One of the things I've had to figure out as I made my way back to the church is whether and how I can call myself a Christian. Part of my time away was to give me space to question everything about my beliefs, and not all of those beliefs have made it through. I don't actively disbelieve anything that I believed before, but there's a lot more on the maybe list.
If being a Christian requires me to go down the creed and check off a series of statements as being believed, then by that definition I'm no longer a Christian. I'm no longer comfortable with the formula of “Jesus was God and saved you from your sins by taking your place on the cross in order to satisfy the Father who was also God. And by the way, he was raised.” This is an admittedly rather flip and incomplete description of substitutionary atonement. To be fair, though, I haven't been comfortable with that interpretation for quite a while, even when I was a regular churchgoer. I've never been really good with the idea of the crucifixion as a sort of in-kind trade for suffering in order to satisfy an angry God.
What I had from the church more recently was something along the lines of “Jesus was God, and by being incarnate as a human he showed us up-close and personal what God is like; he was crucified because God's ways are threatening to human ways; by accepting that death he somehow dealt with sin in a permanent way; the resurrection shows that God's love is not overcome by evil and death.”
I'm good with a lot more parts of this – still not sure about the dealing with sin part, and still not sure about the divinity of Jesus, and still not sure what actually, literally, historically happened. (I understand there is good independent historical evidence for the fact that someone named Jesus lived and was killed by crucifixion, but as far as I know, that's about it without getting into religious literature). But what I am good with is the meaning of the story, and it's on those grounds that I still call myself Christian.
Whether or not Jesus was actually God, I still get a lot of my understanding of God from the gospel stories. I still take Jesus' acceptance and welcoming of all people to be indicative of God's welcome to everyone. Whether or not the crucifixion actually did anything about sin (and whether or not sin is actually a useful concept – a topic for another post), going through the Holy Week liturgy goes make me face up to the ways in which I don't follow my conscience. Whether or not Jesus literally rose from the dead, I hope to find that love is more powerful than death. These are the stories and ideas that I kept coming back to even while I was away from the church.
So I call myself a Christian not because I believe all the things that Christians are supposed to believe, but because I find in the Christian stories a hope for a better world: a world where no one is excluded or exploited, where fear is unnecessary and hatred is unheard of, where our desires are in balance with the natural world, and where everyone can have the fullest experience of being human. The Christian stories and the community of the church feed that hope for me and both help me and challenge me to live towards seeing that hope become real.
I would offer a couple more general ideas that have been useful to me: The very first Christians were just people who heard the way Jesus was teaching and felt moved and said, Yeah, that. I think that's the threshold of identifying as a Christian. The checklists of beliefs and creeds were created later by people trying to be in charge of churches, and so I think they ought to be regarded with some suspicion. (and notice how many "fundamentalist Christian" churches have reduced Christ to the rigid legalism he spent his entire life turning over and setting on fire. We are lucky to have found a church of fellow seekers.)
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the gospels are not journalistic accounts of Jesus' teaching, but writers' attempts to set down what his teaching and life were all about, what it all meant. So when I find woes in just one gospel, I immediately wonder if I'm looking at the hangup of one writer. That doesn't mean it's not useful to consider the perspective, of course, as your post shows. It's all more about seeking than finding, I think. As Paul Simon put it, "The cross is in the ballpark; why deny the obvious?" And I find it meaningful that for 2000 years, people have felt drawn toward Jesus just as powerfully as those who actually met him. Thanks again for the blog. I'll read everything you post.
I'm totally with you on the "Yeah, that." I've been given to understand that the creeds had political aspects - once Christianity is the state religion, the state needs to define it. And the long initiation period was partly to make sure people were actually interested and not out to find and persecute the church. But at least in the U.S. we don't have to worry about being killed for our beliefs, so there seems to me to be no need to turn anyone away from the altar. And I definitely agree that it's important that the gospels aren't journalistic accounts - same goes for the rest of the Bible - there are definitely times where I have to just look at something and throw it out.
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