a brief statement of faith

Some of my good friends have expressed their feelings and doubts about Christianity, so it's time for me to put in my two (or four, more likely) cents and say a little bit about why I believe the Gospel, the Bible, and the whole nine yards. I love people's honesty, so I was incredibly excited to see dialogue open up along this line; but I couldn't put it all into a comment on someone else's blog, so it's getting a plug on mine.

I've had a lot of difficulty with the Christian faith in the past few years. Going to a small Christian college, with an overwhelming (how does Bahktin put it? one overriding voice? I've been out of school too long) single attitude toward the faith -- really more like a steamroller than a popular opinion -- made me hate everything about Christianity for a long time. Because I wasn't a Five-Point Calvinist, I was told by fellow students that I wasn't a real Christian. During my time there I saw dozens of people in deep spiritual and emotional pain, and these supposed real Christians did nothing to help them. When I was one of those hurting people, it was the friends who weren't so fist-pounding about the faith, who didn't claim the faith much at all, who helped me most.

That, compounded with an intense questioning, not of God's power, but of His character, left me almost bereft of the faith I have claimed since childhood. The miracles in the Old Testament seemed too far-fetched, the powerlessness of women in the Bible and in today's chuch made me angry, the callous attitudes of the loud-mouthed Christians toward unbelievers and believers alike made me furious, and I wasn't sure God even loved me. For a brief time I didn't really want eternal life; it was more comforting to consider that maybe after death there was nothing. However, my reluctant but unshakeable belief in the existence of God made this comfort more a wishful thought than a belief itself.

So there I was, twenty years old, drawn into my shell early in summer vacation, thinking that perhaps I, like the father in Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies, had lost my faith. I was standing in the shower letting warm water pour over my face and wondering whether or not I was still a Christian. And the question appeared in my mind like a suddenly-lit billboard, What do you think about Jesus?

It caught me broadside and, startled, I stopped agonizing and pitying myself. I didn't even have to think about the answer. It sprang out of a belief so absolute that it had escaped my questioning: Jesus is the Son of God.

At that point I wasn't even considering the resurrection, the sacrificial death on the cross, any of the doctrines that come along with the deity of Christ. I was only considering the nature of the man on whom the whole faith hangs. Once the admission had been yanked from me, I leaned back against the shower wall and sorted through my options. Either Christ was just a man, deluded or otherwise, or he was the Son of God and God incarnate. I couldn't believe the first, so I faced the fact that I believed in the deity of Jesus, and if I did, then I had to embrace all the rest of it. His death and resurrection, all the doctrines, all the miracles, all the stories.

So I did. I spent the next two years at Grove City still hating the church and the people who comprise the church body, but I knew for myself that I was a believer. I didn't know how to live that out; I didn't want to be a fakey, arrogant hypocrite of gilded perfection like many of the people around me who were so terrified of being accused of not being a Christian that they hid all the sins everyone knew they struggled with and pretended that everything was okay while passing judgment on everyone else. I didn't want to pretend anything. I didn't go to church for a long time and I didn't participate in most of the Christian activities on campus.

But most of that is slowly changing. It's a long process -- my self-inclusion in the church, and my own climb toward holiness (yes, I know, all of you can laugh; I can laugh too; but still, though the incline is very small and gradual, I too am being made holy) -- but it's coming along.

To believe the truth of the farfetched miracles of the Old Testament gives me great joy. We have a God who will not keep His fingers out of His pie. And the things I have trouble believing I can attribute to my own failure of imagination, my own poverty of faith; not to a failure of truth.

As for the church, I still have trouble with the people. But the Christian faith has always been extended to the common folk, to the gutter-dwellers, to the tax collectors and prostitutes, to the thieves and drunkards and gossips, to society's least-contributing members, who are then changed and commanded to live out that change. Half of the New Testament is Paul exhorting the people to live not as they used to live, but to live a life worthy of Christ. Christians have always been jerks, seducers, cheats, liars, and gossips; the challenge is to grow away from all of that, and to grow away from it together. That too is a long and slow process, which is why we must live lives of love, which "covers over a multitude of sins"; not only do we have to hold steady to the progress of holiness in our own lives, we have to bear with the people all around us who are as miserably imperfect, hellishly annoying, and often hurtful as we are.

And for those of us who do believe the Gospel and want to live differently than the backstabbing Christians who hurt everyone, it's imperative that we identify ourselves as Christians. So that everyone else can see that we're not like the stereotypical Christian. So that we can be a good representative of a person who claims Christ, and therefore a good representative of Christ.

For the rest of us who have many questions, I maintain that doubt is good, if it leads you to further questioning, and to examination of every possible answer to the questions. If doubt is an excuse not to think about any of it, then shame on you. (Everyone I know is too intelligent to use doubt as an excuse anyway.) Grow from your questions. Ultimately the crux is not your feelings on eternal life, not your feelings on the miracles, not your feelings on the moral demands, not your feelings on the failings of Christians. The crux is Christ and His nature. What you believe (or choose to believe) about that drives all the rest.

And once you've made your decisions about that, the rest will come. Madeleine L'Engle writes in A Ring of Endless Light that "God is big enough to handle your anger." I've clung to that. We'll never understand everything, but we can understand enough. Right now, living "on the edge" as I have been in South Bend, Indiana, not knowing what my future will be, I nevertheless understand that every moment in time is charged with eternal purpose. This is not always comforting, to know that every decision I make and every word I say has repercussions that I cannot see or fathom. But I also know that I am in the hands of the omnipotent and loving God, who works all things out for good.

Okay, well, this is starting to sound like I-know-better-than-thou, which is not the intent. Everyone's experience cannot be my experience, or we would all be like Mr. Rogers' Purple People. But if we can all learn from each other, as I've learned and continue to learn so much from all of you, then maybe this incomplete enumeration will help.