This is Part 1 of a two part article adapted for use in West Hill United Church’s newsletter, The Salt Shaker. The original appeared in the magazine Women’s Concerns, Summer 2006. It is not the kind of Part 1 that can stand alone; it seriously needs Part 2. Seriously. Don’t leave me hanging here…. Who are we? How do we define ourselves? What would be the words we would use, need, create, discard, reimagine? So much of our value, our worth, is tied up in who we believe that we are. We’d do well to have all the major identifiers straightened out, at the ready, should anyone ask: North American, educated, white, married, female, with children–a description that doesn’t begin to cover the whole of who I am. More’s needed. (Deep breath.) Okay, I’ll say it: I’m Christian. Or, at least, I call myself one. When it’s safe. Many of my friends would say the same thing. Probably they would, that is, if they are. But then, how does one know anymore? Ask any Roman Catholic and they’ll define Christian one way, a Protestant, will say another. Eastern rites and Seventh Day Adventists; Mormons and Christian Unitarian Universalists. Ask any number of Baptists to define what it means to be a Christian and you’ll get nearly as many answers. It isn’t easy, anymore. Not as easy as it used to be. Well, sort of. There have been differences of opinion since the beginning of the beginning, I suppose. That’s why there are so many gospels out there, only a few of which are actually part of the Bible. Each author, each community, seems to have developed its own understanding of what it meant and promoted their own beliefs as widely as they could. Before them, there had been as many different understandings of Judaism, a fact that made the plethora of beliefs surrounding Christianity so comfortable to the infant faith. Gerd Ludeman, like so many theologians, has attempted to decode the gospel narratives and understand what Jesus was all about. His particular spin has Jesus believing that he was especially appointed to bring God’s rule into effect, restoring the twelve tribes of Israel to rule (including the ten that had been destroyed centuries before by the Assyrians) and ultimately presiding over a cosmic council, the twelve disciples joining him to judge those same twelve tribes. Ludeman’s perspective sees Jesus’ followers, after his death, continuing on in their belief that they had been chosen to bring about the fulfillment of the cosmos. They believed they were special, that they held an exalted position. In the face of such a belief, they could do anything. Ludeman argues that reason, with its proofs and its tests, fell unused and discarded, by the wayside. Infallibility gave the movement its wings, allowed it to find support in the texts of the Jewish prophetic announcements, and began the process of choosing gospels and developing the belief system of the church we have inherited. To call oneself Christian (although likely a derogatory term at the time) would mean to place oneself amongst the elect, to be in the position to judge others, to be more holy.[1] Well, so says Ludeman. Another theologian would have another perspective. And another, another. I like Ludeman, though. He makes Jesus seem just slightly mad. Passionate and very real, but definitely a little bit mad. There is a vulnerability in that. In the early years, understandings of who or what Jesus was grew and spread like wildfire, each little group developing its own ways to be holy, to be part of that Christian reality, whatever it was. And the exponential interpretations of the interpretations only served to make things all the more confusing over time. By the end of the nineteenth century, things were alarmingly out of hand. So many splits, some centuries old, rankled the church. But more threatening even than that, new ways of thinking, new disciplines of study, new explorations into the known world and into the soft sciences, were also weighing on the definition of Christian. At the Niagara Bible Conference, in the 1890s, the Five Fundamentals were born.[2] As clear as the day is long, they neatly described what it meant to be a Christian. Sighs of relief may have been expected from around the world but it was not to be. Although the Fundamentals seemed to satisfy many, the work of cracking open the texts and examining them with new hermeneutical tools was too exciting to be stopped. Scholars tinkered and toiled on, exposing, questioning, unearthing, questioning again. Their noise continues to this day. Even so, it would be nice if we could come up with one or maybe two things we could agree upon. True enough, five was too ambitious an attempt; for most mainline Christians, the fundamentals have proven to be a full five too many. In the simpler days of early Christianity, even with all its different interpretations, there was one thing they could agree upon: the bodily resurrection of Jesus. It is certain that once-unifying belief will not hold us now. Not all of us, anyway. Christianity has grown up. Or, to be more precise, parts of Christianity have grown up. Passing through the stage known as ‘critical thinking,’ those cantankerous adolescent years when nothing anyone ever says is simply taken as fact, we’ve asked the questions, pried open the mysteries, tasted the holy water and found it all based on very little. Very, very little. The Bible, the book with all the answers, the authoritative word of God, comes apart in tatters in our hands when we look at it too closely, its authors all too human, its hopes all to simplistic for us to believe anymore. We are left with no proof of God, no words from God’s lips, no divine child saving us forever and ever, and nowhere to turn for that simple hope we once knew. We are left, too, with a sick feeling in our stomachs, the aftermath of a destructive, tribal faith that is responsible for far too many sallow pages of pain and horror in the book of life. So why do we worry when others suggest that we, with our critical eyes and demanding questions, aren’t really Christian at all? Why is it important to identify what it is that lets us keep the name, stay in the club? There are few who go back to believing in the tooth fairy once mommy has been caught sliding the loonie under the pillow. Yet we are reluctant to cast ourselves into an uncaring and indifferent world, afraid that our stories will become rootless, meaningless, lost. Over the course of the past century, the United Church has, three times, considered what it believes and sought to write it down. The third is still in progress as the Theology and Faith Committee writes, edits, and rewrites its way to General Council in Thunder Bay this August. Each time it has been difficult. Each time it has included contradiction, wavering attempts at honouring a multiplicity of perspectives. There are many understandings of faith that have gone unwritten, that, over time, have grown and sheltered generations, softening from the vivid passions of their youth into the beautiful hues of their maturity. That they were unwritten allowed for their transformation, for their graceful aging, for the confession of their sins and the determination to be different from what they once were. In their fluidity lies a commonality toward which we might all reach as we seek to identify ourselves as people of faith. We, too, have lived an unwritten faith these many years. In the ashes of what we once believed, we have found gifts of truth that are eternal–the need to live in right relationship, to build community, to honour life and all creation, to find within another’s eyes a dignity whose fragile presence is only held there by our gaze, to care enough to reach beyond our own self care and want to ease another’s burden. Where these truths came from, how we know them, what it is that rises in our hearts when we encounter them, we neither know nor understand and will not deign to say. But we do know we must live by them. As we explore these truths, these values upon which we would build our understanding of the world, these unwritten descriptions of what we mean when we say we are Christian, we find that they are not only ours, but are shared by many throughout the world–people of faith, people of science, people of good will. We merely came to them through Christianity, through the difficult process of questioning our own beliefs and discarding those that have blocked these truths for too long. Others come to them by other pathways. We find we have woven together with those many others a highway to understanding. And it is a highway we can walk upon together with honour and joy. It is the answer to our existential angst, a confidence in our sisters and brothers. As we journey, as those who have not used our path are recognized alongside us, will it be important that we identify ourselves as Christian? For those of us for whom the faith tradition out of which we have grown roots our understanding of who we are, yes, it will be an integral part of who we are as we walk. For those of us for whom the weight of the tradition must one day be shed and left at the side of this broad and freeing highway, the name will no longer be necessary we will walk ahead undisturbed by its absence. The world is at a critical juncture. Fundamentalist faith groups continue to lay claim to otherworldly salvation and promise to risk the health and wholeness of this wondrous planet in their attempts to achieve it. Corporate interests lure the world’s population toward the blindness of personal self-absorption and whilst we are thus distracted, feed upon our vulnerabilities. To be a person of faith, any faith, for me, is not so much to believe in a set of tenets or doctrine, ecclesial ruminations called orthodoxy, as it is to believe that we can struggle against the systems that threaten our world and hope that, in the end, we will overcome them. Inspired by the hope I first encountered in the warmth of the springtime, nurtured by the cycles of life my faith strengthened as I grew, and welcomed by a world-wide community of hope, I do this as a Christian. ________________________________________ [1] Gerd Ludeman, Jesus After Two Thousand Years: What He Really Said and Did (London: SCM Press, 2000) [2] The Five Fundamentals as determined by the Niagara Bible Conference included • the inerrancy of the Scriptures • the virgin birth and the deity of Jesus • the doctrine of substitutionary atonement through God’s grace and human faith • the bodily resurrection of Jesus • the authenticity of Christ’s miracles (or, alternatively, his premillenial second coming)
Gretta Vosper is a minister and atheist. She is a Best-Selling author of two books and founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.