Recently I was asked to make a simple direct statement of my Christian faith. In response to this request I sat down at my desk and wrote out a confession of the common faith of the church, as I understand it. Inside this confession I have made my profession of faith taking care to accentuate how the common faith makes sense to me (intellectually and experientially), all the while committed to staying faithful to the ‘common faith’ (cf for instance the Apostles Creed). Standing under precedes understanding. God’s Grace comes to meet us in the Gospel. By faith we stand under it and from this position we seek to understand what we believe (“faith seeking understanding” – Anselm). It is from this position, in pursuit of this understanding I have scripted the following. It is incomplete! Many things I have come to understand and believe are not included. But my confession will always be incomplete because in this life we can only begin to grasp the breadth and depth of the mystery of the truth that comes from God’s revelation of Himself in Christ. “Now we know in part then we shall know even as we are known” (Apostle Paul). When the people who requested my confession/profession received it they wrote back and said it was too long so I shortened it and sent it back. Here follows the unabridged edition. When schools, churches and Christian groups have knocked on my door, and I on theirs, with inquires about preaching and teaching, often questions about my beliefs emerge. This script was explicitly written to clarify this.

Paul the Apostle in prison, writing his epistle to the Ephesians – Encyclopaedia Britannica Online

“I Believe Therefore I Speak”

The title of this posting “I believe therefore I speak” is a quote from Paul’s letter to the believers in Corinth. This diad is the nodal point of Paul’s ministry. It is the necessary presupposition of ministry. Paul received an understanding of Gospel truth in the posture of belief and commenced a ministry speaking, i.e. teaching and preaching (2 Corinthians 4:13). Understanding what I have come to believe is the key to understanding what shapes and empowers my experience and ministry. We do not simply experience God in our souls as if the soul has a native point of contact with God, rather the truth, more precisely, a particular shape of truth is mediated to us ( via the word, via the church, via other believers, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit penetrating mind and heart. This truth shapes and forms our experience of God and also our experience of ourselves. This is so because in the Judeo-Christian religions there is no qua experience, native continuity between self and knowledge of God. Knowledge of God, sometimes dubbed theology, derives from God’s revelation of himself ultimately through Jesus Christ and is scripted by the Apostles and Prophets and this revelation of God (theology) cannot be separated from knowledge and experience of oneself (anthropology).  But here, lest I wander from the point at hand, my aim in this introductory paragraph is to follow after and as it were exploit Paul’s correlation of believing, including what he believes, with his ministry.  “I believe” Paul asserts is his entry point to Gospel ministry.  Following Paul here is my nodal point of ministry “I (too) believe, therefore, I speak… ” But what do I believe?

Jesus said, “I have come to seek and save the lost”. I believe there is real “lostness” in this world, and in all of us, but through the Gospel of Christ, the lost are found. In his parables, Jesus spoke of the lost and the found but being lost and found is, however, not a one-size-fits-all matter. People are in the grip of despair, addictions, and meaninglessness. Some are frantically pursuing new frontiers of pleasure and in the process losing their humanity. Others are crushed by sorrow and loneliness. Many are driven by anxiety, straining to secure the basic means of life, lost to its real end and purpose. Those who have attained a measure of material security easily succumb to an all-consuming passion – that of securing their wealth and upsizing it.

 These descriptions sketch the earthly shadow of “lost-ness” but not its heavenly source. Humans have lost their grounding in God as Lord. The essence of sin is not merely ‘missing the mark’ but a spiritual malignancy that has penetrated the souls of all women and men. Sin in Scripture is the end of loyalty, trust, and dependence on the One to who all belong. Sin means to refuse God’s Godness. Sin stakes a claim for independence from the goodness of God to us, his provision for us, and his place under us in love, and over us in correction. “Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I” prayed David. Sin denies this ‘higher than I’, priority of God. Sin puts the good things of life in the room where only the best things belong. This is the seed and root of “lost-ness”.

I believe in the Gospel of Christ because in the Gospel we discover ourselves reconciled to God. Looking at our God, and ourselves, in and through the lens of the Gospel of Christ we, the lost, discover that we are found. God has overcome that separates Godself from us. We realize we are lost only when we discover through the Gospel we are found. And when we are found, then we understand what it means to be lost. Faith believes this good news and enjoys an abundance of peace. Jesus Christ (Son of God – Son of Man) lived, died, and rose again to return us ‘home’ and set us free from all that is false and sinful measured by the righteousness rooted in the reality of God, to know divine and human acceptance, love and the healing power of real trust in the provisions and care of God as Heavenly Father, and to know the healing power of life lived as service to him and others.

This ‘knowledge’ not only makes sense to my mind but also shapes my experience. The truth that is theological and spiritual in origin has, as Pascal urged, two points of contact within us – the head and heart. The first of these possess compelling rationality, but not the rationality derived from universal canons of reason (so-called universal) which this world relies on to conclude truth. The Judeo-Christian revelation of truth, given in and through the Bible, grounds the reality and ordering of life deeper than the reason, science, and philosophy this world relies on. The second of these indicates that the truth of which the Sacred Tradition sponsors, also speaks to our souls – our existence – our dreads, our fears, our guilt, our sorrows and regrets, our disenchantments, disappointments with life, our greed, lust and anxieties, and chiefly, the transience and brevity that holds our being in its grip. In between being lost and found is sandwiched truth – spiritual truth. I believe in truth

I believe that God’s reconciling forgiveness and the resurrection of the crucified Jesus are inextricably bound together, not out of necessity, but simply because God, in God’s freedom, purpose, and wisdom, bound them together. This forgiveness, on which the Gospel turns clears us of condemnation for wrongs done and puts us right with God. And precisely because it comes via the Cross, it is not cheap, but costly grace. This grace, coming to us in this way, opens the door to life eternal. This is the heart of the Gospel and God’s meeting place. There is no other meeting place. God has chosen the place where God is ready and willing to meet all women and men, high and low, righteous (so-called) and sinful, noble and brutish, brilliant and foundering. This place Scripture calls “a rock of offense and a stone of stumbling”. With Paul “I am not ashamed of the Gospel”.

I believe this Gospel must be heard and understood, therefore, I believe in preaching and in the Supper that Christ bequeathed and in Baptism. Rightly administered and preached these present God’s free grace and call us to assurance and faith. Not faith in the ritual that is seen but what the ritual points to that is unseen saves us, and for this reason, preaching must always accompany the ritual (“faith comes by the hearing of the word” writes Paul in Romans). The ritual is a drama, a pulpit that points to God’s free grace but it is no mere form with words attached. Christ via the Spirit is alive and present in the form when its evangelical saving significance is presented. In Baptism water and spiritual cleansing appear to be spiritually and organically joined together as in many non-Christian faiths. Whenever the church fails to attend to Paul’s exposition of baptism it is a short step from sacrificing its distinctive teaching to ancient ideas of water and spiritual/moral cleansing. The water in Christian Baptism is not a simple direct symbol of spiritual cleansing rather it depicts the death Christ died to sin for us (a watery grave), and his resurrection to righteousness and life eternal on our behalf. Baptism is a believer’s faith union to Christ. Going down into the water and coming up out of the water confesses our dependence on Christ’s death and assurance of the resurrection he inaugurated. The believer is baptized into his death and his resurrection to life eternal. Sin’s damning power is exhausted in Christ’s death and eternal life has dawned in his resurrection. Sanctification is the lifelong process of conforming to this new reality. Baptism as sprinkling falls short of the distinctive Christian meaning of Baptism but I strongly believe this practice of sprinkling celebrated by other Christians must be honored.

I believe that not only are people lost but also social systems are lost. Family, economic and political systems often structure evils of one sort or another and insulate these from critique. The Gospel is not only a private soul affair. The macro vision of Scripture is the promised coming kingdom, which through the resurrection of the crucified Jesus made its debut. The resurrection is the first fruits of the kingdom, the presence of the future.

I believe in the coming kingdom. The vocation that befalls humans, believers, and non-believers, is not that of building the ideal kingdom and bringing it into existence but of preparing to meet it. All women and men, along with their institutions that they create, order, and enlist for their own interests and others’ interests and/or harm, must prepare to meet the coming kingdom and its righteousness. No human, or institution created by humans, is exempt from that righteousness which the messiah has already inaugurated and will yet consummate once and for all upon his return. The repentance that follows in the wake of faith is the heart of the Biblical vision of change and the penultimate transformation of a world caught in the embrace of an impending ultimate transformation that is coming to meet us from the ‘other side’. The human province is not to create the ideal kingdom on earth but to prepare to meet it, to image and reflect the ideal that has emerged through the Prophetic vision and the Christ. Our embrace of this coming Kingdom is simply captured by faith, hope, and Love. Faith connects not only to the promised and coming future that is spoken of by the Prophets and Apostles but to its present reality in and through the resurrection of the crucified Christ. Hope is apocalyptic, that is to state hope awaits the public unveiling of what is hidden from sight but known by the Gospel to be a present reality.  The fragmentary love for God and others alive in believers, and nascent believers here and now, come to perfect realization with the coming of the kingdom of God with the return of the messiah.

I believe in the change that is empowered by repentance and repentance by grace. Paul writes of the inextricable connection between grace and change when he states ” the goodness of God leads us to repentance”. The umbrella of grace has been unfolded through Christ sheltering all humanity from the rain and storm of God’s judgment against sin and unrighteousness – this is the good word of the Gospel of Grace. The entended destiny of this kindness is twofold – faith and repentance. But this repentance includes persons in their private lives and their public lives where they exercise power and fill positions in society. Abstracting corporations and institutions from the persons who they serve and by whom they are powered, treating them as non-personal entities, is a modern device often used to obscure responsibility – a useful and convenient way to escape the moral consequences of human actions. Both the public and private realms are exposed to the reality of the messianic kingdom and by the Gospel of Grace pressed into alignment with it, or if not suffer becoming self-consciously polarised against this grace. The rail on which the Gospel moves and gains its traction in the world does not derive from a bare moral threat for wrongs done, nor an experiential offer for spiritual renovation or fulfillment, but ultimately the realization that we are caught up in a fleeting movement of time, a peculiar kind of time – a time of grace now present but soon past (“today, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts”).

Jesus said, “On this rock, I will build my church”. Upon the rock of Peter’s confession that Jesus is God’s messiah promised by the Prophets of old Christ builds His Church. I Believe in the Church. It is not in Christ’s wisdom for us to ride into the kingdom like the Lone Ranger. We travel toward God’s future bearing one another’s burdens, caring for and mediating the grace of God to each other. Church, ‘ecclesia’, is not a nation or kingdom. Ecclesia, conceived as a nation and/or kingdom contains the seeds of violence. Rather the church, conceived of by Christ and the Apostles, is the end of ecclesia as nation and the beginning of ecclesia as a ‘passionate’ fellowship of grace in route to the kingdom. In this community form, believers are joined in expectant hope and voice their doxology to God for His grace that through Christ he has overcome all the ultimate enemies of humanity – evil, sin, and death and freely introduced them into the messianic Kingdom which is and is coming. Here in this fellowship, the ultimate power of all that is dark and dreary, broken, and evil is downsized. Instead, the life and power of the kingdom are celebrated and practiced albeit imperfectly, partially. Here everyone learns to serve the common good and the needs of others. In this fellowship, the social fabric of mutual love seeks to fulfill the unity Christ founded the church on. More than a personal virtue love is the commitment to prioritize the common good and the good of others above oneself. Love is the fabric of true community and involves one in a commitment to prioritize, protect, and strengthen community. Forgiveness is the pinnacle of love because it overcomes hostilities, offenses, and injuries and in doing so restores harmony and unity whether the community consists of only two or a multitude. Love is the presence of the future.

Finally, regarding church/ecclesia, I believe in Protestantism’s revolution. God has not transferred Christ’s saving power to the church. Christ in heaven did not hand over his saving power to the church.  Rather Christ retains this saving power such that it can become alienated from him. The church merely witnesses to the unseen Christ at God’s “right hand” who intercedes his saving graces for us. The church is like John the Baptist who said “I must decrease he must increase’. The priests of the church, its lay priests, and leader priest are simply beggars showing another beggar where the bread is. Of themselves, the church does possess the bread of life, it does not reside with them or in them so as to hand it out to the people by virtue of an authority bequeathed to it. All the church can do and must do is witness to the invisible grace lodged in Christ in heaven and encourage women and men to believe in it, trust in it, depend on it. Faith is the first act of worshiping the unseen God of grace. Faith transcends the thing seen and trusts the unseen. Paul asserts in 2 Corinthians 5:7 “we walk by faith not by sight”. Embedded in this terse affirmation is the 16th Century Protestant revolution of ‘church’ even though in umpteen ways it has and continues to fail this revolution.

The church is more than ‘koinonia’ – fellowship; it is an instrument ordained by Christ to mediate his grace to the world by witnessing to it by acts of love and words of truth. As such it is ecclesia – called out, called to embrace a mission – Christ’s mission on earth instituted by Him for Him. I believe in mission. The church is not to draw its sanctimonious robes around itself and retreat into its own fellowship and remove itself from the world. Rather as Christ’s body, it is called to turn out to the world and minister God’s love both in word and deed (one beggar showing another beggar where the bread is). Every pastor, every church, and church member is charged to form his or her ministry in the posture of mission. Mission is not a ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ endeavor. It is to be the warp and woof of ministry. Even though I knew and believed this teaching early on in my ministry the ‘underground’ ( unregistered church) in China demonstrated to me the reality of this truth. Ministry is mission. The recent shape of mission for me, for what it is worth, God knows, has been teaching Biblical Studies and Christian ethics to fledgling seminaries all over the Far East, in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos, Myanmar, and India. Ten years ago I went to Asia to have a look and this need presented itself. A chronicle of my teaching work may be seen on my website. Paul the greatest Christian thinker in the church is at once its greatest missionary. The separation of study and mission is spacious and leads to distortions. Each needs the other.

I believe in leadership but not all forms of leadership. It is leadership that Christ modeled and instituted that makes sense to me. This is the kind of leadership where the leader’s power is not validated by leveraging his or her position over others. Rather, as Jesus taught, true leadership is validated by a different kind of spiritual ethos. This is the spiritual freedom to downsizes the prerogative to rule from above and bend under others to serve them, carry their burdens, and attend to their needs. It is true that leaders must possess strength but I believe that the strength that is called for is measured by the presence of clarity and truth needed in any situation and the courage to differentiate oneself. The leader must seek, and through the Spirit’s promised help, find the difference that Christ embodies; find it, if need be, over and again in every situation where wrong, confusion, conflict and anxiety prevail and then summon the courage to stand up. The church and the world wait upon leaders who do not, “swing hard with a dull ax”( to quote a Biblical proverb) but put their saltiness into the mix and their light on a stand. The rest is history.

I believe in Christian ethics. There are many kinds of ethics in the world stemming from the circles within which we live out our lives. These include our religion, family, ethnic kinship, nation, our vocational and economic fraternities, and also the free associations we form (birds of a feather flock together). All of these social circles we live in (more or less) generate distinct cultures that shape us and become incarnated into ethics. The Scriptures sponsor Christian ethics and these derive directly from Christ and the Apostolic Gospel. Standing in freedom, using wisdom, discretion, and experience, these ethics, again and again, must be translated into the worlds we live best we can. Essentially the Gospel gives us three spiritual ‘raw materials’ from which we are to creatively translate into ethical (cf ‘moral’) actions or responses ( to put into play in any given time, place, and circumstance). These three are faith, hope, and love. Each of these comes to meet us before we come to them. In the Gospel, the resurrection of the crucified Jesus and the elemental meaning the Apostles via the Spirit gave to this peculiar history we are in the embrace of faith, hope, and love. This Gospel contains the seed of faith because it profers us assurance of remission of our sins and God’s friendship, it contains the seed of hope because via the resurrection of Christ it asserts that the strength of these have been broken once and for all time and it contains the seeds of love because it asserts that this assurance and hope do not accrue as a matter of course or result from a religious moral transaction but come from the free grace and compassion of God for us ( 1 John 4 “God is love” is a statement of who God is to us in God’s Being/Spirit, and what God has done for us – act/ethic. These three, faith,hope and love, delivered to us as one unified thing in the Gospel, are received as one consolidated gift (not moral task), and come alive in us in the form of these three three interdependent and interelated dynamics. Here follows the pinch of the point.

The gospel impregnated with faith hope and love is received as gift not task ( i.e. not moral duty or moral imperative) and as gift via the Spirit commence a fledgling new beginning within us and empower a new ethical footprint, in kind. In this way ethics that are distinctively Christian reflect their origin, that is to say their evangelical origin (i.e. ‘Gospel’  origin). Nomos, law as the ground of ethics is transformed by this Apostolic evangel into three elemental ways of being in the world – faith, hope, and love. There is nothing righteous, or to use a phrase Paul scripted for the law, nothing “holy just and good” that these three do not comprehend and transform. Two of my books (1) Existence and Faith:Suffering the Tension Between the Seen and the Unseen (2) Religion and Life in Three Movements: Faith, Hope and, Love are in service of this understanding of ethics. While it is not immediately clear in this explanation how faith and hope translate into ethics here and there in these two my books this is develped. This way of approaching ethics does not of course discount the diverse passages found in the Bible about right and wrong but it does transform and shine light on these passages.

I believe in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, which Christians call the Old and New Testaments. I believe they are faithful and trustworthy. Through them, God has spoken and continues to speak. We must study this Scripture to hear God’s word with due attention to its time and culture, attending to the great theme that it is organized around – the Covenant God made to Abraham. Most importantly reading Scripture we must listen to the Apostles, who, on the other side of Easter, repackaged Jesus into a Gospel or Evangel and preached him to the Gentiles. Without the Spirit, God’s word is not heard, and, without the Word, the realm of the Spirit and the spiritual in one’s life, easily morphs into many psychological and cultural voices within and without. Spirit and Word ultimately must never remain separated or independent. Working together they lead us to the Living Word, the risen Christ who speaks grace and life to all.

 In the Gospels, we read about the earthly Jesus of Nazareth, a particular man in a particular time and place. One who trekked around Judea and Galilee telling enigmatic stories with subtle lessons, restoring people’s bodies to wholeness, forgiving their sins, and preaching the arrival of the kingdom promised by the Prophets. On the dusty roads of Galilee and Judea, this Jesus directly ministered to a few women and men mostly from Judean and Galilean abstraction. Face to face he met and mixed with them and liberated them. In the book of Acts and the Epistles, this presentation of Christ’s ministry (found in Mathew, Mark, and Luke) changes. On the other side of Easter, no more bound to the limitations of ethnicity, nation, time, and space Jesus becomes a universal messiah. The immediate face-to-face encounter ends but a new mediated encounter begins. Through the Apostolic Gospel, Christ speaks grace and life to all peoples in all times. The word of the Gospel spoken through the church and its ministers, faithful to the Apostles and alive through the power of the Spirit, is the word of God spoken and heard in the present. Through the Apostolic Gospel, Jesus continues to speak and fulfill the liberating, saving mission he began in the flesh on earth. (“ I come to seek and save those who are lost”).

In my blog, I have addressed the importance of understanding the differing cultural makeup that exists in the great rainbow of varying ethnic, national, and religious societies that makeup the earth. If these differences are not understood and accounted when one is teaching and preaching away their own homeland blindness is bound to skew the Gospel and impede its receptivity. The New Testament itself contains instruction that is conditioned by time and culture. Paul said it was imperative that he became all things to all people ( all kinds of people, people who did share his customs and moral scruples and way of relating one to another). This self imperative Paul the missionary lived under is no less obligatory today. As soon as a minister assumes he understands the stranger that he is witnessing to, that this stranger basically shares his cultural reality this missionary is in danger not only of becoming ineffective, unfruitful but worse yet guilty of seriously distorting the meaning of the Gospel by tying the Gospel to his own cultural values and customs and morals. All missionaries must learn to recognize and reverence the difference deeply lodged in the other. In fact, I believe the matter goes deeper than this. We must start from the assumption that we are not more or less all the same, but instead profound differences persist. A passage from Paul comes to mind “if anyone thinks that he knows anything he knows nothing yet as he ought to know it” (1 Corinthians 8:2). The presumption of continuity one with another is a form of violence. One must learn to “take off their shoes in the presence of the holy ground of the other.  The Gospel does possess universal truth. Jesus said go to the ends of the earth and preach the Gospel and Jesus’ refers to himself as the Son of Man, not some women and men but humanity. Indeed the gospel is a universal evangel to be preached to all people. The challenge is to bring this universal message into a real intersection with the unique particulars of the other’s culture and experience. And this challenge applies both to societies and their unique cultures and to each individual’s life experience.

*I believe therefore in the Holy Spirit. The Spirit protects the freedom of God and creates the freedom of all womankind and mankind open to the Gospel. No exertion of human will, intellect, or emotion can bring the Word of God to life in the soul, in the church, or in the world. But the Spirit, again and again, calls the Word to life. While believers worship, work, and study (and we must worship, really work, and really study) we also must wait on the Spirit, and while we wait on the Spirit we must carry on our labors -passionately. Passionately (according to its root meaning) because we know action, in itself, will not carry the day. Work is an act of faith and hope; not hope in the perfection and power of one’s efforts to bear fruit, but hope in God’s power and blessing. All true work must be filled, not only with diligence and ability but with something intangible and hidden – passionate waiting on a power and blessing that comes from an unseen gracious hand. Because there is no direct deduction between work and genuine fruitfulness, work is passionate! All Christian existence is a sandwich. Between the word given in scripture and a person who believes this word, a miracle must subtle occur. It is of course not enough to read or hears the good word even at the hands of the best evangelist or apologist. Between hearing or reading the Gospel and obeying its claim all depend on the blessing and power of the Spirit. Between our labors to build our churches and carry out our mission endeavors we wait on an intangible subtle spiritual power not lodged in us but in God, a power that cannot be brought into play by even the greatest of plans and the most diligent and talented work. In our efforts to build or rebuild the fellowship and harmony in the church, we need not only smart efforts to facilitate friendship and build a texture of mutual regard one for another but the Spirit that miraculously grounds the self, the ego on the grace and love of God thereby humbling it and turning outward to God and others. In short, we are in constant need of a miracle. Between our efforts and the good fruit, the good results we seek from these efforts we wait upon a miracle. Recognizing our need for this miracle and our ultimate dependence upon it is not relatively important but absolutely imperative. A man sat inside a train staring out the window. The train was not moving and he became restless and frustrated. All of sudden he was relieved because his train commenced moving. But in reality his train was not moving the train the tracks directly across from him was moving and it gave him the sensation that he was moving. There is an activism in the world and the church that gives people the allusion something is getting done, progress is being made, goals set are being realized when in fact all too often these are full of the fret and fever of human will and plans devoid of the discernment, guidance, and blessing that come from the Spirit. “Not by might nor by power but by Spirit saith the Lord”.

There are many areas of Christian belief I espouse. This has been a partial of profession inside the presupposition of the church’s confession. And here I intersect one of the great contributions of Karl Barth when he cancelled his Christian Dogmatics project after writing maybe 700 pages and commenced anew with his life long magnus opus Church Dogmatics. Protestantism too easily commences with the priority of the individual’s denominational beliefs or the individual Christian’s belief and experience. But this propensity in Protestantism, I believe, is a distortion at best. Paul, himself an Apostle, wrote to the Corinthian believers who were becoming increasingly idiosyncratic in their understanding of the Christian faith “for I delievered to you…what I received (received – literally handed on to me from the other Apostle – disciples). The above script which I have entitled “I Believe Therfore I Speak” is my profession of of faith standing inside and under the church’s confession of faith. As such it reflects some of the ways I have come to grasp the Church’s truth and made sense of it so as to communicate it to others hopefully with a degree of relevance. Many areas of the common faith of the church I have not commented on but only for economic reasons.