Why I’m still a Christian

If there is anything that makes some of my fellow Unitarian Universalists more uncomfortable than my military past and probably future, it is my willingness to call myself, both in public and from the pulpit, a Christian. I remember one day in particular that a parishioner in my internship congregation came up to me after a sermon and said “David, wonderful sermon… but you sounded almost like a Christian there at the end.”

I replied, “Almost? Well, I guess I’ll have to try harder then, won’t I?” That parishioner and I had an enlightening discussion in which he realized that though I consider myself a Christian, it was certainly not the kind of Christianity that he had rejected when he left the Catholic Church. I will never forget a few weeks later when the same parishioner came to me and told me he had done some thinking and he was “okay” with my Christianity. What was for him a serious moment of growth was for me one part awe, one part funny, and one part feeling condescended to.

At least he decided he was “okay” with my being both a UU and a Christian. Not everyone is.  Each of the times UU Christians have been called members of a “fringe religious movement within a fringe religious movement”, I think about stones and glass houses within this supposedly non-creedal UU faith tradition.  I have encountered many of my fellow UU’s who find even my use of the title “Christian” for myself mildly offensive. 

To be clear, my Christianity is about as heretical from the mainstream church as it gets… to say nothing about my distance from many of the more conservative iterations of the Christian faith (or the conservative tradition I was baptized in). One of the aspects of my Christian Faith that I find amazing is that when I have private conversations with many mainstream Christian ministers, I find that many believe similar things to what I do… but they often do not feel they can take those stands publically for fear of denominational reaction. I have born witness to private ministerial confessions of doubts of the trinity, to confessions of universal salvation, and to rejection of the resurrection as literal truth. Among the reasons that I am a Unitarian Universalist is that this non-creedal faith allows me to hold publically and prophetically many of these Christian theological “heresies” without fear of reprisal from the formal structures of my faith tradition… even if I do have to have the occasional conversation with a UU who can’t understand why I still call myself a Christian.

A couple of hundred years ago my Christian theology would have gotten me tied to a stake and set on fire, as it did for at least a few of my theological predecessors. Now, I am part of a religious tradition that grants me the freedom and responsibility to go where the theological spirit listeth, to continue listening for the voice of the divine, and to share my theology not in the hopes of conversion, but in the hope of inspiration.

Perhaps it would be best for me to lay out some of what I mean when I say “I am a Christian”. Admittedly, there will be those who say that my theology is either non-Christian or that it is Christian Heresy. In the first case… you are entitled to your opinion, but that’s between me and God. Have a care when you try to speak for God. In the second, I will give you my answer before hand… Thank You! Calling me a heretic as compared to where much of modern Christianity has found itself is high praise, and I revel in it. Unless you make an interesting argument, I will probably not post responses to this article than follow either of these trends. Simply put, I have been down both of those roads and find they do not really lead anywhere.

I believe in the radical unity of God. What I mean by that is that everything in the Universe is a part of God. God is in the air we breathe and the ground we tread upon… in the stars above and the atoms at the heart of all things. God is in us, and through our lives we can give expression to God. When as a child in a Southern Baptist church I “Invited Jesus into my heart” what I really did was recognize that God was always there, always a part of me… and I just had never seen it before.

I believe Jesus was a man, born of a woman (Mary) and a man (Joseph) who walked this earth and taught based upon a deep and profound understanding of this radical unity that is God. He had such a connection with the divine within us and all around us that he connected to other people in ways that were miraculous. The power of that connection to God and to others inspired healing in some, and inspired faith in many. Both Jesus and the people he ministered with understood what was happening through the world-views and religious-views of the time, and that is why many specific details of the writings from that time have to be re-understood in today’s world. But the implications of his connection to God and to others is, I believe, timeless… and has profound implications for our world today. I believe it is that depth of connection that Jesus had with the radical unity that is God that we call “Christ”… and it does not surprise me that some confused Jesus with God because of it.

I believe that to be Christian is to recognize that connection/communion with the radical unity of God that Jesus manifested, and to feel or aspire to that same communion ourselves.

I believe Jesus was a teacher, a prophet, a minister, a healer, a model for life and ministry… and that he had a depth of connection to the radical unity that is God that few have ever come close to, and perhaps no one has ever equaled. The Buddha came close, and perhaps understood that connection better… and many others have experienced it to varying degrees. I have felt that connection to God in prayer, watching a sunset, and holding the hand of someone as they die. However, Jesus did not encompass all that is God… and his essence was that of a man. That man died on the cross… and the resurrection that his disciples witnessed came from the depth of their connection to him. I am sure they experienced him after he died on the cross… in a more profound but similar way to how I continue to experience some those to whom I was spiritually close who have died. This resurrection of Jesus had nothing to do with the forgiveness of sin for the early church, and it has nothing to do with the forgiveness of sin for me. It is simply part of life and the divine… and Jesus is far from unique in that.

I believe the trinity is one attempt to understand the complexity of a God that is all and is in all… and not necessarily a bad one. I would have gone with God the Father, God the Mother, and God the Child myself… or the Progenitor, the Comforter, and the Potential (Has Been, Is Being, Will Be). However, the trinity as classically stated is just another metaphor for a God that is and will always remain beyond human comprehension in its completeness. Anyone who tries to make their image of God more than such a metaphor is, in my opinion, crossing over into the realm of Idolatry. I personally operate with many working metaphors for God… and remember constantly that they are all woefully inadequate to encompass “totality inclusive of time and conceived as a realm of meaning.” In fact, our metaphors about God probably tell us more about ourselves than they do about God. Perhaps the best metaphor for God is the one the Hebrew Scriptures give… “I AM”, or being itself.

I believe whatever happens to us after we die happens equally. This is not to say that I do not believe in Hell, because I certainly do. I just don’t think that Hell is dependent upon our heart to stop beating before we experience it. Millions, perhaps billions of people are walking this earth right now trapped in the grips of Hell. Some are trapped in hells of alcohol and substance addiction, some are trapped in hells of depression, of mental illness, of abuse. I know that those few years after Bosnia for me were like walking through a level of hell, if a mild one compared to others. In depression and suicide research, I have heard a description of feeling that you are trapped a thousand feet deep in a well… so deep that you have no hope of ever seeing the light and cannot even imagine finding a way out. So you just sit down and die.

I contend that the person who feels that depth of hopelessness is in Hell long before their heart stops beating. The idea that Hell is something separate from our human condition on this earth has been used as an excuse not to address the hells that are all around us. Finding your way out of the hells we experience is a religious generic imitrex ingredients imperative not for some afterlife, but for this life. The mission of the Christian church should not be to help people avoid a metaphysical hell after death, but to help people find their way out of the depths of the hells they are experiencing while their hearts are still beating.

Just as I do not believe that Hell is a metaphysical place we will arrive at after death, neither do I believe that the Kingdom (or Realm, in more gender neutral language) of God refers to a metaphysical afterlife. When Jesus preached about the coming Kingdom of God, I believe he was talking about a state of being… about a commitment to peace and justice, a commitment to honoring God, living with the sacred trust of faith, and loving our fellow human beings with depth and compassion. The greatest description I have found of the Kingdom of God to this day (imperfect though it is) is in the Unitarian Universalist Principles, though I know that is not what they thought they were doing when the committee drafted them. In reality, however, the Kingdom of God is a set of commitments and a state of being that, if it comes to fruition in enough lives will become an inspirational spark that will transform the world, transform history, and transform what it means to be human. Many of those “prophets” that have inspired my life, theology, and ministry are those in whom I see reflected the Kingdom of God… Buddha, King, Gandhi, Barton, David, Socinus, many, many others… and of course Jesus of Nazareth. None of them manifested the Kingdom of God perfectly alone, for I believe that we can only truly see the Kingdom when it is manifested by many of us, together in community. For such reason were we called into ecclesia… or to be a church.

What happens after we die will take care of itself… with two caveats. First, I believe that whatever the afterlife is like (and I do believe that we continue even after our hearts stop beating) it will happen for all of us equally. Now, where I am fuzzy on this is that it is possible that what we carry with us in this life, we carry with us in the next. If your spirit is troubled in this life, (if you are stuck in, say, a hell of addiction or of fear) it is possible that you carry those with you. Not that you are stuck with them for all eternity (for I believe that the afterlife is one of change), but that what we experience in this life matters. In this way, there is a reason beyond the beating of our hearts to help people find peace, forgiveness, and love in this world. This is why atonement and redemption matter far more to us as humans in this world than they could possibly matter to God. We seek forgiveness for our trespasses not because God needs it, but because we do.

Second, we should not worry too much about what the afterlife is like… for I believe the radical unity that is God extends even beyond this temporal plane. I do not believe that a loving God leaves any of his children in hell forever… and that we are called to help one another find peace, justice, and forgiveness. In this way, both the “Kingdom of God” and the hells we humans can become trapped in are not metaphysical places we go after we die, but rather realities we experience and can create here on this earth that have the possibility of going with us when we throw off this mortal coil. And, of all the great questions about faith, God, and theology… this is the only one we are guaranteed an answer to, for we will all die.

Now you may notice that though I have made many references to scripture in the New Testament, I have not made any quotes… and that has been on purpose. I believe that the writings that were bound by the 2nd Century Church in the Canon represent a median of that early church’s attempts to make sense of the life and death of Jesus, and to support the building of Christianity as a new religious movement and not a subset of Judaism. The Hebrew Scriptures represent a people’s struggle to understand their relationship to God and to one another. Neither are the Word of God. They are the words of humans seeking to understand God. There have been many such words of humans that seek to understand God, and to the amount that each of them is inspirational to me or to many millions of others, they constitute my understanding of scripture. I do not have to agree with everything I consider to be scripture. I disagree with much of the Gospel of John, and yet it has inspired me to much of what I do believe about God, about Jesus, and about faith. However all such “scripture” is the word of humans attempting to understand God and ourselves.

I believe the “Word of God” is found in the “Creation” itself. When you see the interconnection between the smallest atoms and the largest galaxies, you are seeing the Word of God. When you see the intricate movement of life from microbes to Mammoths, you are seeing the Word of God. When you recognize that for all our differences, we humans and all things are bound together in an “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part”, you are seeing the Word of God. To believe that mere human words can come to represent all of the totality that is God is, again, to move into the realm of Idolatry.

And as the universe is ever-changing, ever moving, ever growing… so too is the Word of God and the words of humans that God inspires. Even more importantly than a changing growing Universe (and God, for that matter) is the reality that our human understanding of God (and of ourselves) is forever changing and growing. The Canon that humans created can be sealed by the traditional Christian Churches, but the Canon of all that God is can never be sealed. In truth, I believe that the sealing of the Christian Canon was a mistake, and such is one of my many heresies for which I am profoundly grateful I can no longer be set on fire. I prefer new meanings for being “on fire for your faith”.

As God is always changing and growing, as the Word of God is always changing and growing, as Scripture is always changing and growing, as human understanding of all of the above is always changing and growing… so too should part of our ideal be to be changing and growing. To not be changing and growing is to stagnate or decline… and such is a metaphor for death while trapped in a deep well of hell.

As such, even this articulation of my theology and my Christian identity is but a moment in time, and will be developed and revised each and every day of my life. I believe it is not my theology that makes me a Christian, but what I am called to do with that belief… in that I find Jesus of Nazareth as one of the primary models of my life.

I understand my ministry as not being “about” Jesus, but in the tradition of Jesus. I consider him the founding minister in my tradition of being a minister. Now, I hope my ministry will last quite a bit longer than his did… but the combination of a ministry of compassion and prophetic justice, of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and of using the example of living as best I can to inspire others to listen to my words and thoughts about life, the Universe, and Everything is my hope for my ministry. I see in Jesus’ ministry a commitment to the marginalized, to forswearing undue reward and adulation, and to standing up against hypocrisy and injustice. I see in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth a mission to call people to a radical new way of living, of loving, and of being with one another and God, on this earth and perhaps beyond it… and I see him calling our attention to the possible catastrophic consequences of not reforming what it means to be human. I see him dining with “tax collectors and sinners” rather than placing himself on a pedestal. I see him healing the sick and giving hope to the hopeless. It is in that example that I find a calling for life and for ministry… and an acceptance that there are costs for this kind of ministry, perhaps even life itself (not necessarily a metaphor for a ministry in a wartime military.)

It is in all of these ways and more that I am a Christian… and I hope you can see in this theology why there is no religious community I could practice my faith in other than Unitarian Universalism. Perhaps I am on the fringe of the fringe… but I am reminded that this is also where Jesus found himself in his society and culture, and I am content with that. Inspired even…

Yours in faith,

David