I sympathize with the 'integrity dilemma' many educated and morally concerned people face. It isn't easy to be a believer in 2006 (although I expect it was not all that easy in AD 33). To understand things about the world, history, science and life makes it practically impossible to have the kind of faith that many in the Evangelical world say is needed to be saved. Demanding assent to things that are not true has made the Evangelical faith inaccessible to many honest seekers and skeptics.
It is too hard for me too, but I still confess my faith in Christ. Reading about Jesus in the gospels gives me good reason to declare that God was definitively revealed in the person of Jesus. According to the gospels Jesus taught world-shattering things, he showed a way to break down false barriers of condemnation and rejection, pride and self-delusion, and in short he turned his world (and ours) upside down. In the gospels encounter an internally consistent story (little details that don’t exactly jive really don’t excite or bother me) that tells us about a man who died a horrible death with humility, love and dignity, and who (according to witnesses under pain and execution of death testified to its reality) arose to transform the lives of individuals and empires. The story indicates that He can and hopefully will do this again.
Such is my faith but it is not an entirely good fit with most of contemporary Evangelical Christianity because it centres on Jesus to the extent that it ignores the flotsam and jetsam thrown up in the wake of an evolving progressive revelation that God is unfolding and has been unfolding for the past 15+or- billion years and even beyond time itself.
IMHO much of Old and even New Testament writings are not God's word to us today (and I don't believe all of it was God's word to those contemporary with its composition. Even Jesus taught that much that was considered law was provided by man's hardness of heart and not God's heart and purpose. Paul himself declared that at least some of his teaching was not conclusively and indisputably from God. i.e. and “I THINK I have the spirit.”1 Corinthians 7:40)
We are not going to find incontrovertible evidence of comic book 'poofing creation’. We are not going to find proof that every story in the Bible (indeed even many of those written as historical accounts) will be proven by or even strongly supported by archaeological evidence or convincing inference. We will not likely get the powers of magic that charlatans say they have and that we are supposed to possess.
We will continue to live in a story of God's activity that doesn't lend itself to the kind of incontrivertible proof that some skeptics say they need in order to believe or that many false teachers say is available if we only believe what they teach.
What we have is different. It is the teaching, life, and person of Jesus Christ.
If the words of Jesus do not reach into a person's heart, where our creaturely frame, our frail broken emotions, and our innate mysterious ‘God image’ meet, then faith will be impossible for that person in this life.
HOWEVER;
My understanding of Jesus character tells me that those who genuinely want to know but can not 'get it’ now may very well be given a witness that is sufficient to divide sheep from goat, heaven gifted from hell deserving. Perhaps that witness is the what we call the Holy Spirit and may be that ‘lighted figure’ referred to by people speaking of their near death experiences (NED's). That witness will be our last and best opportunity to see Truth face to face and either chose to humble our selves before it and receive it or to pridefully reject it.
I am not an easy evangelical but I do believe Jesus did teach that it all comes down to this moment of decision. Will we humble ourselves before Him (not before preachers, teachers, evangelists, church leaders, men stealers and those who make merchandise of believers) and acknowledge our need for Him and his mercy and forgiveness or will we insist that our ways are better than the offered grace? In this I am Evangelical through and through.
Grace remains the key and it extends to the interstices between life and death itself. This grace will be equally available to Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, rich man, poor man, wiseman, fool, genius, mentally challenged and all other category of humanity. In that moment of final decision, if God is gracious (and I believe that is the message of Jesus, that God is gracious) then all for whom faith has been impossible in this life will have a chance to see and believe. If they can surrender any bitterness or unforgiveness towards God for the pain in our unfolding creation and the cloudiness of our perceptions in this life, then I expect that they will receive God’s forgiveness, which has been provided to all in Jesus Christ.
To hopeful skeptics and uncertain believers everywhere I want to say that, if get I ‘there’, if there is a ‘there’ to get to, I expect to see most of you ‘there’. At least I hope so, and I think I may have the spirit (but that is a matter of faith isn’t it?) so it may very well be true but only time will tell.
LH
No comments:
Post a Comment