I, Christian

I am a Christian.

Did you hear that? It was the sound of eyes being rolled, noiseless sighs, and people thinking: oh great, here we go...

Not that I can blame them. A few years ago, I would have done the same. Who am I kidding; I still do the same today. And, as with those who do likewise, all too often with good reason. Because saying I am a Christian usually evokes images of Bible-thumping, damnation-portending fundamentalists, or humourless, unsmiling Puritans. Or both. Frequently, it is a reaction that is justified. I just want to assure you that I’m neither.

How I became a Christian - or, more acurately, returned to Christianity - is a long story. Too long for this space. What is important for the purposes of this blog is to sketch out what I mean when I say: I am a Christian.

I believe in God. And not just any old God, but the One God: mysterious, ineffable, eternally extant, who is present in the natural laws underpinning the cosmos, who is creator not created. God who is love, who brought all creation into being through the processes science is only now learning to identify and investigate; God whose creation was and is an act of love, who wills that all creation exist in communion with God’s self. God who is not being, but who is.

I believe that Jesus Christ was God’s authoritative act of self-revelation, that in the person of Christ, God made manifest that hope which says that humanity’s ultimate fate is not death but eternal communion with God.

I believe the Holy Spirit is the mechanism through which God continues to work across history and human society; the enduring and ongoing effect of the hope revealed in the person of Christ.

In other words, I believe in the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What do I believe about the Bible? Do I believe that it is the literal Word of God? No, I don’t. What I believe about the Bible is that it is a powerful, evocative, always challenging, and sometimes disturbing, collection of human responses to the possibility of God. I believe it is the history of individual and societal responses to the intricacies and difficulties of faith, and of how people in their broken, incomplete, human way tried to make sense of the experience of revelation.

And I also believe this about the Bible: that those who put the Bible before God, who treat it as though it were the literal Word of God instead of an account of the human experience of revelation, are committing idolatry. Why? Because they give a human construction - the Bible - equal or greater status than God.

Does this make me a "liberal" Christian? A heretic? A quasi-Christian? A non-Christian who only appropriates the language of Christianity?

I don’t think any of these labels applies. I only see myself as a Christian, someone who has their own struggle to understand, their own path to tread. Someone who lives in a world of fellow travellers. To be sure, my expression of faith will be inadequate, incomplete; my articulation necessarily flawed. I don’t see this as a commentary on the quality of my faith; only that I am human, with human limitations.

What do I think about other faith traditions? Well, that’s a blog for another day. For the moment, it’s enough to tell you what I mean when I say: I am a Christian.

Talk to you soon,

BB