ideas have consequences
there are a million things i could begin this blog with, but it seems to me that the central starting point for christianity is with christ. for most americans jesus is a punch line. a familiar name that reminds us of sunday school and people with bad haircuts. Jesus has become easy to ignore because he has become a caricature of what he really is.
so who is jesus, and why does it matter. there are many different ideas about who jesus is, holy man, prophet, sage, son of God. christianity has claimed for two millinnia that Jesus was the son of God become human, and it really mattered that this was true. they also claimed that the cross was a real event and that he really did rise from the dead.
recently a friend asked me if all that was really necessary. and my response is yes. it is necessary. you can say all manner of things about jesus, about who you think he was, and if it isn't real, if it really didn't happen the way christians have thought then it really doesn't matter. but...if it did happen then, to quote Richard John Neuhaus, "it is the truth about everything."
the gospel claims some very simple things, and they can be a starting off point for us. number one, we are sinners. this is quite a distasteful idea to the contemporary mind, yet Christianity has always maintained that we are, by nature, guilty people. yes, there is goodness in the world, and we humans perform wonderful acts of kindness every day. but there is also great evil, one doesn't have to look far to see that this is true. it is because of sin that we are in a state of seperation from God.
of course i am making a large assumption that people want to be in a relationship with God. for many that's not the case. people make all kinds of requirements for the kind of God they will choose to believe in. so they say something like this, "I won't believe in any God who lets innocent children die." There are many versions of statements like this and i don't want to ignore the force of such statements but it seems to me that declarations like that are really just a postponement of any type of serious consideration of God.
in light of humanity's separation from God, Jesus came.
christianity is so culturally weighted down it is often difficult to know what the real thing is. is christianity Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, is it The Passion, it is George W. Bush, is it priests molesting children? because of such things it might be easy to think that Christians believe a bunch of ridiculous things that have no basis in fact, on par with aliens at Roswell. or perhaps that in order to be a Christian you have to believe something that no ordinary person would believe in, or that even the manner of belief for a Christian is a fundamentally different thing than it is for someone else.
Quite simply i believe that the nature of christian belief is basically no different than ordinary everyday belief. the manner in which a un-believer comes to know things and to believe in them is no different from the way in which i come to know them and come to believe them. the difference is the content of our belief, not the method of it. and as the title of this post indicates, what you believe really matters.
so who is jesus, and why does it matter. there are many different ideas about who jesus is, holy man, prophet, sage, son of God. christianity has claimed for two millinnia that Jesus was the son of God become human, and it really mattered that this was true. they also claimed that the cross was a real event and that he really did rise from the dead.
recently a friend asked me if all that was really necessary. and my response is yes. it is necessary. you can say all manner of things about jesus, about who you think he was, and if it isn't real, if it really didn't happen the way christians have thought then it really doesn't matter. but...if it did happen then, to quote Richard John Neuhaus, "it is the truth about everything."
the gospel claims some very simple things, and they can be a starting off point for us. number one, we are sinners. this is quite a distasteful idea to the contemporary mind, yet Christianity has always maintained that we are, by nature, guilty people. yes, there is goodness in the world, and we humans perform wonderful acts of kindness every day. but there is also great evil, one doesn't have to look far to see that this is true. it is because of sin that we are in a state of seperation from God.
of course i am making a large assumption that people want to be in a relationship with God. for many that's not the case. people make all kinds of requirements for the kind of God they will choose to believe in. so they say something like this, "I won't believe in any God who lets innocent children die." There are many versions of statements like this and i don't want to ignore the force of such statements but it seems to me that declarations like that are really just a postponement of any type of serious consideration of God.
in light of humanity's separation from God, Jesus came.
christianity is so culturally weighted down it is often difficult to know what the real thing is. is christianity Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, is it The Passion, it is George W. Bush, is it priests molesting children? because of such things it might be easy to think that Christians believe a bunch of ridiculous things that have no basis in fact, on par with aliens at Roswell. or perhaps that in order to be a Christian you have to believe something that no ordinary person would believe in, or that even the manner of belief for a Christian is a fundamentally different thing than it is for someone else.
Quite simply i believe that the nature of christian belief is basically no different than ordinary everyday belief. the manner in which a un-believer comes to know things and to believe in them is no different from the way in which i come to know them and come to believe them. the difference is the content of our belief, not the method of it. and as the title of this post indicates, what you believe really matters.
posted by John Jack at 9:19 PM
2 Comments:
Highlighted in the political realm, more and more politicians are coming out and saying, "I am a person of faith." What in the world does that mean? Faith in what is my question? Faith in yourself? If so, that doesn't seem like faith, but rather more of a self-help discipline. Stemming off your last paragraph, everyone has faith of some sort--the faith that one wakes up alive every morning; the faith that the mail will arrive; faith that coffee will brew; faith that your spouse or loved one will continue to love you. So is faith then, believing in the abilities of one's self believing potential, or is faith dependent upon believing in the other's continual faithfulness? What i mean is: is God's action dependent upon our amount of faith, or is our faith a proper response to God's actions? Is a "person of faith" a glazed over title that says, "I have faith in myself" or "I have faith that I'm faithless and that's why God is my King"?
i wouldn't say that God's action is dependent on our amount of faith. we see jesus several times in the gospels rebuking his disciples for excercising piddly amounts of faith and then rescuing them, feeding them, displaying his power. and at the same time jesus can accuse his disciples (and by extension us) of little faith because there trust is not commensurate with what he has done before. the same kind of thing went on in the old testament. so it seems to me that faith in a strict sense is trust with indicators. in other words we have good cause to trust god, have faith, because he has proven faithful.
as far as our beloved politicians go i have no idea. i suspect they want to invoke some kind of spiritual aura or religious awareness and faith is the buzzword that sounds deep, and yet has no real referent. they can appear religious and yet continue on without comittment.
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