TRUE FAITH - Foundation of My Theology

Faith in Christ Means Faith in His Values

I’m not really one to judge people based on whether or not they have “faith in Jesus Christ.” Of course faith in Jesus is important to me, personally, as a person who is trying to follow the Christian path to God, but I have long ago given up on the idea that there is only one path. I don’t believe that good people of any faith are unacceptable to a God who so loved the world that he would send his son to save us. I think that a kind and loving Muslim, atheist, Buddhist or Hindu has at least as good of a chance of seeing the face of God as I do as a wealthy American Christian. Why? Because it is entirely possible to live Jesus faith, whether or not you’ve been taught to have faith in Jesus himself.

When asked what the greatest commandments were, Jesus did not hesitate to remind his fellow Jews of what the old testament taught: that there are really only two commandments, from which all else flows. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40 NSRV)

The first of these is to love God entirely. To do that, we need to look past our various conceptualizations of God and try to understand what God is. I say try, because I don’t think any human mind, at least not in our present forms, can completely understand the nature of God. We can, however, come up with some useful generalizations that I think point us in the right direction. For many Christians, God is the old man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; a human-like figure who is profoundly more than human. He speaks, and sometimes acts, in very tangible ways in our world, and other times seems to be distant. For others, God is a presence, a spirit, or a foundation upon which all else rests. I think that this is as close as we have to a knowable, sharable truth about God: God is the foundation of existence, somehow above and beyond what we know and experience, but also inextricably linked to us and our existence.

It doesn’t take much imagination to follow this to it’s logical conclusion: that all good people have a sense of an underlying ground of existence, whether they conceptualize it as God, Allah, principals of other religions or philosophies, or a set of incredibly complex laws of physics, chemistry and biology. In each and every case, there is something upon which our own existence depends. Our happiness, knowledge, and welfare depend on the understanding of it. Our conceptualizations of God will not, and should not, match. In fact, I suspect that our salvation may depend on the fact that we all pursue our different concepts of God. If we all followed God in only one form, we would risk limiting our total understanding. So while I would like my atheist friends to acknowledge that there may be more to existence than physics explains, I don’t want them to hang up their equations and call it a day either. I would be utterly horrified if my friends in biological sciences stopped searching for cures to disease and took up nothing but meditation. I think it’s vital to explore the wonders of God, from the power of the Spirit to the incredible art with which God used biology to make us animate beings. A deep love of whatever part of God you are drawn to is a deep love of God, and I think that if you follow that path of learning far enough, you’ll end up at the same God I do through prayer.

As Jesus points out, however, a deep love of God is one facet of being a good person, but not the one and only facet. To put it another way, it’s not good enough to celebrate your own existence. To do so is to limit your vision and to deny the full reality of God. Because you and I individually cannot fully grasp the reality of God, we rely on each other, or at least we should. And so Jesus tells us that the second great commandment is much like the first: to love your neighbor as yourself.

Why would I love my neighbor as myself? My neighbor is not necessarily like me, is perhaps even unattractive to me in many ways, and is sometimes, frankly, not very loveable. My neighbor believes things I don’t, likes things I do not, looks, talks, and acts oddly. It’s hard enough to love my fellow Christians, how, and why, would I love “my neighbor?”

I suspect that Jesus was telling us something more profound than we give him credit for. Love your neighbor, this is like the first commandment, to love God. How? You alone do not possess the whole truth. If you love God, if you wish to know God, you can only get close by loving others. If you fail to love the different perspective your neighbor gives you, then you fail to love some aspect of God. If you embrace your neighbor and examine their perspective, treat them as a repository of sacred knowledge, you have a chance to use their perspective to enhance your own limited view of God. You would want your neighbor to take into account your view, to make room for your separate existence, and so you must do the same for your neighbor. Think of it as a cosmic division of labor.

Jesus tells us that on these two principals, all else hangs, and I believe him. Your life hangs on physics, on biology, on the power of the Holy Spirit, on the calm achieved in meditation; on some aspect of God’s love. While you cannot be aware of the totality of God, you can be aware of all those other people, who, just like you, are deeply involved in finding some aspect of the truth of our existence. So follow your path, safe in the knowledge that your neighbors are following other paths for you. Someday, we may get the chance to tell the stories of our different journeys to one another when we all reach our mutual destination.