1. Journey: Where I’ve been, how we got here, where we’re going

Welcome to “How I Kept the Faith,” an online journal about theology.

This is the story of how my beliefs got to where they are from where I started, a summary of some important influences from across Christian history, and my own explorations of the Christian faith going forward.

Theology at every step of the journey

 As a lifelong Christian believer, I have studied theology in some way or another since I was a small child, even when I didn’t know that is what I was doing.

 As a child, I assembled the various teachings of preachers and family and my own limited yet creative understanding into a basic structure of belief.

That was theology.

It was more of a passive theology, as I absorbed a lot of doctrine at face value, without criticism. But still, my Christian family—the Church as I knew it—was collectively interpreting the scriptures and making decisions about what those scriptures meant for our beliefs and daily lives.

Kicking against the pricks

 As an adolescent, I wanted to smash the pillars of that structure that felt so narrow and restrictive.

That too, was theology.

This was an engaged theology, when I started to look beyond the teachings of my childhood, reading what was actually on the page, and noting the difference. I began to interrogate my doctrine, and wondered if in history, there had been other possible ways to interpret what I’d always taken for granted as “Biblical” teaching.

As a young man, I tore through the Bible and its history, determined to find out “the truth,” or leave my faith in shreds trying to find it.

Theology.

This was a theology that ranged between angry and desperate, as on one hand I tested my theory that Christianity as we had received it was little more than a tiny cult in 1st century Palestine that stole its ideas from other philosophies in nearby regions—a cult that got way out of hand once started to be used as a tool by the Empire—and on the other, I feared what would happen to me and my foundations if I did expose Christianity to be a fraud.

As I studied the history of the Bible and the ways it had been handed down—books assembled from multiple sources, oral traditions committed to writing decades after the events they communicated, manuscripts pieced together from a patchwork of fragments in multiple languages, a canon selected from a much larger pool of possible canonical writings through the heated arguments of a committee, writings full of contradictions with one another but glossed over in interpretation—the pages of the book seemed to fall apart in my hand.

The Kingdom was the key

But then, like a last-minute reprieve, in my senior year class on the origins of Christianity class, I first truly encountered the concept of the “Kingdom of Heaven.” It really brought Jesus back to life for me. It was not some far-off promise of a gold-plated Heaven, but a radical upheaval of earthly values that was happening right now, among us and near us, even though it had not yet been fully realized.

In the Kingdom of Heaven, everything was upside-down: the poor were exalted and the rich walked away disappointed, the last would be first and the first last, the prodigal was welcomed and the obedient ignored, the lost sheep was sought while the flock of 99 was left alone, and a tiny mustard seed could become a mighty tree. The Kingdom was weird, it was foolish, it was hard to grasp, and it was lovely.

I discovered I could use the Kingdom of Heaven as a key to interpreting the whole of scripture, looking at how Christ said, “you have heard it said this way, but I say it this way,” and realizing that not only did all scripture need to be interpreted, but that scripture had a history of interpreting and re-interpreting itself, as God progressively made God’s love clearer, even as God made God’s nature a greater mystery.

I realized that the Bible made so much more sense read through this lens, not so much to my mind, but it certainly witnessed to my heart.

We were definitely doing some theology in there.

A faith evolves

During the time that I tried to hold God at arm’s length, because it felt intellectually irresponsible to embrace the divine without some empirical evidence that I could see, touch, and understand, I was doing theology.

As I pored through histories and apologetics and testimonies to find the data I needed, Jesus was there, even when He was the one with whom I was wrestling. Fighting with someone can look very much like dancing with someone, from a distance. The shadow of Jesus loomed over me, even as I tried to find proof for the light.

And it was theology, in the form of a series of rational arguments that created and justified the existence of the irrational, that allowed me to finally surrender and admit that I believed—I just believed—whether I wanted to or not.

And now, I continue to listen, to read, to search for new ideas, and to stay open to the new ideas that I would not have sought out—even if they make me uncomfortable—so I can collect the ones that fit the best with the ever-evolving shape of my faith, and live my daily life based on my best understanding of what I have learned so far, that too is theology.

The journey continues

This is a journal of where I have been, where I am, and where I am going.

In this context, I will be talking about a few things as I sketch out the parameters of my faith.

One avenue I will be writing about is my own faith background. I don’t think I could look clearly at my faith today and tomorrow without a clear-eyed review of what I’ve learned, accepted, rejected, and been challenged by throughout my life as a believer.

I will also use this space to talk about the larger Church, the Body of Christ. Although we are supposed to be “one body,” we are more like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz when he is torn apart by the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys: “Well, that’s us all over.” Not just divided in two, but splintered into thousands of factions, many with no common ground to stand on. I want to look over Christian history to examine the origins of our splits and schisms, and explore many of the ways that Christianity has been celebrated over the last 2,000 years. I hope that somewhere in that history we can find commonalities that may help create bridges between different groups of believers.

Once I have examined my own past in some detail, prayerfully testing each detail like individual beads in a rosary, and examined the Church’s past as well, I want to use this place to do NEW theology. May this space be a creative blackboard, a playground, a think tank and wellspring, a launch pad and a new world, where ideas flourish, are refined and sharpened, and I can grow in faith and understanding.

My life has been, and continues to be, a theological journey.

Thank you for taking this journey with me.