I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I call myself that in order to distinguish myself from the dominant strain of North American Christianity. At the risk of sounding arrogant and judgmental, I am compelled to say that conservative Christians have adopted a very narrow and exclusionary reading of the Bible, thereby rendering static and dead a book I find dynamic and alive. It is not my purpose here to defend my faith or my reading of the Bible; neither needs defending. My purpose is simply to clarify what I believe. Before developing my own beliefs about Christ and the Bible, I think it appropriate to share a little of my personal history.
I was brought up in a Methodist church in Hyattsville, Maryland. In 1962, when I was 17, the leaders of that church, against the will of the pastor, who was clearly ahead of his time, refused to admit to membership a black couple. This was not what I had come to expect the church to be. I left the church and did not return to church at all until 1976, when my daughter was born. Nor did I actually become a believer until the late 80’s. During much of the ensuing time, I was staunchly atheist. Believing faith in God to be sheer stupidity, I even went so far as seeking to convert others to atheism. At one point, while enjoying a beer with a Christian professor of mine at the University of South Carolina, I went so far as to tell him, “I don’t need God.”
As a teacher and scholar of English and American literature, however, I had to know the Bible, not as a sacred book, but as a work of literature. I also came to see that many of the writers I most loved and respected were or had converted to Christianity, among them Dante, Chaucer, Donne, Swift, Blake, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Eliot, Auden, and Flannery O’Connor. If only stupid people believed, how could I explain the extraordinary creative genius of these writers? At the same time I began to see more clearly the moral and philosophical implications of the materialistic worldview I had adopted. If all life could be explained as resulting from chemical reactions, then whatever I thought, whatever I read, whatever I wrote or saw was simply the result of a chemical reaction; any test hypothesis or scientific principle was simply the result of chemical reactions in the minds of various scientists. And all moral positions as well resulted from chemical reactions in the brain. So on what possible basis can we judge even such a monster as Hitler?
I often found myself in a kind of despair, a state of mind in which nothing makes sense, nothing is truly good, life has become a mere series of random, disconnected fragments of experience. The best description of such a state I know is T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
Probably the decisive moment in my conversion to Christianity occurred in a meeting I had with two other men, both believers. We had come together out of a mutual interest in establishing a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. We proposed calling a larger meeting to which all interested members of our community would be invited. It quickly became clear that neither of my two colleagues would be able to lead in the formation of a Habitat chapter and that if our chapter of Habitat was to become a reality, I would need to lead. This was a scary prospect for me because I had no experience in construction and knew very well that I lacked administrative skills.
So when the other two men suggested we pray, I, for the first time in my life, prayed aloud. I prayed something like “God, if you are real, give me the confidence and ability to do this.” Believe it or not, upon uttering that prayer, I felt a powerful sense of confidence and peace about our project. During my five years as President, our Habitat chapter built eight houses in partnership with poorly housed members of our small town. Since its inception the chapter has built or renovated over fifty houses with local families. And ever since praying in that initial meeting, I have been a follower of Jesus Christ.
Since becoming a believer, I have read the Bible many times. I have come to read it as a collection of personal accounts of various people’s encounters with God. Both the individual stories and the book as a whole are narratives—not prescriptions for living or “getting right with God,” not a self-help manual nor a method for attaining eternal life—but stories. These stories are not fiction; they are history as history was understood by those who wrote them and whose writers made no hard and fast distinction between literal and figurative, between fact and belief. These stories reach their climax in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Like the climax of any narrative, these events change all that went before. In particular, they challenge the prevailing belief that power, violence, domination lead to victory; on the contrary, they demonstrate that victory comes through non-violence, forgiveness, and sacrifice.
Nor do I see personal salvation—going to “heaven” when one dies—as the primary focus of Jesus’ life and death. Rather I believe Jesus came to establish God’s “kingdom,” the beloved community, a community that will not be in some far away ethereal heaven, but here on earth. That kingdom will be marked by peace, by non-violence, by inclusiveness, by equality, by love and compassion, by generous sharing. It will resemble the churches of Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-35. Followers of Christ are, I think, called to help bring about this community through love, even of enemies, forgiveness, compassion, and non-violence. I distinguish pacifism from non-violence, considering the former passive, but the latter active and assertive.
I believe that the early church lost its way when it gained power through the conversion of Emperor Constantine and that only small parts of it have, over the centuries, found their way back to the way of Christ. I also believe that large scale corporate capitalism as practiced in this country and in much of the world is antithetical both to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to the survival of human civilization. I also believe in the power and influence of evil as a personal force contrary to God which most often finds expression not in individual actions but in human-created systems that take on a life of their, often leading people to support actions contrary to their own values. Consider, for example, how many of us, even though we understand the dangers of climate change, rely on carbon fuels simply because we are caught in a system that requires them and either do not have access to or cannot afford alternatives.
Among Christian thinkers who have most influenced my thinking are Dietrich Bonhoeffer, T H Wright, Gustavo Gutierrez, Jim Wallis, James Cone, Oscar Romero, Walter Wink, Martin Luther King, Peter Enns, Elias Chacour, and Wendell Berry. I also consider myself part of an extensive, largely online, network of progressive Christians, including Sojourners, Patheos, and such writers as Rachel Held Evans, Mark Sandlin, Brian McLaren, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Rob Bell, and many others. If you think of Christians only as ill-informed, narrow minded right wing ideologues, I urge you to check out some of these writers.