Christianity, as it most often is understood today, boils down to a couple of core concepts: orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxis (right action). Orthodoxy, in all of its forms, values the ability to formulate Christian concepts into the proper words and then to stick to them, take a stand with them. It goes something like this: “Hi my name is Bob, and I believe in the virgin birth.”
Orthodoxy
For millions of professing believers getting this formula correct is paramount. After all, doesn’t it say—“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved”? And of course this kind of believing isn’t a simple thing. As someone once responded to a man who affirmed his faith in Jesus, “Which Jesus, exactly?” Because there are some differences. There’s the American Jesus who is pro-economic expansion, highly capitalistic, a dyed in the wool individualist, pro capital punishment, anti-tree hugging (after all he did kill a fig tree didn’t he—this puts him in camp with loggers everywhere), etc… There’s historic Jesus—who, as one recent Jesus Seminar liberal scholar described him, was most probably short, balding, and pudgy; a skilled mental wrangler, and rabbi in the Jewish tradition with nothing exceptional except that he caught the attention of exceptional followers. There’s hippie Jesus—anti-American to the core. There’s Che Guevara Jesus, who simply lacks a machine gun to be relevant to the class struggles of South America. Well, you get the idea. There’s just a lot of versions of this Jesus fellow. It’s tricky, even agreeing that one needs to believe in Jesus, just knowing which one gets our belief.
Thankfully, two thousand years of intellectual wrangling has given us uncanny clarity as to what this really means. For one thing it means agreeing that Jesus is Co-equivalent with God the Father. He wasn’t just a nice young man who got killed for being a professional do-gooder…He was God in the flesh. It also means believing that God got into the flesh through a rather immaculate and improbable conception—The virgin birth. Of course all of belief is predicated on the assumption that every word in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible is mostly literal—especially the creation account and the miracles of Jesus while on earth. It also means that Jesus literally died on a cross (as opposed to only appearing dead, but actually being in some kind of coma or trance), descended into Hell where he re-captured the keys of death from Satan, then was resurrected—supernaturally and bodily (meaning it really happened, he didn’t just come back as a ghost or something). And lastly after ascending to heaven (where he now sits at the right hand ), he waits for the appropriate moment when he will return to finish the work started in his first three years of ministry—though this time he will not leave any one confused if he was a hippie or not…he will be all business, so to speak (blood up to his horses bridle, sword drawn, etc…)
Clearly I’m being a little tongue and cheek. I don’t mean to be disrespectful—except to say that so much emphasis has been placed on these words, that they be literal and concrete and rigidly bought into or asserted as true and right. Each of these facts is seen as absolutely essential to the other—pluck one out, and as Rob Bell noted, the whole brick wall of fundamentalist faith, falls down. This is what it means to be orthodox—to have a right belief. It translates as having the proper mental structures that you hold onto, the correct categories to put your doctrines in.
Here’s where I’d like to take a right hand turn.
The Challenge of Terry
My friend Terry is medically labeled as profoundly retarded. His IQ is somewhere squarely located around 40. His memory is progressively degenerating. He, at times, fails to remember the names of people he’s known his entire life, let alone facts that you or I might take for granted. Now here’s the interesting thing. Terry is also a believing Christian. This is something he feels very strongly about. His faith, his belief, is very important to him. But if you ask him what this means he will be absolutely incapable of formulating anything close to the set of dogma’s I’ve described above. Even if I were to describe in great detail, or walk him through all of these core, foundational affirmations he would still not grasp them. It makes him frustrated to even begin talking about these kind of things. But, his answer to what faith means to him is revealing. His response is to touch his heart, soften his eyes and make a kind of swooning motion with his shoulders. For Terry Christianity means that at the center of his experience he connects to a sense of love. For him, this is God. This is, to him, what it means to be a Christian. These days I find myself asking if there is really anything orthodox, or more “correct” than this.
Because if there is–if all the formulations and right words and nuanced concepts that demand absolute belief, are necessary—then Terry doesn’t stand a chance. And if I’m really being honest, I’m right there along with him. Most times I fail to get the formula. Right beliefs, appearing from the stable base of historic Christianity, have never come easy for me. I don’t get them, don’t agree with many of them. Often I just don’t see it. Even when I do, my thoughts are finite at best.
Persons with profound cognitive disabilities tend to teach us that the truly significant thing, the main thing, is located at the ineffable core of our being—where we are left stammering for words, any words, just to express our experience of being loved by an indescribably Love that seems to pass all understanding.
For Terry, for others who share his challenges, and maybe for the rest of us too, what makes a Christian isn’t so much what we believe, rather it is that we are beloved.
The scriptures concerning salvation all boil down to this: Unless you become as a child with a child’s simplicity and trust, you cannot enter into a personal relationship with God. This is no problem for Terry, being like a child is natural for him. It is the rest of us who struggle because we are “Adults”, educated, mature and knowledgable. The more we “know” the less of faith we exhibit. Without faith we cannot please God. SO why do we chose to attempt to fit God into our scope of mentality? If I can understand and explain God, then God is no greater than I am, and certainly not worthy of worship. Quite the opposite is true. Salvation, God’s love, His personality and motivation are great mysteries to human-kind. The more we know, the more we know that we DON’T know.
It is the moral of that wonderful story “The Truth Store” where a man comes across a place that sells absolute truth. When he inquires about the price of such truth the response is “It is very steep–costing your certainty…” In order to know reality we must let go of our rigid concepts. This is why orthodox formulas rarely are adequate in articulating reality–they capture what has already passed us by…
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