What Do I Really Believe?

 

What Do I Really Believe?

December 4, 2024

I’m wondering these days what I really believe. I mean, I see so much biblical and theological bullshit on Facebook that I reject most of what the people who put it there seem to believe. It’s fairly easy for me to say what I don’t believe. I don’t believe that God is male. I don’t believe that the Bible comes in any way God. Therefore, I don’t believe that we have to take everything in it seriously. We don’t have to struggle to make everything in it somehow meaningful. A hell of a lot of the stuff in it just isn’t meaningful, and we should just reject it. I don’t believe that what the Bible presents as factual history is, for the most part, factual history. I don’t believe Jesus is coming back. I don’t believe that God damns anyone, not even horrific human monsters like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Mao Zedong. I don’t believe that Jesus has anything to do with causing God to forgive human sin. I don’t believe that his death was a sacrifice. I don’t believe that anyone has to believe in Jesus in order to be saved. I don’t believe that Jesus was literally the Son of God. I don’t believe that God is literally Trinitarian. I don’t believe that salvation is about the fate of the soul after death. I don’t believe that Christianity is the only way to God. I don’t believe that church is necessary for salvation. I don’t believe that homosexuality is inherently sinful. I don’t believe that only sexual relations between one man and one woman within marriage are the only moral sexual relations.  I don’t believe that Christian morality is about obeying laws. I don’t believe that women are in any way inferior to men. I don’t believe that faith is the acceptance of desirable but unprovable facts. I suppose there are other things I don’t believe, but these are the ones that come to mind as I write.

Now, that’s one hell of a lot of traditional Christian stuff that I don’t believe. I recognize and accept that truth. I am in no way a traditional Christian. I like to call myself a liberated Christian, and by that I mean I’m liberated from all of that unsustainable Christian bullshit. So when I clear away all of that unsustainable Christian bullshit, what am I left with? I’m left with a great deal, but that great deal requires a radical restructuring of the Christian faith in essentially all of its aspects. So here’s what I think I do believe in.

I believe that all human knowledge is, in the end, grounded in human experience not in divine revelation. I believe that an experience of a spiritual dimension of reality is a universal human experience. Not in the sense that every single human being has such an experience. Rather, in the sense that every human culture we know of, be that culture alive and active in the world today or be it dead and gone for millennia, has within it a system of myths and symbols that point to a transcendent, spiritual reality beyond our human, physical reality.

I believe that the language of faith is necessarily symbolic and mythic not literalistic. I believe with Paul Tillich that symbol and myth are the language of faith. I believe that the literalism through which most people today approach the Christian faith will eventually kill the Christian faith if that faith can’t overcome it and replace with the much truer, deeper understanding of faith as grounded in symbol and myth not in fact. I mean nothing that I say in this piece hereafter to be understood literally.

I believe the Bible to be a fully human product not in any way a divine one. I believe that it is the foundational book of the Christian faith because it always has been and because it contains the only reliable, or at least semi-reliable, texts that we have about Jesus. I believe that the Bible contains both great wisdom and great error. I believe that sometimes it gets God right, and sometimes it gets God tragically wrong. I believe that we must make choices between its different parts and contentions. It simply is not possible to read the Bible without making such choices. The issue isn’t whether anyone does that. The issue is whether a person reading the Bible can articulate the bases on which she makes her choices. My basis for making my choices is Jesus and the love of God we see in and through him. I believe that Jesus and God’s love should be every Christian’s bases for making their choices.

I believe that God is real. God is a universal spirit that sustains all of existence in existence. I believe that God so utterly transcends human reality that we can never know the fullness of God. Indeed, we can never know that anything we say about God isn’t totally false. Yet I also believe that there is a drive in humanity as a whole, though obviously not in every human being, to speak of God, to speak of those experiences that so many people have of the reality of something beyond our ordinary, physical reality. So we take the inestimable risk of speaking of that which we cannot ultimately know. That’s what theology is. That’s what the stories are in which the world’s numerous faith traditions are grounded.

I believe that faith is trust not acceptance of unprovable facts. It is trust that what we believe but cannot prove about God does not lead us badly astray. It is trust that even if it does, God still forgives and loves us absolutely. I believe that faith is a leap into uncertainty and that in that uncertainty we are sustained not by knowledge but by trust.

I believe that God is love. Love beyond human understanding. Love that encompasses and accepts all of humanity and all of human behavior, even the really, really bad stuff. I believe that God loves that which we love and that, more importantly, God loves even that which we hate both about others and about ourselves. I believe that God loves and saved Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and every other despicable monster of human history and of current human reality. I believe that God’s love so utterly transcends the finite limits of human love that we will never understand it. All we can do is stand in awe of it and give God thanks for it.

I believe that we desperately need to know that God loves us in that utterly transcendent, ultimately incomprehensible way. I believe that we are all creatures not gods, and that means that we are all fallible. We all fail. We all sin. We need to know of God’s universal, eternal love for every human being there ever has been, or is today, or will be in the future, and even for ourselves, because when we don’t know that love we live in fear. With God understood as well as we are capable of understanding God, we need never live in fear. Yes, we all suffer and die. But we need not fear that God ever abandons us in or to that suffering and dying because God is divine not human love.

I believe that God loves us and doesn’t judge us. God knows we’re all fallible. God knows we’re sinners. Yet God isn’t sitting on a throne up in the sky somewhere judging and damning us. If God does judge us, which I don’t actually believe God does, God does it in a way ground in unconditional love and not in some diabolical desire to punish us eternally or even for a time for being who we are.

I believe, with St. Paul, that absolutely nothing in all creation ever will or even can separate us from the love of God. See Romans 8:38-39 if you need a proof text for that contention. What does that contention mean? It means that sin, however dire our sin may be, doesn’t separate us from the love of God because sin is something in creation. It means that being an atheist doesn’t separate us from the love of God because atheism is something in creation. It means that blasphemy doesn’t separate us from the love of God because blasphemy is something in creation. It certainly doesn’t mean that following a faith path other than a Christian one separates us from the love of God because all human faiths exist within creation. We may sometimes believe that we have turned our backs and walked away from God. Whatever. God never turns God’s back and walks away from us. Not ever. Not for any reason in all creation.

I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, but, as I said, I believe that statement to be symbolic or mythic not factual. That means, I believe, that when we look at Jesus as we have him the New Testament but especially in the synoptic gospels we see as much as we are capable of comprehending about God. I believe that when someone asks us who God is, our best answer is: Look at Jesus.

I believe that in Jesus we see not some new divine forgiveness of sin that wasn’t there before him but rather a couple of other life changing things. We see that God loves us. Period. End of discussion. No exceptions. Especially in Christ on the cross, we see that God never forsakes us. We see that God enters into all aspects of life, including suffering and death, with us, holding us, sustaining us, and doing so even when we are convinced that God isn’t doing it at all.

And we see how God really wants us to live and to worship. We see that God has a preferential option for the poor and that God calls us to have one too. We see that God is radically nonviolent and that God calls us to be radically nonviolent too. We see that God accepts everyone and rejects no one for any reason and especially not because of anything about their particular humanity. We see that God rejects the whole notion of sacrifice as what God wants from us. God wants our worship to be done in spirit and in truth, and sacrifice has nothing to do with spirit and truth.

I believe that God absolutely does not want us sitting around on our butts waiting for Jesus to return and set the world right or waiting for God to set the world right in some other way. I believe that God wants us to be building the kingdom of God on earth not hoping that someday God will come and do it for us. I believe that faith is about conviction that that is what God wants from us combined with the courage to do it.

I believe that salvation is about that construction of the kingdom of God here on earth, not about pie in the sky when we die. God’s salvation is present with us here and now. It isn’t something we have to wait to have after we die. It is about salvation of the whole human person not just some spiritual aspect of a person we call a soul.

I believe that salvation is ultimately living in the knowledge of God’s love. See John 17:3 if you need a proof text for that contention. Living in real knowledge of the absolutely unconditional nature of God’s love for all of creation, including every single human being, including even us, saves us. Or at least, it can save us. It can save us from despair. It can save us from fear. It can save us from negative emotions like hatred, jealousy, envy, covetousness, and any other thought or emotion that keeps us from living as the whole, loving human beings God calls us to be. God’s love may well save our souls after death. I don’t think we can really know that for sure because no one has ever truly experienced death and come back to tell us about salvation after death. I do believe that we can live in trust that God’s love saves us after death though I also believe that we can’t ever really know what that means.

I believe that God does not call us to live according to any set of specific rules. I certainly don’t believe that the Ten Commandments contain come truth but are in no way an adequate guide for human living. I believe that morality consists of responding to God’s unconditional love with our own love, as limited and fallible as our love always is. Love must always the basis of our moral decision making.

So. Am I Christian? Yes, but to understand what being a Christian means for me you have to rethink just about everything you think you know about Christianity, everything you probably have been taught about Christianity by people who claim to know what it is. You have to get over all forms of religious literalism. You have to give up the notion that Jesus died to save us from sin and know that God has always saved everyone from sin and certainly didn’t require the suffering and death of God’s Son before doing it. You have to live in trust in God not in the belief that you know things about God you can’t possibly know. You have to give up all ideas of Christian exclusivism, which surely is some of the greatest Christian bullshit there has ever been.

And most of all you have to understand that God doesn’t call us to believe anything. Rather, you must understand that God calls us to love. To love as perfectly as we can while knowing that our love never is nor can it be perfect the way we understand God’s love to be. And you must understand that faith isn’t belief, it is trust. If you need a biblical foundation for that statement (though of course biblical proof texts never prove anything), look up what the Greek word pistis, which is always translated in English versions of the New Testament as faith or belief, really means. It doesn’t mean take unprovable facts as true. It means belove, it means trust.

I do not and never could believe in, that is, trust, a God who I understood to be all about sacrifice, choosing between people, judgment, or condemnation. I do believe in, that is, I trust, a God who doesn’t require righteousness of me or who condemns me when I make mistakes but rather who calls me to respond to God’s love in love. God calls each of us to love one another and all of God’s creation as fully as we possibly can. God knows that we’ll never do that perfectly. Maybe Jesus did it perfectly, but I sure don’t; and I’d be very skeptical if you claimed that you did.

So yes. I am a Christian. I have wrestled long and hard with what saying that I am a Christian means. I have tried here to state as briefly as I can what I think it means. Agree with me or don’t. Call me a heretic if you must. It wouldn’t be the first time I have been called one. I’ll close by saying with Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.”