The View from the West Mesa

On the same page (180) of The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, the author illustrates his earlier point by stating "In Christian speech a witness is not a reporter. The mother who talks to her child of Christ does not simply pass on what she has heard, she speaks about what she knows, the Word of Life." This statement has a myriad of implications for faith and for faith communities. We can only get one another to this point if we move beyond the expectation of learning objective facts of Scripture, and into the pursuit of knowing God; of experiencing and seeing His working in the world. If the church is losing members, it isn't because we can't teach facts, it isn't because we can't create ministry opportunities, it isn't because people can't connect with others. It is because we do not encourage and expect one another to know God past the objective events of history. I am not talking about emotional stories in sermons, or even well-crafted worship s...

Am reading "The Spirit of Early Christian Thought" by Wilken. This is a very enjoyable read that seeks to describe the development of Christian dogmatic belief. There are two valuable passages on page 180. This post refers to the first, which reads ""It is...the things believed, not the act of believing them, which is peculiar to religion...." (quoting John Henry Newman). Faith isn't simply believing that something happened; that someone lived. Rather faith is believing the precepts, the implications, the values of the thing believed in . That last word is critical in understanding faith. We don't simply believe Jesus lived; we believe in the life He lived, the message he brought. We don't simply believe that we have memorized the message He brought - we actually believe it, we own it, it transforms us, it becomes us. In this way, the Christian faith is not a thing to be learned from a distance, but a way of life to be entered. Faith isn't the r...