I have the manuscripts of three books I've written. They haven't been even self-published yet. I intend to put them online with amazon.com through Kindle Direct Publishing. Here's the Introduction to one of them. Its title is How Can I Be a Christian? A Personal Confession of Faith.
Introduction
(c) Thomas C. Sorenson 2024. All rights reserved.
I’m a Christian. I’m even an ordained minister of the gospel
of Jesus Christ. When I was serving churches as pastor, I called myself a
professional Christian. I suppose I’ve considered myself a Christian, or at
least more of a Christian than anything else, my whole life long. The faith
became more important to me during the 1975-76 academic year, when I was doing
PhD dissertation research in Moscow, Russia. That year my wife Francie (now of
blessed memory) and I attended the Anglo-American Church associated with the
British and American embassies in Moscow. Around fifteen years later I stumbled
across Paul Tillich’s little book Dynamics of Faith.[1]
It introduced me to philosophically and theologically solid non-literal
Christianity. In 1997 I entered a Christian (Roman Catholic, actually) seminary,
Seattle University’s late, lamented School of Theology and Ministry. I received
my MDiv degree in December, 2000. I was ordained in 2002. I served Christian
churches until my retirement at the end of 2017. I have preached, taught, and
written on Christianity for over twenty years. I am indeed a Christian.
Recently, however, I’ve been wondering why I or anyone would
be a Christian. After all, Christianity’s foundational story is absurd, and its
history is filled with hatreds, spiritual imperialism, violence, and other
sinful vices more, it seems, than with spiritual truth and depth. Christians
have started wars and killed other people, including other Christians, in some
of history’s most destructive conflicts. In the United States and much of the
rest of the world many people both outside the churches and inside them see
Christianity as demanding an exclusivism that says all non-Christians are
damned to an eternity of horrific torment in hell just because they weren’t
Christians during their lives on earth. They say Christianity requires and
justifies condemning all LGBTQ+ people as sinners and treating women as less
than men. Christianity today seems to demand an intellectually and spiritually
untenable biblical literalism, the denial of the truths of contemporary
science, and a dismissal of the value of the earth because our concern is
supposed to be heaven not the earth. Popular Christianity leads people to
ignore issues of social, political, and economic justice for the same reason. In
the US today, Christianity is becoming more and more associated with a bigoted,
hate-filled Christian nationalism and white supremacy that all people of good
conscience and good will must condemn as radically evil.
My intent when I began drafting this piece was to consider
all, or at least most, of the things that I believe raise the question of why
anyone would be a Christian. I planned then to offer my confession of what it
is about my faith that makes it possible for me to be a Christian. My Christian
faith is indeed a foundational part of my life, despite all of the apparent
reasons to reject Christianity altogether.
Then one evening I thought to myself: You’re old (77 as I
write these words in late 2023). What do you want to do with the rest of your
life? The answer that immediately came to me was: Write a magnum opus. I understood
magnum opus to mean some grand work that would develop every aspect of my faith
and explore the meaning of every aspect of my faith journey. This book is not
that magnum opus. I doubt that I will ever write such a magnum opus. This work
does strike me, however, as a sort of mini-magnum opus, if “mini-magnum” makes
any sense, which I doubt that it does. Everything I say here is not only
something that I believe, it is something that is vitally important to me. I
think all of it matters a great deal in today’s world. I think the world
desperately needs to hear what I have to say. I don’t delude myself that I can
save the world. I am, after all, a mere mortal like every other woman and man
who has ever lived. I am definitely not the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[2]
Nor do I delude myself that this piece will find more than a handful of readers
if it finds even that many. Nonetheless, I feel called to say what I say here,
so I’m going to say it.
And let’s face it. Christianity is absurd. To our rational
minds not only doesn’t Christianity make sense, it insists on the truth of
things that are simply impossible or that are impossible to believe. It
confesses supposed truths that no rational person could possibly accept as
true. We might well hear a skeptic who knows a fair amount about our faith hold
forth on the faith’s absurdity. I am not that skeptic, but I know that we are
called to be “ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an
accounting for the hope that is in you.” 1 Peter 3:15. To defend any belief
system you must understand the attacks those who do not believe it make against
it. In this work I will first discuss some of the quite reasonable attacks
people make against Christianity. In Chapter One of this book I will consider
at least briefly some of the things that really should make being a Christian
impossible for any intelligent person. I hope that my explanation of why I am
nonetheless a Christian that takes up the rest of the book will be an adequate
response to those criticisms of the faith. Yet whether they are or not, I’ll
still be a Christian. Being Christian is simply part of who I am, and I have no
intention of abandoning it despite all the reasons someone could raise for why
I should.
This book is to a considerable extent my confession of my own
Christian faith. It contains several references to my own spiritual and
pastoral experiences as illustrative of some point it is attempting to make. It
is the work of a pastor who has studied theology and practiced ministry, not
the work of an academic theologian. I intend it to be meaningful most of all to
myself. I hope that it is also meaningful to intelligent, informed laypeople
both inside the church and outside it who want to know more about what
contemporary Christianity can be and how different Christianity can be from
what most people think it is.
In the material that follows, I discuss the Bible and most
particularly how the four canonical gospels present Jesus Christ. Those
discussions are so brief as perhaps to be rather useless to anyone but me. I
have selected things out of the canonical gospels that are particularly
important to me. Some of those things are important because they form the
foundation of my faith. Other things are important to me because I find it to
be so important to critique them and expel them from my faith. If I could, I
would expel them from Christianity altogether. Yet I’ve known for a long time
that each of us Christians has our own “bible within the Bible.” We all select
parts of the Bible that we find meaningful. The ones I have selected here as
being meaningful to me are unlikely to be identical to the ones you would
choose if asked to do so. That’s OK. Like the subtitle of this book says, this
is a presentation of my personal confession of faith. I hope that you will find
it at least interesting if not meaningful for your own faith and in your own
life.
[1] Tillich,
Paul, Dynamics of Faith (Harper and Rowe, New York, 1957).
[2] I
don’t believe in the Second Coming of Christ. I agree with John Dominic Crossan
that belief in a second coming distracts us from what we’re supposed to be
doing, namely, living into the meaning of Christ’s first coming and working to
build the world he called the realm of God. Jesus came once. He did what he did
God’s way. We don’t need him to come back and do it our way as so many
Christians want him to do.
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