The Big Questions of the Christian Faith: Big Answers for a New Era, Conclusion

 

This is the current form of a conclusion to a book I have drafted with the title "The Big Questions of the Christian Faith: Big Answers for a New Era." I hope to self-publish it soon.

Conclusion 

I trust that the material you encountered in this book has made at least one thing clear to you. True Christianity is not what most people think Christianity is. Christianity must not be what most people think it is if it is to survive in our  post-modern world. Most Christians think Christianity is about getting their souls to heaven after they die. It isn’t. Most people think the Bible is divinely inspired. It isn’t. Most people think Christian morality is about obeying rules. It isn’t. Christianity understood the way most people understand it is, in the long run, spiritually stultifying not spiritually uplifting and liberating. Christianity understood the way most people understand it demands that the faithful take conservative and even reactionary positions on the issues of the day. It doesn’t. In fact, it does just the opposite. Popular Christianity gets most of the faith tragically wrong.

Yet Christianity can be a great liberating, life-altering, life-enhancing, and ultimately salvific faith for anyone who approaches it appropriately. To approach it appropriately is to approach it having set aside essentially everything popular culture thinks Christianity is. It is to understand that the language of faith is unavoidably symbolic and mythic not literal and to understand that that is a very, very good thing. It is to understand that the Bible is a human product not a divine one but that it nonetheless contains divine truth when it turns the ways of the world upside down.

It is to understand that love is the standard by which to judge everything. It is the standard by which to decide all the issues in our lives. To decide political issues. To decide economic issues. To decide moral issues including even sexual moral issues. It is to apply the standard of agape love to every decision we must make in life.

It is to live by Micah’s great question: What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? It is to live according to Jesus’ Great Commandment: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

To approach Christianity appropriately it is necessary always to remember a few foundational truths. God is real. To remember that God is, in Brian Wren’s great words, “Joyful darkness far beyond our seeing, closer yet than breathing.” It is truly to grasp that God is both ultimately utterly unknowable but that we nonetheless know truths about God. It is enter into the paradoxes of God’s transcendent immanence, God as Trinity, and Jesus as God the Son Incarnate. None of those paradoxes makes a lick of sense, and that is their great virtue. God is and always must be ultimate mystery, and the paradoxical nature of religious truth preserves that mystery. Therefore, we cannot do without it.

To approach Christianity appropriately is always to remember that everything we say or think about God may be wrong. God is mystery, but not a mystery to be solved. God is a mystery to live into with full awareness that we cannot ultimately know God and that therefore everything we think we know about God may be wrong. It is, however, also to live in trust that what we think we know about God does not lead us badly astray. And to trust that even if we get everything else about God wrong, God’s grace is God’s limitless, unconditional love for every one of us. We can therefore trust that our mistakes do not separate us from God. That indeed, absolutely nothing can or ever will separate us from the love of God.

It is to remember that we see God revealed as fully as we are capable of understanding God in Jesus Christ. It is to answer the question of God: Look to Jesus. As Christians we must understand that the world-upending truths that Jesus taught us are as close to divine truth as we’ll ever get. We must strive as best as we fallible mortals are able to live according to those truths.

To be Christian is to put spiritual values above material ones. It is to put God above everything else on earth that demands our loyalty and our service. It is to lead a live of spiritual practice. It is to lead a life most particularly of prayer. Not prayer as an attempt to get God to do something God might not otherwise do but prayer as our primary means of feeling the presence of God in our lives and living into that presence.

To be authentically Christian is to understand that Jesus Christ was not a price paid to God to procure God’s forgiveness of human sin. As we see in the Old Testament, God has always forgiven sin. The notion that Jesus had to suffer and die to procure God’s forgiveness of humanmis what most people think Christianity is. It isn’t. To be authentically Christian is to see Jesus suffering and dying on the cross as the ultimate revelation of a universal divine truth, namely, that nothing in all creation an separate us from the love of God.

To be truly Christian is to understand that a truly Christian life isn’t easy. After all, his truly Christian life cost Jesus his life. Christianity calls us to build the realm of God on earth, and the realms that already exist on earth will resist our efforts with all the power they can muster—and that’s an enormous lot of power. To be Christian is to take up our crosses and follow Jesus wherever he may lead us. Being Christian cost Jesus his life. It has cost countless other faithful Christians their lives over the millennia. Perhaps it isn’t likely to, but it could cost us our lives too.

A Christian knows that Jesus will never lead us into violence but calls us always to live nonviolence. That Jesus will never lead us into hatred, not hatred of anyone whatsoever, for God is love, and love is the standard by which to judge all things. Jesus will never lead us to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or any other kind of hatred. Jesus will never lead us to Christian nationalism and certainly won’t lead us to white supremacy. As Christians, we must strongly reject all of those bastardizations of what Christian values really are.

Christianity is in peril among us today. The number of people who belong to and attend Christian churches has been in decline for decades. The number of people who self-identify as Christian whether they belong to and attend a Christian church or not is also steadily declining. Can we save our great, ancient, sacred faith, a faith through which we and countless other people today and over the millennia have found their connection with God along with all of the blessings and challenges that come from that connection?

I don’t know. I do know that the answers to most of Christianity’s big questions have changed. The answers many of us beyond a certain age, or maybe even short of that age, learned in Sunday school no longer work if indeed they ever did. I know that the answer to Christianity’s big questions that people take from television preachers and the preachers of most large, evangelical, community churches are just flat wrong. Those answers will kill our faith if we can’t overcome them. They won’t kill it tomorrow. They may not kill it for decades. But Christianity is alive today, to the extent that it actually is, because it has been able to present its divine truths to people in different cultures and different socio-economic systems, for nearly two thousand years. I live in trust that it can do it again. May it be so. Amen