The more I take a critical approach to my own faith the more it comes into focus. And it gives me hope.
Recently I had a conversation with someone who was deeply concerned about my approach to faith. This person was so sure I had fallen off the slippery slope and was doomed to hell. And ten years ago this would have really concerned me. I would have been racked with fear and guilt, wondering how I could have gone so astray. But a long the way I realized one really important lesson. If orthodoxy is true it will always present a good wrestling partner.
You see I made the distinction that truth by its very nature will always be true. So the problem isn’t truth. It’s me. And to arrest the brokenness that is in my soul means being honest about my own brokenness, so that I can let it go.
This approach has given me a tremendous freedom to fail…and succeed. The more I wrestle with Scripture the more I feel that it is my own and not someone else’s version. This deepening, this clarifying has allowed me to take on huge obstacles that would once define me, making me cower in fear. But in facing them, I have now discovered them for what they are: paper tigers.
Perhaps the greatest shift I have made in my faith came in my own examination with the beginning of the story. But it was only recently that I have been able to articulate the difference. The greatest shift in my faith came when I anchored my faith to the entire story of God. In hindsight I realized that much of the theology that I grew up in began in Genesis 3. Humanity, myself included, was defined by what happened in the fall.
Much of my own faith has been in rediscovering these two little chapters, in really listening to how the story began. Because when I began in Gen 3, all I could see was my own brokenness. I was helpless, a little toad, and defined by my brokenness. But when I began in Gen 1, I could see the radiance of God’s love defining me. I could see that restoration meant recapturing the vision of the Garden for my own life, one that declared I was very good, that I was worth fighting for. The cross became the crowning symbol of that love.
I now believe that this recapturing of the Gen 1-2 story will be the defining change in the church over the next thirty years. It will be a slow generational shift. It will be painful, but it will be good. We’ve lived too long in the shadow of an incomplete story.
