The God Squad
Your faith is a journey
Q: I love your column. It’s one of the few worthwhile things our paper has kept as they’ve continually purged and cut important features and sections to cope with the decline in circulation and advertising. As such, your column is one of the reasons we continue to subscribe. I do have a question for further clarification.
In a recent column, you responded to a question regarding a Christian mother/Jewish father, where you said: “First of all, there’s no such thing as a half anything. If you believe Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, who came to earth to die and be resurrected for your sins, then you’re a Christian. If you don’t, you aren’t. Period.”
Your response seems too cut-and- dried for such a complex issue. For example, I attend and enjoy a Lutheran Church, but I subscribe to the theology of Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong, who essentially reject literal interpretations of the Trinity, the Virgin birth and the Resurrection. Each Sunday, I recite the creeds and willingly take part in communion, as I find them comforting “traditions,” but I don’t take them literally (as Lutherans believe that the bread and wine are transformed). For me, it’s more metaphor and a comforting symbolic ritual.
Theologically, I’d probably be better off at a Unity Church, or perhaps Unitarian, but I find the approaches of both more of a philosophy than religion. I don’t think of myself as a hypocrite, but at the same time, I can’t honestly “proclaim” or proselytize, as do “true believers” and/or fundamentalists.
I believe in God and find Jesus’ teachings important and relevant, but I can’t come to grips with the core Trinity/Resurrection/Virgin birth component of Christianity. That said, can someone like me still be a Christian? According to your statement, the answer is “No.”
—W.
A: Thanks for your kind words and important critique. Frankly, what you are is less important to me than what you’re trying to become. Let’s leave to God the final judgment about whether or not you are, in fact, a Christian.
What is clear is that you’re a Christian in your spiritual journey. You’re honest enough, however, to realize that what you believe is different from the teaching of Christianity. Such honesty is refreshing. Many people are so wrapped up in their own egos that they insist the teaching of their faith is ever and always just exactly what they believe.
I encourage you to live with that difference and pray about that difference. God is not through with you yet, and you’re not through with God or Christianity. The great Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig was once asked if he observed one of the ritual commandments of Judaism and he answered, “Not yet.”
You haven’t yet entered the mystery of Transubstantiation and Incarnation. Maybe you never will, and maybe the reason is that you’re right and these are just symbolic truths. But maybe there is truth in these teachings that you can and will discover. The point is, you are comfortable in a traditional faith community, even if you’re not yet comfortable with its full theology.
My view is that just asking the questions the way you do is enough to keep you on the path to a truth I pray you’ll discover in time. The best course is not to join a church that never challenges you, but to humbly affirm both your conscience and your inherited faith.
Send questions to The God Squad, c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207, or e-mail them to godsquadquestion@aol.com .
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