Introduction: Christianity is unique among the world's great religions in the premium it places on religious belief. This is not an altogether good thing. The result has often been a distortion in the way Christians have appropriated the witness of both the Old and New Testaments. Orthodox belief has become the sine qua non of true Christian faith. More often than not, Christian leaders and teachers seem to act on the assumption that people are wholly accountable for their beliefs. The assumption is implicit in every declaration concerning what Christians must believe, and in every exhortation regarding believing faith. Of course, statements of Christian belief are also intended to inform, convince, and persuade. But what are we to do about those who, after being informed, are neither convinced nor persuaded? What about those, for example, who find the ancient creeds and/or many of the traditional doctrines and teachings of the Christian Church to be quite incredible in light of what we now think and know about the world in which we live?

Beliefs are very problematic for Christian faith. It is a huge mistake for Christians to define themselves, above all, in terms of what they believe. There are three decisive reasons for this: 

1) For the most part, we do not choose to believe what we believe. 

2) However necessary beliefs may be, they invariably tend to be divisive. 

3) Although Christian faith surely involves beliefs about certain matters (e.g., God, Jesus Christ, the Bible, salvation), faith is fundamentally a matter of trusting relationship rather than cognitive consent.

For the most part, we do not choose to believe what we believe. 

First: New Testament scholar Marcus Borg relates how he used to tell his religion students that they could get an A without doing any work in the course if they could believe that there was an invisible elephant standing in the corner of the classroom. Needless to say, although this may have prompted many of the students to want to believe there was an elephant in the corner, no student was ever able to make himself believe. "The point is not to suggest that God is like an invisible and non-existent elephant," says Borg; "the point, rather, is that we cannot make ourselves believe something which seems radically questionable to us." I would put it this way: Religious belief is not simply a matter of volition or choice; we cannot make ourselves believe something that is clearly at odds with our experience or inconsistent with what we already believe.

Thus, I cannot believe that Joshua made the sun stand still, or that Jesus was born of a virgin. Both of these claims are clearly inconsistent with too much else that I believe. Moreover, I cannot believe that it is necessary or even important to believe such things in order to be a faithful Christian. In my experience there are many faithful Christians who do not hold to such beliefs.

Unfortunately, it is hard to escape the impression these days that there are many people and groups in the Presbyterian Church - not just the so-called Confessing Church people - who would insist that in order to be a good, right-thinking Presbyterian, one must believe quite a number of things that, in my experience, are simply incredible. At one time they may not have been incredible, but they are incredible today. By "incredible," I do not mean "fantastic" or "hard to fathom" or "mysterious". I mean un-believe-able. They are things that many people I know simply are not able to believe. No matter how much you might promise them! No matter with what horrors you might threaten them! And I am not just talking about some of those old "fundamentals," like the inerrancy or infallibility of scripture, or the virgin birth. I am also talking about claims that Jesus Christ is God's sole means of salvation for all people in the world. I also wonder about all renewed but inept attempts to define God as the Trinity (we seem to have forgotten that the primary motivation for this doctrine was to affirm the unity, not the threeness of God). There are lots of other traditional Christian doctrines and teachings that I could mention, which no longer are intellectually coherent or experientially compelling, but that is not my point. My point is that no amount of huffing and puffing and pulpit pounding is going to make people believe what experience and/or reason find untenable. So why would anyone want to claim, all the more, that Presbyterians need to become clearer and more insistent about what they believe?

I suppose that the desire for clearer declarations of belief has something to do with the need for identity, solidarity, security. These are fast-changing times, and so much of life is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty. It would be nice to have a few more things pinned down. A heightened emphasis upon conformity of belief, however, is no solution. It is an incitement to further conflict and disagreement. The empirical fact is that religious beliefs are hardly freely chosen. Religious beliefs are very much due to upbringing, to social location, to life experiences. Changes in religious beliefs are hardly matters of choice. In many respects, therefore, religious belief is a condition like that of gender, or race, or sexual orientation. It is not something we choose for ourselves so much as it is something given to us in and through our experiences of life. Yes, religious beliefs can change - but not at will. At any given time one cannot successfully choose to believe that there is an elephant in the room, or that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that God saves only those who belong to Jesus Christ. And it may never be possible to come to such beliefs, though there are surely other beliefs that are likely to emerge or disappear as one's experiences change and grow.

William James wrote, "As a rule we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if only we could" (Principles of Psychology, 1989 edition, p. 923). There is nothing perverse in believing what you can, and only what you honestly can. There is something very perverse in expecting people to believe what they honestly can not. We may expect people to listen, to consider, to think, to attend to other views, to appreciate other peoples' experiences. But we should not expect them to believe anything that runs counter to their own experience and reason. Religious beliefs, after all, are matters of conviction. We do not convict ourselves. We come under conviction. We are convicted by experience, by argument, by persuasion, by the Holy Spirit. We are compelled by the evidence and whatever we can make of it - or we are not. We do not and cannot choose to believe whatever someone urges us to believe, nor even what they tell us we must believe at peril to our souls. Many people have died under torture, while others have simply perjured themselves, because no threat or pain or death was sufficient to convince them of the truth of that which their own experiences and powers of reason had failed to compel them to believe. Believing some of the things "that Presbyterians believe" is simply not an option even for large numbers of Presbyterians. Among those for whom it is not an option are some of the most faithful and most thoughtful human beings we could hope to count on for the blessings of life together. They should not have to choose between being honest and being Presbyterian.

However necessary beliefs may be, they invariably tend to be divisive. 

Second: Jewish Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once observed, "Questions unite, answers divide." Most human beings share the same questions about life and the world: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? How should we live? What difference does it make? I do not suppose that it is possible to exist without ever asking such questions. In fact, I do not suppose that it is possible to exist without coming to some at-least tentative answers to such questions. Our answers form a very important part of what we believe. However, it is possible to answer such questions in ways that are either helpful or unhelpful. It is possible to answer such questions in ways that are magnanimous and exploratory. It is possible to answer such questions in ways that are affirming and empowering. It is also possible to answer such questions in ways that implicitly or explicitly assert superior knowledge or status. It is possible to answer such questions in ways that are divisive and debilitating.

At this year's General Assembly there was an awful lot of talk about what Christians - specifically, Presbyterian Christians - believe. For some years now there has been an increasing emphasis within our church on belief. This has taken concrete form in the creation of three new catechisms and the proliferation of study materials and liturgical practices involving the use of the Book of Confessions. If this surge of enthusiasm on behalf of "what we believe" were forward-looking and open-ended, seeking new ways to express the Christian faith that would be fully consonant with the best of contemporary knowledge attained through science and critical thought, then I might share it to some degree. However, most of this enthusiasm seems to be backward-looking. It is coming from persons and groups who give every indication of trying to safeguard the present and the future of Christian thought from the innovative influences of the modern/post-modern world. It is readily apparent that they regard a certain set of beliefs, teachings, doctrines, or dogmas to be essential to the integrity of Christianity and its message of salvation.

Witness the statement that came out of this year's General Assembly, which reads in part: "We confess the unique authority of Jesus Christ as Lord. Every other authority is finally subject to Christ. Jesus is also uniquely Savior. It is 'his life, death, resurrection, ascension and final return that restores creation, providing salvation for all those whom God has chosen to redeem'" [the quoted portion within this citation is from a document of the Reformed Church in America, The Crucified One is Lord]. The impetus for this statement came from overtures supported by those in our denomination who claim that the Presbyterian Church is losing its theological moorings. However, the statement was not sufficiently particularistic for many of them. It stopped just short of claiming Jesus Christ as the sole and absolute source of God's salvation: "Although we do not know the limits of God's grace and pray for the salvation of those who may never come to know Christ, for us the assurance of salvation is found only in confessing Christ and trusting Him alone."

At least for now, we have become encumbered by this partial theological concession - this traditional, and one might even say conservative, orthodox, and chauvinistic, pronouncement of Christian belief - to those in our denomination whose theology bears close resemblance to the fundamentalism of the past century. The statement sounds more like a word of law than a word of grace. It is an embarrassment to those of us who would wish for that portion of God's people who call themselves Christian to reflect more of the humility they see in Jesus and the magnanimity they see in his God. The fact is that the more specificity we attempt to give to our theological convictions, the more our diversity of belief will be exposed. To force these distinctions, to insist that some deserve the status of orthodoxy while others do not belong within the household of faith, is further to divide the church within, and further to separate the church from peoples of other faiths and no faith.

Faith is fundamentally a matter of trusting relationship rather than cognitive consent.

Third: In the current emphasis upon belief and the confessions, much attention is focused on historic statements of faith that have fallen into disuse and are presumed to be in need of reinvigoration. Surely the past has much to teach us. I cannot imagine any attempt to articulate the Christian faith that is not deeply indebted to the past. The problem is that, with a few exceptions, current talk about reclaiming the past, and renewing the faith seems rather oblivious to the fact that "what Christians believe" is much less a matter of documentary history and creedal formulation and much more a matter of living faith.

If it is a mistake to make beliefs as such the definitive standard of what it means to be a Christian, then how do we proceed? It is surely necessary to believe something about Jesus in order to be a Christian. In the first place, being a Christian is a matter of being a disciple of Jesus, whom we call the Christ. Those who look to Jesus as their primary source of God- and self-understanding should never be denied this appellation. In the second place, believing in God as Christians do - that is, in the light of the knowledge of Jesus the Christ - is fundamentally a matter of trust, not cognitive assent to propositional statements about either Jesus or God. If I say that I believe in my father or my mother, I do not mean that I believe my father or my mother exists. I do not mean that I believe this or that set of propositions about my father or mother. I mean that I have a certain confidence or trust in my father or mother. I believe that I can count on them in certain respects. So it is with belief in God (and also, by the way, with belief in the Bible).

Granted, in order to believe in my parents, or in God, or in the Bible, I must believe some things about my parents, God, or Bible. But I hardly need to believe everything that others may happen to believe about them. I can believe in the Bible without believing that it is infallible. I can believe in God without believing the Nicene formula. I can believe in sexual morality and fidelity without believing that homosexual activity is always a sin. I can believe in the Presbyterian Church (at least some of the time!) without believing that every action of the General Assembly or every amendment to the Book of Order or every line in the Book of Confessions accords with God's truth and will. As a matter of fact, it would seem to be a form of idolatry to make of any institution, doctrine, text, or moral standard an absolute rule for Christian faith. Surely only God is absolute.

Conclusion: Given the problematic of religious belief, surely it is perverse for Presbyterians and other Christians to persist in trying to use distinctive theological beliefs as definitive criteria for denoting those who are true and faithful disciples of Jesus the Christ. Why is it not enough to profess one's faith - that is, confidence and trust - in God as manifest to us in Jesus the Christ, and to declare oneself to be a disciple of this Jesus, in order to be counted a full member of the Christian household of God? Presbyterians talk a lot about being inclusive, but the Presbyterian Church will never be fully inclusive and faithful until it is also inclusive of those who dissent theologically from the received orthodoxy of the Reformed Christian faith. I am not simply claiming that there needs to be room for differing interpretations of scripture on issues like homosexuality, or that there must be room for differing views of the authority of scripture, or that there must be room for freedom of conscience regarding adherence to the confessions or theologically related matters in the Book of Order. I would claim all that, but I would insist that more needs to be claimed. It is time for Christians to become truly inclusive of all those who understand themselves to be claimed by God in the person of Jesus. It is time to embrace as fellow Christians all those whose trust in God has been engendered by the presence of Jesus in their history and in our history.

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