The Pressure to Believe

Many thoughtful Christians I know --- layfolks, pastors, and bishops alike --- are feeling increasing pressure to bring or to keep their beliefs in conformity with the church's normative teaching through the centuries --- in a word, with "the faith of the apostles" --- or else. Most resist the pressure well, and some even turn the tables on their pressurers. "Judge not, lest ye be judged…" still seems to level the playing field effectively in the game of serious theologizing.

Nevertheless, pressures continue, and not always from right field. From all the way beyond shortstop to the left field stands come "who cares???" shouts --- about anything from the past imposing itself upon present day Christian life, the apostolic tradition included. To muddy the metaphors still further: whether they are sitting on the right side or the left side of the pews, people engaging in these kind of pressure tactics should know better. Insisting that Christians must hold only the "right" beliefs, or that they must hold any and all traditional beliefs in suspension, is another form of works-righteousness: its unjustifiable premise is that we are saved by what we do and do not choose to believe.

To be sure, a little pressure to get right with our faith tradition is not all bad. What people are supposed to believe as Christians is not something that the church has just made up as it has gone along. Sorting out all of the implications of the apostolic tradition for Christian living in the present has always been arduous business, deserving of attention and respect. It matters a lot, though, who does the sorting and how open they are to letting the apostolic tradition speak to us on its own terms and not theirs. The single most important discovery I keep making in my own sorting is that figuring out what the tradition does and does not demand of us is more complicated than we would like it to be.

Recently, a respected colleague in ministry, George Ricker, published a book with the winsome title, What You Don't Have To Believe To Be A Christian. It's all about the beliefs from which God has liberated us, and the rich new possibilities of understanding that constantly dawn on the horizon of reasoned, prayerful inquiry into the truth. George is one of the best read, most effective pastors that I know. He is a more than reliable guide through the morass of over-belief that is now threatening the church's vitality everywhere.

One chapter of George's book, on the Trinity, especially interested me. What we don't have to believe about this doctrine, he writes, is that it is an accurate portrayal of the inner being of God. What we can believe, instead, and still be a Christian, is that the doctrine expresses well how human beings experience God.

This seems innocent enough, until we bring to mind the many theologians who come to this same conclusion in a way quite different from the way that George does. Their standard rejection of traditional trinitarian doctrine is that it is based upon an outmoded world-view. Since the world-view doesn't square with our own, the argument goes, then we must relieve people from having to defend it, and the doctrines that go with it, anymore. I think that this ploy carries about as much validity as the doesn't-fit-must-acquit argument does in the infamous "OJ" trial. As that trial's jurors showed the whole world, though, sometimes there's just no accounting for mental lapses.

No one has ever thought that George Ricker's mind was fried, though, and he proves his intellectual mettle again in the way that he opens up fresh new inquiry about very old beliefs, without having to reject the world-view behind the Christian tradition. With respect to the Trinity, George shows us what we don't have to believe about it simply by appealing to the great variety of opinion about the doctrine contained in the Christian tradition itself.

There is an important lesson to be learned here by people ready to bludgeon fellow Christians whose faith they deem at variance with the Christian tradition. It is that the weapon with which they would slay unbelievers is more often than not only a partial, and therefore partially wrong, understanding of the very tradition which they claim to defend. In the Christian tradition as a whole, there are far more understandings of the Christian gospel than any of us could possibly become informed spokespersons for. (Has anybody really straightened it out yet what Jesus did and did not say about his next coming?) Paradoxically, this also means that our traditions contain far less that we must believe than most traditionalists seem willing to concede.

In the fullest sense of the phrase, the more's the pity.