theology

Recently I had a conversation with some of my friends that has inspired me to write out for them some of what I believe, and how I have come to believe what I believe. I don't write this out to argue with anyone, or to convince anyone that I'm "right." Mostly, I think that sort of conversation is a waste of time. I want to understand my friends and for them to understand me. That said, I'm not going to create a list of different beliefs that I have. I think that is a simplistic way of understanding belief that doesn't take important things such as life experience and epistemology into account, so I am going to take both of those into account as important components of my belief. I don't write this to offend anyone, but to be honest so that you can understand me.

1. Epistemology

Quick definition of epistemology is "how you know what you know." An epistemology is a certain way of knowing. Mostly I want to talk about epistemology and the bible.

When I was 15, I believed what many evangelical Christians believe about the bible and certain stories within the bible: it is the infallible word of God, and the events represented in the bible really did happen in the way that it says they happened. At this time, I remember being very afraid of evolutionary arguments, or arguments against the inerrancy of the bible. But eventually it became clear to me that the bible really does have contradictions within it. Check out the resurrection stories in the gospel as one example. I have seen people try to reconcile the stories through logical shenanigans, but they really do contradict one another. I started to notice passages like when Paul distinguishes between what he's written that is from God and what is just from him: "To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord)" (1 Cor. 7:12). In other words, I began to suspect that the actual authors of the bible did not understand their role as setting down everything from God, or as bearers of absolute truth. Then, as far as evolution, that whoever wrote Genesis probably did not intend for his mythological account to be taken as fact in the way that we have taken it as fact, or asked it to be fact. Authorship is another part, when I began to hear that Moses probably did not write the Pentateuch, Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes, Paul did not write some of the letters attributed to him, etc. Ultimately, none of those authorship questions really change what I think of the content, it just began to shift what I thought of the Bible itself. Since then, I've also come to learn that our contemporary idea of the bible as the infallible word of God is quite recent, and that belief in an actual seven day creation story was not really present in the church until the last 150 years (basically since the rise of evolutionary theory). In other words, the very problems that I was having with the bible were actually problems I had with relatively recent ideas about the bible.

Tack on to that the fact that neither the Apostles Creed nor the Nicene Creed (two very important, early Christian creeds) never mention the Bible or scripture. Partly, that's because the Bible didn't exist at the time as a single, canonized compilation. I became aware of that, aware that at some point, people choice what was to be canonized and what wasn't, and aware of the influence of other belief systems upon theology in the Bible (Zoroastrianism upon Hebrew cosmology, for instance, or Greek philosophy upon Paul's writings). In other words, I became much more aware of the human element within the Bible.

Then there were the four gospel accounts. As I said earlier, there are some situations that are direct contradictions. Other times, there aren't contradictions, but the same event is told in a very different way, where Jesus' words are different from a passage in one gospel to a parallel passage in another (the two Lords' prayers, in Matthew and Luke), or the same event happens in a very different way. This doesn't bother me at all anymore, but it did a lot at the time, and it altered my view of the bible.

Additionally, I began to be very uncomfortable with the way Christians talked about the bible. I realized that in many cases people were more interested in following the Bible than they were with following God. I want to follow God, not the bible, and to follow the bible inasmuch as it helps me to follow God and know God, and no more.

Another part of my changing view of the bible was based in linguistics. Thinking about linguistics, I realized how slippery words are. Words are slippery, dictionaries are not authorities for what words mean but catalogues of how words have been used. In that same vein, all language is symbolic out of necessity, there is no way for a word to represent a real thing completely. In other words, when I say I'm talking about God, I'm really using symbolic language to talk about a real thing, and that it will always be inadequate, and that the words and ideas in the Bible are the same: they are using symbols to speak of something real, and are always going to be inadequate to describe anything fully, especially God, if God is anything as amazing as people (including me) say he is. Perhaps an appropriate scriptural reference here is Jesus' words in John 5:39-40: "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." There is no eternal life through finding the bible, the bible points to God, and by following him we find life.

I see the writing in the bible as different frameworks for understanding God/life/reality/humans. As frameworks, they should be used inasmuch as they are useful, and matched with other frameworks that help to fill in these inadequacies. To reject this is, I think, to reject the legitimacy of every field of study, including theology.

To sum this section up: my belief in the bible changed so that I find it difficult to believe the bible has one monolithic perspective on very many issues. It is a compilation of different writings that tell the truth in a variety of different ways, and much of what is in there is difficult to determine or to make sense of. What "it says" on many issues is ambiguous, because it's a host of different people writing on the same issues, or not writing on them at all. It is not a simple book. I also don't hold it up as the authority for how to live my life. That is the position that I want God to have. I believe the bible says many things about how to live life, and that many of those things are from God, but that God is the ultimate authority. This has not been an easy journey, but I do feel much more at peace now than I used to, and I don't feel afraid anymore.

2. Sin

To understand how I think of sin, you have to understand how my life looked until about 3 years ago. At that point, I began to realize how ignorant I actually was about the ultimate implications of every action of mine. As a result, I began to feel moral anxiety over ridiculous decisions like whether or not to finish a can of pop, whether to go one place or another, to go to a friend's house or not. It was crippling, and I realized that this could not come from a God who was good, because it was unhealthy and destructive. Perhaps at this same time I realized how obsessed Christians are with their own sin, and that most Christians are really more obsessed with their own sin than they are with God's goodness. Additionally, I began to suspect that they were much more interested in their own sin than Jesus was, and that much of what Christians call sin actually isn't, or that was is sin for one person isn't sin for another. I began to see the subjective nature of most moral decisions.

Then, about a year ago, I read two books. One was Silence by Shusaku Endo and the other was Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard. Both of these dealt with issues of God telling people to do something wrong. Kierkegaard's talks about God telling Abraham to kill his own son, and Silence is the story of a priest whose choice is to apostasize (deny Christ) or to watch as his fellow Christians are tortured and killed. In the story, God tells him to deny him, out of love and mercy for the priest. In other words, I began to see God as much more concerned with mercy than with morality, and that sometimes the right thing to do is the wrong thing, even if that something is still wrong. This obviously leads to tricky territory, but I believe that is more accurate towards life and God and reality, and it's not an excuse for people to do whatever they want even when it's clearly wrong.

3. Jesus: his mission

Reading through the gospels, I began to realize that Jesus is more concerned with life than he is with sin. A few brief glimpses of Jesus' mission: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him" (John 3:16-17). Here, the mission of Jesus is to bring people life. This eternal life doesn't begin after death but begins right now, in the present. Jesus did not come to make the world aware of how wicked it was but to give it life even in its wickedness. This is perhaps just as explicit: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10). In other words, when Jesus talks about his mission on earth, the reason that he has come, it is in terms of bringing life. It is the verse immediately following this that he talks about laying down his life for his sheep. When he talks about his death, it is in the context of giving people life, and not about erasing their sins, or that his death is necessary for them to be forgiven of their sins. It is about giving life, and everything that Jesus does has to be read through that context.

4. Jesus: his death

Last year around this time is when I really began to think about the crucifixion. Part of this is my dissatisfaction with the idea that Christ died to appease the wrath of God. Part of it is that I think it's a very incomplete, skinny view of the cross to talk about it in terms of sin and the forgiveness of sin. If that is part of it, it is one part, and not the whole.

A few preliminary thoughts, things that I noticed:

1. Jesus forgives people of their sins, totally, before his crucifixion. He tells people over and over that their sins are forgiven. This alone tells me that it was not necessary for Jesus to die for God to forgive humans of their sins.

2. When I read the bible, I saw no evidence that Jesus died to appease the wrath of God. It's just not in the Bible. To be sure of this, I asked Professor Steele about it, and he confirmed that there really isn't any evidence for that model.

3. He also talked about the problem of the ransom model for salvation/crucifixion. The bible clearly describes Jesus as a ransom for many. The problem is who is being paid here? If it's a ransom, is Satan being paid? Why should God have to pay Satan for anything? Is God being paid? This turns God into a sadist, who kills his own son merely to appease himself, with no other factors. This does not fit with the idea of God as good, or of God as love, which is what I, personally, have to believe more than I believe anything else in the bible. Everything has to be understood in terms of his love and his goodness.

That is some of what was going through my head a year ago. Around this time last year I went and heard Rob Bell speak, and he talked about the Hebrew sacrifices. He talked about those sacrifices as being symbolic in nature, and that they worked as symbols to benefit the Israelites, not God. God, he said, does not need our sacrifices for anything. He has the entire world. And, as the writer of Hebrews says, "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (10:4). And yet...these sacrifices functioned precisely in that manner, they would sanctify the impure and unclean, it was a way of becoming right in God's sight. But as that verse says, it was totally unnecessary from God's point of view. The payment is artificial, rather than real. Rob Bell argued that it was a symbol so that the people themselves would have a concrete way of knowing that God had forgiven them.

Rob Bell didn't extend his thoughts in this instance to Jesus, but I think that was the obvious next step. The suggestion is that Christ died as a symbol, and not to satisfy a hungry God. Significantly, Jesus himself makes this connection between his death and symbolism when he says, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14-15). Here, Jesus connects his death to healing through symbolism. Looking to the snake obviously had no inherent qualities that would heal people, the power was in the symbolism of the gesture. Similarly, Jesus's death should be seen as symbolism that was designed to heal, to bring eternal life (that begins now) to anyone who looks to him. The underlying question for me is how can God ever be pleased through death, through murder, through sacrifices that involve murder? From this point of view, it was necessary for Jesus to die, but it was necessary so that we, humans, would believe that we were forgiven, not to appease God or to pay an actual debt.

So, when I read later new testament writers speaking of Jesus' death as forgiveness of sin, I read it as their framework for understanding how Jesus brought life to them through his death, and their framework for understanding what happened at his death. This framework should not be read as the only one for understanding what happened, or as a monolithic, eclipsing framework that excludes all other ones. The Jewish writers understood Jesus as a fulfilment of prophecy and as a sacrifice, which is why they wrote of him in that context. I think it is a mistake to only think of his death in that way.

Another important part for me is what Kalistos Ware talked about when he came to SPU last year. He was talking about the Orthodox model of salvation, and talked about many different models. What was important to him is that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus must be included in a model for it to be accurate. Believing in Christ's death as forgiveness of sins doesn't require him to have lived at all, and it does not require him to have been resurrected. From the point of view of Jesus only as sacrifice, he might as well have been nailed onto the cross as a baby and stayed dead.

In that sense, Jesus' resurrection and life have become much more important to me as necessary elements of understanding his death. I am de-emphasizing the importance of sin in the crucifixion and in my life, both as a reaction to the obsession I see around me in most churches as well as because I believe that is what God is asking of me. I do believe that Jesus saved me, and I believe that he is saving me every day and moment. My understanding of morality, or sin, has moved away from the legal language that many of the biblical writers to a health, life based model, where things are good because they are healthy, and things are evil because they are unhealthy and destructive. Jesus saves me, and he does it in many ways, and he does it by bringing me life, not only by saving me from sin (especially because no one is done with sin even after finding Jesus).

5. Final Thoughts

I have laid this all out so that my friends can understand not only what I believe but how I have come to believe those things. Belief is not something that is abstract from life experience, but is directly based on my experiences and the epistemological processes that I have been part of. Additionally, I believe what I believe because I am compelled to, just as you who are reading this are compelled to believe what you believe. I believe what I do because it is the only thing that I can believe and still worship God and love God, it is the only thing that I can believe and still feel that I am being honest and that I am being a person of integrity. Similarly, you believe what you do because it is the only way in which you can love God and worship God, and to be honest with yourself and to be a person of integrity. I don't ask anyone to believe what I do about the bible or Jesus or God or salvation or crucifixion. I trust that you guys have come to where you are through honest struggle, just as I have, and I wouldn't ask you to change if it could not be honest, just as I cannot honestly return to what I used to believe. I write this out so that you will understand me and hopefully believe me when I say that I love God and serve God and that I believe that Jesus saved me and saves me and will continue to save me.

Amen.