3 Things I Believe

that I didn't use to believe

There are three piles inside of my soul. All three inform the way I live and the choices I make.

The first pile is for things I believe are true.

The second pile is for things I’ve heard and believe are not true.

The third pile is for the things that I’m uncertain about.

In my second year of Bible college, pile #1 and pile #2 were by far and away the larger piles. I had everything figured out. I knew the answer to almost every question and if there was a question I didn’t know the answer to it was probably a question I didn’t think was even worth asking.

I definitely had God figured out. And people. And ministry. By 21 I had nailed down the really big and important questions of life. Becoming an evangelical Christian was like being handed a briefcase full of answer sheets and I felt way ahead of everyone else. I took a course on New Testament Ethics that included combing through the New Testament multiple times to identify and categorize every ethical statement in the New Testament in order to develop a comprehensive and authoritative guide for life.

And then I got married.

And went into full-time ministry with other human beings.

And had children.

And met other Christians from other traditions.

And kept reading books and listening to lectures.

At 60, the current status of my piles is more like a bell curve. I’m certain of a few things. I’m also certain there are a lot more things I’m just not certain about anymore. And the pile of things I don’t believe doesn’t provoke me to war the way it did at 21 and instead I tend to sort things into a fourth pile – does this lead to human flourishing? Is this kind? Does this feel like Jesus? Does it do harm?

Out of pile of things I believe, here are three things that didn’t use to be there but now sit at the core of the things I do believe, the things that inform what I do and why I do them.

1) No one believes in the authority of Scripture. People tend to believe in the authority of their interpretation and application of Scripture.

When I first started following Jesus, I was right off to Bible college where I was taught the “plain meaning of Scripture.” This was emphasized a lot. But after I graduated and encountered more people in real life and through expanding the authors I read and lectures I listened to, I found out that a lot of other Christians thought that my group of Christians was a cult group because of our view on “the clear teaching of scripture” about baptism. There’s nothing quite as jarring as having a bunch of teens in your youth group at a giant music festival and learning that at least two of the booths at said festival had your “non-denomination” on their list of cults.

I remember watching Rob Bell on a live webcast unpack his book, Love Wins. He was coming in hot from the single tweet review by John Piper, “Farewell, Rob Bell.” The most memorable thing about the moment was that I briefly exchanged live tweets with Rachel Held Evans about the presentation we were watching by Bell. RHE herself was in Piper’s “heretic pile” and, frankly, a hero of mine. We both, along with thousands of others, listened to Rob unpack his thesis that was, to be honest, historically pedestrian for the Church. Hardly heretical, Bell was mostly rehashing some well-traveled ground of orthodox thought on love and the afterlife only recently displaced from the mainstream by the last hundred years of evangelical ideology.

If we all just took the Bible for its plain teaching, all the teachers and professors and preachers and pastors would be out of work. The commentaries and blogs and periodicals and symposiums and papers would be just a huge waste of time and resources. If it’s so plain, why are we spending so much time explaining it and telling each other what it really means?

But at one time, for quite a large chunk of my early days of following Jesus, inside the cultural bubble of a particular group of Christians, it seemed very clear to me.

If there’s a popular document that needs us to embrace nuance and a generous orthodoxy, it has to be the Scriptures of the Church. Certainty about the “clear meaning” tends to center itself around the identity politics of the people with power in whatever group of Christians you find yourself in. The “King James Only” Christians aren’t doing what they do and thinking what they think or preaching what they preach with any intentionally underlying sense of irony or desire to misrepresent scripture. Those who use the Bible to put women in a box don’t emphasize their misogyny, they emphasize their faithfulness to the plain meaning of scripture. People who see the United States as the pinnacle of the coming Kingdom of God and the Constitution an “inspired” document that, when combined, fuel their Christian Nationalism, have great confidence they are only speaking the truth of scripture.

So today, when people make their appeal to the authority of scripture on a particular topic – theological, ethical, social or religious – I’m going to do some reading, some listening, some discussing and wondering. I am going to ask questions like:

“Who is empowered by this interpretation of the scripture?”

“Who loses agency by this interpretation of scripture?”

“Who is excluded from the table and who is centered at the table by this interpretation of scripture?”

“Who does this interpretation benefit and who does it harm?”

“What other scriptures do we have to ignore in order to embrace this interpretation of scripture and what do they say?”

2) It’s all about a long obedience in the same direction.

When I first started following Jesus, I found myself in a story about getting it right. Believing the right things for the right reasons and doing the right things for the right reasons. Then, released into the wild, I found myself becoming part of a story that was all about “getting people saved.” It was about numbers and decisions and rescuing people from hell and getting them on the “road to heaven.” Both of those orientations are powerful and an effective means of getting groups of people to coalesce and form multiplying groups of followers. But as a professor used to say to us, “what you win people with is what you win people to.” People will live out of the story we’ve convinced them is the one we belong to. Neither of those stories are centered on Jesus or the people of God – but they are both wildly applicable to a consumer-oriented culture – and both carry the seeds of their own ultimate disintegration within themselves.

Right belief means that every time you find someone with a belief that’s a little more right than yours, you will leave your community for theirs or try to convert your community to that new “rightness.” You or your community will not survive this process. The numbers game produces a euphoric sense of being part of something successful but over time, hypocrisy, hurtful interactions and the group down the street that’s obviously more successful tempts us to emulate or abandon. Eugene Peterson describes an historic way of being the people of God and a way that produces, in time, the kind of fruitfulness and flourishing that it seems like God is after.

A long obedience in the same direction.

After a while I discovered another story, another way of being and doing. I became a charismatic Christian or, as a friend likes to say, “the kind of people who like some sizzle with our steak.” It’s hard to explain to younger people today how it felt to stumble into this narrative back in the late 80s, early 90s. We felt we were on the edge of Jesus coming back. The presence of God was tangible. Huge things were happening. We saw people getting healed in all kinds of ways. We felt we were discovering all kinds of upgraded spirituality and were on a steady journey of “leveling up” from one conference to the next. We wouldn’t have called it “Gnosticism” but we for sure saw ourselves as being at least a little more enlightened than other Christians. Jesus’ return was imminent, that’s the only thing that made sense of what was happening, and we were going to be at the front of the welcoming committee.

We soaked. We saw “glory clouds.” We had legit prophets and apostles. We had words. We had 24/7 prayer and intercession. We marched for Jesus. When Braveheart came out we had guys coming to conferences with their faces painted, carrying “prayer” sticks and wearing kilts. We did gold dust, gold teeth and roared like lions.

And the very next week after the conference was over, the guy receiving the “double anointing for prophetic evangelism” left his family and ran off with the worship leader because of their shared vision for ministry to the nations.

Peterson writes, “There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.” I feel sad that I’ve been part of selling the sizzle. Having been beside a lot of people on their death beds, I can promise you that I’ve never heard a single child or spouse say with joy, “well, nobody clocked more hours of soaking prayer than she did…” these are not the criteria by which either God or families measure a human life. Jesus’ parable about the sheep and the goats lets us in on the bottom line – “did you live love over your lifetime? Did people know you were my disciple by your love for them?”

It's our constancy, no matter how broken or stumbly the journey may be – to faithfully orient ourselves on Jesus for the duration of this lifetime. Peterson, quoting Nietzsche writes, “…The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” It is this “long obedience in the same direction” which the mood of the world does so much to discourage.”

To be the people of God has always been about the same thing – faithfulness. Only now, in Jesus, we see what faithfulness properly looks like and we find the power we need to live his way.

3) Faith is spelled, TRUST.

To live as a human being is to assume risk. Every day we are required to take risks. Anyone who gets in a car and drives to work or church is engaged in risky behavior. The questions we face are: who we will trust to define our version of what makes life worth living, what are we supposed to value, what does “healthy” look like and to whom will we swear our allegiance? There’s no question about whether you and I will take risks.

We preacher types will sometimes say things like Faith = Risk because that equivalency creates a narrative that life is always about leveling up, getting a little (or big) adrenaline rush from surviving something we weren’t sure we could, and doing something we could only do if God is real. And honestly, that sells. White, middle and upper-middle class people love this stuff. Because they’ve never had to figure out where they are staying with their three kids this week or who will watch their babies while they work a shift at their 3^rd job to scrape up enough income for rent, groceries and gas. It’s embarrassing to stand in front of a group of friends who are wearing everything they own and tell them faith is spelled, R-I-S-K.

Faith has always been our capacity to trust God for our daily bread and to swear our allegiance to God in the face of one million other ways that offer us short cuts, a higher high or a more financially lucrative and secure lifestyle.

Faith is a gentle answer that deflects anger. Faith is a kind word that’s like honey. Faith is being a peacemaker in a warmongering world. Faith is being little in a make room culture. Faith is offering your whole breakfast to Jesus to see what he makes of it. Faith is accepting that persecution and hurtful words are part of following Jesus. Faith is emptying yourself. Faith is giving up everything culture tells you defines you and trusting that what God gives you is all you have to have.

Matthew Bates writes, “The Greek word pistis, generally rendered “faith” or “belief,” as it pertains to Christian salvation, quite simply has little correlation with “faith” and “belief” as these words are generally understood and used in contemporary Christian culture, and much to do with allegiance.” He says, “…the gospel is the power-releasing story of how Jesus became king and the only adequate response is allegiance alone.” No doubt there will be times when people who don’t know our story will look at our actions and say, “That’s risky.” But our reality is that faith is simply, “this is the Way, walk in it.”

It's not audacious goals that Jesus is after, it’s not grandiose views of our own importance, we don’t have to have miracles to demonstrate our faith. Our faith is demonstrated when we live out of this place of being loved and as Mother Teresa said, “Small things done with great love will change the world.”

What’s moved into the core of your pile of things you believe that wasn’t always there?