Immediately to your right on this website, you’ll notice a headline for Explorations In Faith And Belief. Let me tell you a little about these new essays, invite you to take a look for yourself, and ask you to share your reactions.
When I began writing columns for the Howe About series in mid-2002, as one of a congregation’s many outreach ministries, my principal concern was to bring the resources of faith and theology to our thinking as Christians about life in both the church and the world. If letters from readers are any indication, we are now reaching out to people in at least 30 states.
Most of the e-mails I get about one column and another are very supportive. Some are very angry, both with the situations about which I write and with what I write about them. And a few are just plain hostile and rejecting. But almost all correspondents acknowledge that “Howe About” gives them something to think about that is worth the effort. Who could ask for more? I am deeply grateful for all the responses, pro and con, and pray that they will keep coming.
One thing that many readers of Howe About have been asking me from the beginning --- pretty doggedly, to be truthful about it --- is for something that I have found very difficult to supply in the format originally designed for this series. They want more explicit discussions of the underlying theological bases for my ideas. As one regular reader implored me:
Look, you keep telling us that thinking “Christianly” involves using the Bible, church traditions, our experiences, our spirituality, and our reasoning abilities all together as we make up our minds about what to believe and do as Christians. Your columns are kind of like an end product of doing all this, but I’d like more on the process itself. Can you tell me more about biblical authority, for instance, or church tradition? And what kind of experiences of faith, or doubt for that matter, count the most? And how do faith and reason go together, if they do at all? In twenty-five words or less, of course!
Ok, you’re on! Not in twenty-five words, mind you, but not in a hugely long book either. The “Explorations” posted in this new “Thinking Christianly” group focus especially on beliefs in the life of faith, and on helping people, ourselves included, deal with the uncertainties, questions, and doubts that inevitably occur as we grow “in the knowledge and the love of God.” They are about the real issues of real people who have shared them with me over the years --- students, parishioners, counselees, family members, pastors, friends, therapists. Wherever necessary, I have shielded their identities by giving them names other than their own, and I have often changed details in what they have said to me in order to protect confidences still further. Nevertheless, I believe you will find their stories, even with the necessary editing, true to life and thought-provoking.
All of the essays in this group are offered as an expression of gratitude for the many conscientious believers and earnest inquirers in and around the edges of our churches for whom spiritual growth is impossible without probing ever more deeply the biblical, historical, and experiential foundations of faith and faith’s message to the world. The essays are grouped under broad headings and in a sequence, to suggest connections between them that I think will be worth tracking down. Nevertheless, they are written to stand alone also, and should be understandable and usable whether or not they are read with any of their companions. Each exploration is longer than a column, but shorter than a typical book chapter.
As has been the case with all of the Howe About columns, these “Explorations” are there for the taking. Read them on-line. Down-load them. Copy them. Send them to friends on your side as well as on the other sides of the issues. Re-print them. In short: use them in any way you choose. Hopefully, as you think and argue about them, you’ll share at least some of your reactions with me, so that we can continue to think “Christianly” together about both our faith and our questions, as a way of loving God with all our minds. (Mark 12:30)
The first Isaiah in the Old Testament still says it best. Like ancient Israel, we, too, have been invited to “come and reason together” --- not only among ourselves, but with God, who is in the very midst of the conversations also. The Hebrew verb at Isaiah 1:18 can be rendered even more tantalizingly: come and let’s “talk things over,” or even “argue them out.” Howe about it?
Finding Answers to Hard Questions About Faith is online