can I sum up my
Christian faith? This whole book is an effort to express my faith, but summing
that faith up is not an easy task. To me, faith is a very complex thing. It
starts with ontology, that is, an understanding of the nature of being. It includes
an understanding of the nature of human language and proceeds from there. Most
Christians, indeed, most people, assume an understanding of being and of
language unconsciously. They can’t articulate their understandings, but they
have them nonetheless. I believe that we must discuss and decide about them
openly, consciously. Here’s how I understand them.
Being is
multidimensional. There is physical, material being, or at least we assume that
there is and act as if there is.[1] We
take material being as real. Since the European Enlightenment, much of western
culture has assumed that this material reality is the only reality there is.
Western culture is wrong about that. There is another dimension to reality. It
is the dimension of the spiritual. Spiritual reality permeates material
reality. It is the depth dimension of reality. All human cultures, though not
all human beings, have recognized the reality of the spiritual. Even the
materialistic culture of western Europe has never completely lost knowledge of
the spiritual.
Human language is
incommensurate with the task of speaking about the spiritual. The spiritual
both inheres in everything that is and utterly transcends everything that is.
We humans can speak meaningfully about the spiritual only in the language of
symbol and the mythic. Most people take their words about the spiritual
literally, that is, factually; but the spiritual cannot be reduced to fact.
Factual truth is important in its own realm, but it is unavoidably superficial.
The language of symbol and myth connects us with the spiritual in a way mere
fact never can. I understand all statements about God and Jesus Christ as
symbol not as statements of fact.
I believe that
spiritual reality is a higher reality than material reality. It is ultimate
reality. It is the reality on which all other reality depends. That is what we
mean when was call God the Creator of all that is. Our call as humans is to
conform our lives to the ways of spiritual reality. None of us will ever do
that anywhere near perfectly. That doesn’t mean we are not called to do what we
can to live according to spiritual values not material ones.
My primary symbol for
the spiritual is the word God. God is Spirit. As Spirit, God both inheres in
everything that is and totally transcends everything that is. God is not a
person, but we can relate to God personally through the use of symbolic
language. Though God is not a person, we can relate to God as a person as long
as we don’t reduce God to humanlike personhood.
I believe that God has
God’s ways of being, has God’s own values, and that those ways and values are
totally different from the ways and values of the world. God has thoughts, but
they aren’t like our thoughts. God has a vision of the world transformed from
the way it is to the way it would be if it operated according to God’s ways and
values rather than its own corrupt ways and values. God’s ways and values are
so grounded in love that we can truthfully say that God is love. God’s ways are
the ways of nonviolence and radical, distributive justice for all of God’s
people. God calls all people to the work of creating a transformed world
through nonviolent action against the powers of the world and for the wellbeing
of all people. The first step in doing that is inner transformation. God calls
us to rid our minds and spirits of the worldly ways we have internalized so
that we can better conform to the ways of God.
I believe that all
profound truth is paradoxical. That God both inheres in all created being and
utterly transcends created being at the same time is a paradox. It is something
that isn’t possible, it’s just true. The Incarnation is also a paradox. It is
simply impossible that Jesus could be both fully human and fully divine at the
same time. It isn’t possible, it’s just true.
I believe in the
Trinitarian conception of God symbolically. We cannot say anything that is
directly, factually true about God. God is too transcendent for that. We can
speak of God in the language of symbol. That’s what the Trinity is, a symbol
for one way to understand God’s reality. The great virtue of the Trinity is
that, because it makes no rational sense at all, it preserves the ultimate
mystery of God. It is a paradox. It is impossible but true. Nothing can be
three and one at the same time, but God is. I believe that the trinitarian
conception of God gives us a mysterious but dynamic and active God.
I believe that Jesus
of Nazareth is God Incarnate. The Incarnation is another paradox. It is both
impossible and true. No mere human could possibly also be all of God, but I
confess that Jesus was. He was fully human and fully God at the same time. In
this sense my Christian faith is quite conventional. I accept both foundational
doctrines of traditional Christianity, Trinity and Incarnation, though I
understand them symbolically not literally.
I believe that in
Jesus as God Incarnate we humans see and can learn as much about God as our
finite minds are capable of learning. I believe that if you want to see God,
look at Jesus. As God Incarnate he was born, lived, and died as a human being;
and in everything he did God was fully present and doing it with and in him. In
Jesus we see God entering into every aspect of human life, even, or especially,
the difficult, painful parts of human life. In Jesus’ death we see the death of
God. Yet God is paradox. On the cross of Jesus God dies, but God remains the
infinite, immortal God at the same time. That, of course, is another paradox.
It’s impossible, but it’s true.
I believe that in
Jesus Christ we see how God relates to us humans, to human suffering, and human
sin. God does not scorn human suffering and death. God enters into them with
us. No matter what happens with us during our lives and even after our deaths, God
is with us and for us. Human sin no doubt angers God, but God does not punish
it either in this life or after this life. God is infinite, universal,
unconditional love; and divine love could never punish anyone because doing so
would make God’s love conditional and therefore far too human.
I accept Jesus Christ
as my Savior, but I do not believe that the Christ event (the birth, life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ) brought anything new into
being. It did not get God to forgive sin God had never forgiven before. It
makes no sense to me to say that it did. I see Jesus as Savior because he shows
us in the most direct and powerful way possible that we’ve always been saved
because God scorns none of human life. Rather, God enters into human life and
thereby sanctifies it. All of it.
I believe that after
Jesus’ death his followers had a powerful, life changing experience of Jesus’
continuing presence with them. We call that experience the Resurrection. It has
great symbolic meaning and power. It means that with God death is not the end.
It wasn’t the end for Jesus, and it isn’t the end for us. At least, it allows
us to trust that death is not the end for us. Jesus’ Resurrection is another
thing that isn’t possible, it’s just true.
I believe that Jesus
calls us, as God does, to a nonviolent revolution on earth to make real what
Jesus called the kingdom of God. In Jesus we learn that the values of the
kingdom of God are basically the values of the world turned completely upside
down. The kingdom of God is totally nonviolent. In it, people never resort to
violence for any reason. In the kingdom of God those the world calls first are
last and those the world calls last are first. In the kingdom of God the rich
are brought down to the level of the rest of us, and the poor are lifted up to
that level too. In the kingdom of God everyone has enough because no one has
too much. In the kingdom of God the spiritual life and values are more
important than material life and values. In the kingdom of God we humans relate
to each other in love rather than in the world’s ways of competition, one-upmanship,
oppression, and dominance.
I believe, as I
believe Jesus did, that transformation of the world begins with the
transformation of the self. The world will change when enough of its people
change. Change their ways from violence and domination to the ways of
nonviolence, justice, and peace. To attack the world for its faults without
having first discerned and dealt with your own faults is just the way to more
violence and domination, not the way to true peace.
I believe that
morality is grounded in God’s unconditional love not in codes of laws and
commandments. We can never reduce God’s love to ten commandments or even to the
six hundred thirteen laws of the Torah. Morality is situational, and that is
moral which facilitates wholeness of life for the people involved in the
situation. Morality is always nonviolent. It says “thou shalt not kill” and
means it. Always. In every situation. What is moral in one situation may be
immoral in some other situation. Morality is always judged under the rule of
love, not by whether or not an act conforms to some rigid code of conduct.
I believe that
Christianity is far more about how we are to live this life than it is about
how we are to get our souls to heaven in a next life. Jesus said almost nothing
about how we get our souls to heaven. I believe that if our souls do go to
heaven, we have nothing to do with it. We don’t save ourselves. Whether there
is any reality for us after death, and what that reality is, is entirely up to
God not to us.
I believe that
salvation is more about this life than it is about a next life. Jesus spent his
ministry calling people to be people of the kingdom of God in this life not to
be people in heaven in some afterlife. Salvation in this life is coming to know
God’s unconditional love. It is to rest our minds and our spirits in that love.
It is to live out of that love and to share it with as much of the world as we
can.
I understand faith as
trust not as the acceptance of unproven factual assertions. I know that
everything I believe about God may be wrong. The possibility of error is
unavoidable when we speak of that which transcends our ability to speak about
it. Yet in faith I trust that what I understand about God is not false, or at
least that not all of it is. I don’t know anything about God. I try to
understand God as best I can, then live in trust under that
understanding of ultimate reality.
I do not believe that
Christianity has the only truth or that it is the only way to a proper
relationship with God. Both Christianity and other faith traditions are true to
the extent that they connect people with ultimate reality, which a tradition
may or may not conceive of as God, and false to the extent that they connect
people to something else. It’s obvious, if we’ll just open our eyes and our
minds, that people all over the world find their connection with God in
Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Sikhism, Bahia, and a great many other faith
traditions. We Christians have no right to condemn them just because they don’t
find their connection with God the way we do. We should thank God that we
humans can find God in so many different ways.
I believe that the
Bible is a purely human product. It was written by men (sadly not by any women)
who were people of their own times and places. Their writings express their
understandings of God, which are not necessarily God’s understanding of God, nor
must they be our understanding of God. I see the Bible as an invitation into
dialogue with its ancient authors. There is much wisdom in the Bible, but there
is also much that is false, some of it appallingly false. One of the challenges
of faith is to discern which Bible passages express divine wisdom and which
express earthly error. The Christian’s standard for making that distinction is
Jesus, and therefore it is love.
The basics of my
Christian faith are then these: God is real. God is Spirit. God is love. Jesus
Christ is God Incarnate. God calls us to lives of love. God calls us to
transform the world into a one ruled by love, and God demands that we do it
nonviolently. I believe with Jesus that transformation of the world begins with
transformation of the self. Without individual transformation away from the
ways of the world and toward the ways of God, transformation of the world is
not possible. I believe that God’s grace is universal and unconditional. I
believe that we humans are called to behave properly not from fear of
punishment but in response to God’s love for us. So my bottom line is this: God
is real. We know God in Jesus. Love is the standard for everything.
I don’t live a life of
love better than anyone else, but I know that God has forgiven my failures and
everyone else’s before we even commit them. For that greatest of all of God’s
gifts, for God’s universal and unconditional grace, I say with all my heart:
Thanks be to God!
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