How My Mind Has Changed

This is part 2 of my Theology take-home exam. The assignment was:

Write an essay that addresses how your theological thinking has changed on a given topic over the course of the past semester.

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I have always felt that the linear narrative about the people of Israel and their God, the advent of Jesus and his life, death, and resurrection, and the establishment and growth of church through the gift of the Holy Spirit was a rickety and dubious framework upon which to build an adequate account of God. It’s such a peculiarly time-bound, geographically-challenged, ethnocentric, scripture-circumscribed storyline. How could such an idiosyncratic account properly point to a timeless, limitless, endlessly creative source and ground of all that is? How could such a quaint historical artifact speak to my search for God in my life, here and now?

Over the course of this semester I have gradually tried to come to grips with what I now perceive to be the true genius of Christianity: that it is about Jesus. I continue to be astonished by what a mundane and flat-footed observation this is (“Christianity is about Jesus.” “No kidding, Einstein!”), and yet how seemingly immeasurably deep a subject it is to try to plumb.

It has been fascinating to me to watch the superstructure of doctrine being built on top of the foundational skeleton of scripture and tradition. Working from some axioms found in scripture and accepted by faith — Jesus was Emmanuel (God-with-us), fully human and fully divine, Son of God — and drawing upon the witness of the Hebrew scriptures, the Gospels, and other documents of the New Testament, all sorts of attributes and characteristics of God can be fleshed out.

Starting from an originally quite antagonistic perspective, for example, to my surprise I have come to truly appreciate the doctrine of the Trinity. It turns out to be the most parsimonious explanation of the nature of God that does justice both to scripture and to our experience in the Church as a community of faith. We cannot do without any person of the Trinity, and we have no need of additional persons. Having said that, however, I don’t mean to imply that the doctrine of the Trinity isn’t also problematic: unless carefully taught and carefully received it can easily be more of a stumbling block than an aid to faith. It was useful to be reminded that it is God we believe and have faith in, not the tenets of any particular doctrine of the church.

Because Christianity is centrally tied to the story of a particular person and his relationship with God and with other human beings, Christian theology is concrete, specific, and fleshy in a way that many other religions are not. One must trot at pretty high speed down the runway of scripture to achieve a lift-off into pure abstraction, although the Gospel of John does a pretty good job of providing a turbo boost. Since most of us are not high-octane intellectuals who spend all our time thinking cosmic platonic thoughts, Christian theology — with its frank acknowledgment of the realities of suffering, loss, and betrayal alongside its portrayal of God’s love and the promise of salvation — meets us where we are: located in real human bodies living in specific moments in history. Cliché though it may be, I think the question “What would Jesus do?” is actually both theologically sound and a pragmatic way to determine a strategy for holy living.

The Christian portrayal of God in Jesus is compelling because it shows us an interested God. No, more than that, it shows us a God who loves person to person — not in a petty, possessive, jealous, and controlling way, but in an expansive, generous, self-giving, abundant way. Jesus’ love is passionate and unreserved; we see it in his ministry and we see it in his passion. We do not have stop being who we are, we do not have to somehow shed our identities along with our sins and our foibles in order to be loved. In fact, the nature of Christ’s love is to free us, at last, to be even more completely and perfectly who we really are, who we were meant to be.

The story of Jesus is also the story of the new community that emerges among those who follow him: how he loves, leads, and teaches them, and how he and they live on together after his death and resurrection. The church is what it is, the Body of Christ in the world, because Jesus was first Christ in the world. Without Jesus of Nazareth, who called disciples to new lives, there would be no servant-leadership, no holy catholic church, no communion of saints, no priesthood of all believers.

Having said all this, however, I must mention one strong and continuing reservation about the Christian narrative of salvation history and how it is sometimes fleshed out in doctrine. I remain staunchly spiritually allergic to any religion’s claims of an exclusive lock on access to or knowledge of God. The words “only” and “best” in this context make me break out in hives. I do not believe that there is only way to God, or that God can only be described by one system of theology. Even as the story of Jesus commends itself theologically to me more and more, I will not affirm that this is the sole true way to a knowledge and love of God. But I will avow that it is one good way, even one very good way, and that I am deeply grateful to be able to grapple with it in an increasingly substantive manner.