My Faith Journey:  Being Honest with God

Having now retired from active ministry for nearly a decade, I have taken the opportunity to reflect on my Christian experience and examine how my faith convictions have evolved through the years from the time when I first thought of myself as being a “Christian” to today.  My reflections are framed by two books that stand as guideposts for my Christian beliefs and experience over the past 50 years.  The first of these is entitled- Honest to God– and was written by the Anglican Bishop John A. T. Robinson in 1963.  This small confession by a British theologian created a firestorm within mainline churches at the time when Bishop Robinson admitted he needed be honest about his own modern revision of the Christian faith because the assumptions within orthodox Christianity no longer made sense to him. For me, Bishop Robinson’s confession stood as a theological encouragement to come to terms with the disconnect I had felt myself to a lot of the orthodox Christianity I had learned in my youth.  His book inspired me to find affirmations of faith that fit more honestly with my own experiences living in a world shaped by science and modern sensibilities.  Shortly after I retired from serving as a church pastor for more than 35 years, I came across another book entitled – Outgrowing Church– that was written by John Killinger, a well-known and respected Presbyterian minister and teacher, who offered his own personal experience of outgrowing the manifestations of the church that he grew up in and had served for many years.    Killinger gave voice to many of the feelings I had developed over my years in ministry about my place within traditional expressions of Christianity.  He talked about outgrowing denominationalism and what he thought were distortions of the Christian message that he was hearing in most contemporary churches. He found himself, as I did, being troubled by the disconnect between the Jesus story and the agenda of many churches today and what seems like a spirituality focused individual benefits of claiming faith in God rather than being on a mission to the world in the name of love, justice, and peace.  Killinger also echoed the sentiment that I have developed about the proclivity of many Christians and churches to make science an enemy of faith and the lack of imagination within Church circles to reinterpret the core of Christianity for modern minds and pressing social issues.  Taken together these two books have served as cornerstones for me in my attempt to write about my faith development with a clear explanation of how my Christian identity and theology have changed over the years.  

I feel compelled to record this concise summary of the evolution of my Christian convictions for several reasons.  First of all, I have lived through an era when many of the traditional beliefs and practices associated with the Christian faith, in America at least, have undergone significant changes.  In many respects, “the old, old story” of the Gospel that I learned as a child has become either irrelevant for many people or rejected as intellectually untenable.  My faith journey reflects the kind of challenges that many others have also experienced in the effort to hang on to our Christian identity and to find our place within the larger Christian community.  So, I hope that this confession of faith might encourage some others who are struggling to find a place to stand with intellectual integrity within the broader Christian story to be honest with, or maybe about, God and with others.   Secondly, my appreciation for both the historic moral values contained in the Jesus story and for the Church when it has given witness to the power of love, justice, and peace in human experience has led me to affirm the importance of the core Christian message for living creatively in the world today and into the future.  For all my discontents with many of the traditional views associated with Christianity, I continue to believe that humanity is ultimately sustained and uplifted by a faith and hope in something larger than ourselves and is often inspired by the Jesus story that encourages us to live creatively in this world with self-giving love. 

Over the years I have discovered that those I encounter, both inside the Church and outside institutional church life, often make assumptions about what I may believe simply because they only know that I am a Presbyterian minister.  Truth be told, I have often been reluctant to express my own theological affirmations because I have been aware that my Christian views are in large measure out of step with traditional Christian beliefs and, for that reason, may seem strange, foreign and even questionable to many self-identifying Christians today.  Nonetheless, a recent conversation with my adult son reminded me that there are huge differences in beliefs within the larger Christian community today and it is important for us to learn to respect the differences we may have in our Christian identities and the way we express our faith convictions.  My own faith development has led me to the realization that it is counter-productive, if not idolatrous, for any segment of the Christian community to claim to have the corner on absolute truth in spiritual matters.  So, I hope that this personal confession of my faith will broaden the thinking of those who may assume that all Christians should believe relatively the same things or that all Presbyterians embrace a similar theology.  As one of my progressive Presbyterian colleagues once lamented, we are often seen as renegades or apostates in the church rather than as advocates for an alternative version of the Christian faith.   

Part of this personal confession includes my acknowledgement that in many ways I have not only outgrown most of the traditional expressions of the Church, as John Killinger notes in his book, I have also outgrown much of the Christian faith that I inherited from my childhood and that is still dominant today among the majority of Christians in America.  By this I mean I have outgrown or moved beyond many of the established creedal beliefs and doctrines that have defined the classical or traditional expression of the Christian faith (for a good description of what constitutes the “classical” version of the Christian faith, read Markus Borg’s explanation in The Heart of Christianity, pages 6-21).   My Christian identity, for instance, was initially formed and nurtured as a child within the fundamentalist Baptist church in which I was raised.  I was “saved” at the age of 12 when I made the decision to express my faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and I was duly baptized by immersion.  From this formative church experience, I came to embrace the classical version of the Christian faith which emphasized the atoning death of Jesus for the sins of the world and the promise of eternal life for believers.  When I became a teenager a number of life experiences began to erode my certitude about the veracity of this traditional Christian viewpoint that I had accepted without question.  I became a church “drop-out” when I began to see some troubling contradictions within my Southern Baptist heritage, including overt racism, biblical literalism, moral hypocrisy, and a rejection of science and reason in matters of faith.  While in college I met a young woman who introduced me to a Presbyterian minister working with young people in the inter-city of my hometown.  I was spiritually attracted to the way he was seeking to introduce Black and White youth to a more relationally inclusive understanding of the Christian faith.  It was through this youth ministry that I came to embrace an appreciation for the centrality of love and justice in my understanding of the Jesus story and to reshape my own understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.   Looking back over my life I see how my Christian identity was first shaped by the religious fundamentalism of the Southern Baptist church that I was born into, then nurtured and developed by the evangelical Christian tradition of the Presbyterian church, and later blossomed into the theological liberalism that characterized my graduate studies in religion at Florida State University and then reinforced at Colgate Rochester Divinity School where I studied to prepare for the ministry.

In many respects my spiritual journey has been profoundly shaped by the open-minded and open-hearted church leaders I encountered during my college years and that was further developed in my years of ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Yet, at this point in my journey of faith, I am unable to embrace many of the accepted beliefs or dominant views that have characterized mainline Christianity to this day.   Like John Killinger, I realize that I am not alone in this feeling that I have outgrown the traditional expressions of the Christian faith.  Here in the second decade of the 21^st century, it is clear to me that many intelligent, open-minded, and ethically and spiritually sensitive people have difficulty connecting with or affirming many of the classical Christian beliefs and practices that most churches continue to express.   In large measure my Christian convictions are an amalgam of a scientific worldview, a white American cultural identity, and a pragmatic humanism blended together around a relational understanding of the Christian tradition that emphasizes the ethical value of religion.   Moreover, I now find many of the church practices and agendas within the broad Reformed theological heritage  to be intellectually obtuse and irrelevant in terms of the many important spiritual and moral issues of today. I consider myself to be fortunate that I had the opportunity to serve a progressive Presbyterian congregation in Austin during the last 17 years of my ministry that shared my desire for the church to be an agent of compassion and justice in the larger world around us.  My critique of the vast majority of churches and most of the mainline denominations in America today centers around their preoccupation with maintaining their institutional life and nurturing traditional Christian beliefs rather than seeking to seriously address economic and racial injustices, environmental degradation, or the current political threats to democracy and global peace.  So, it should not be surprising that here in my retirement from active ministry I have gravitated toward an even more progressive and non-traditional expression of spirituality and faith convictions, finding a spiritual home for myself today within a Unitarian-Universalism faith community and its seven principles.    

For the sake of simplicity, I have decided to outline my core Christian convictions following the “saying “yes”/saying “no” format that I remember Robert McAfee Brown used many years ago to share his confession of faith within the Presbyterian community.  So, here are the primary theological beliefs that I both affirm and cannot affirm with integrity in my Christian identity today:

I say “yes” to a faith in the gracious, life-giving, and transformative power of creative and redemptive love that undergirds both my life and the world around me, which I call “God”.  I believe that this often mysterious and allusive Spirit of love functions in every process in life that creates, builds up, and celebrates life as a gift to be cherished, nurtured, enjoyed, and protected from harm.  For me, God is evident and encountered most frequently in the spirit and forms of compassion, justice, forgiveness, peace, and hope that occur in human living.   I understand God to be an awe-inspiring process that is at work within human living, characterized by the experience of creativity, rather than a Being or reality outside of human experience.  In this respect, I can affirm the Biblical notions about God’s creative and redemptive activity that moves mysteriously like the wind (Ruach) and as a spiritual reality within whom we live, and move and have our being.   My view of this divine reality is captured most succintly for me in the New Testament statement that says “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them”.  My Christian identity rests on my affirmation of these words from the ancient church that encapsulates my understanding of the nature and purposes of God (1 John 4 6-21).

I say “no” to the traditional Christian ideas that talk about God in terms of a human-like personality or all-knowing, all-powerful divine being existing outside the universe or beyond reality as we know it who intervenes on occasion into the lives of believers or who upsets the patterns of nature for some divine purposes.  I cannot embrace any longer the traditional Christian theological notions about the sovereignty of God, the judgmental nature of God with respect to human activity, or the idea of the exclusive revelation of God in the life of Jesus Christ.  I reject all religious beliefs that conjure up fear and terror in humanity, that make absolute assertions about an afterlife, or that justify violence or spiritual judgementalism in the name of God. 

I say “yes” to a conviction that the Jesus story, as we find it expressed in the New Testament and in the witness of love expressed on occasion in the Church, embodies for me the unique and transformative experience of being in the presence of the spirit of creative and redemptive love.  I affirm my allegiance to the spiritual and ethical teachings of Jesus Christ who inspired his followers with the transformative power of love, forgiveness, and call for justice in human relationships.  I believe that the life, teachings, death, and resurrected spirit of Jesus gave birth to a community of faith in his name and calls us to seek to transform the world as it is into a world that conforms to the spirit of love and justice.  I hear in the Jesus story a spiritual voice inviting us to seek to live on behalf of the common good and to bring our politics, economics, and social structures in line with the creative power of compassion, forgiveness, and justice.   

I say “no” to the classical Christian view that Jesus was half-God and half-human and he died on behalf of humanity’s sinfulness to appease God and to secure our salvation.  I cannot embrace the idea of the atoning death of Jesus on the cross as a means of restoring humanity’s broken relationship with God or as the way to ensure our eternal life with God.  For me, this understanding of Jesus violates my belief in the spirit and forms of love that I associate with the name of God.  I find all the traditional ideas about living a Christian life in terms of a reward and punishment relationship with God to be offensive to my beliefs about the God of grace and love that Jesus reveals in his life and teachings.  I cannot embrace the New Testament view of Jesus’ virgin birth, his status as a miracle worker who was put to death on a Roman cross to fulfill some higher purpose of God, or that the bodily Jesus was raised from the dead after his crucifixion.  I interpret the New Testament stories about Jesus’ death in terms of his execution by the Roman empire at the behest of Pharisaic Judaism of his day because of his preaching about the power of God’s love and justice over the forces of domination that became threatening to Roman and Jewish authorities of that time.  Likewise, I understand the New Testament witness to Jesus’ resurrection as the early church’s way of talking about their experience of Jesus’ spirit coming alive among them after his death.  For me, the resurrection of Jesus symbolizes a hopeful faith conviction that self-giving love will ultimately triumph over the forces of domination and hatred that often seem to rule the world we live in. 

I say “yes” to the biblical ideas about the human capacity for engendering both goodness and evil.  I affirm a truth within the biblical stories about the destructive power of human hubris, pride, arrogance, self-indulgence, lust for power, and fear that resides in all of us.  I also readily embrace the biblical belief in the trans-formative presence of love that calls us to become children of light and hope rather than people living in darkness and fear.  I believe that religion and morality are matters of belief informed by the interplay of reason, experience, and the insights of a received tradition rather than given only to a few by some special divine revelation.  My approach to reading and interpreting Scripture is guided and informed by a social reading of the Bible that locates the heart of the Gospel in the witness of many Scripture passages (I John 4:16, Matthew 25: 37-40; Micah 6:8; James 2: 18; Matthew 22: 37-39, et al). Rather than interpreting the Bible primarily in individualistic terms, I listen for the broader social, economic, and political implications of the Gospel that impact our lives, our communities, and the larger world around us.  I firmly believe that love and justice are the primary lenses through which Scripture has to be read and understood in order for any part of these ancient words to be spiritually or morally edifying for us today.  I hear within the Biblical faith, transmitted by the Christian tradition when at its best, a moral imperative centered in Jesus that asks us to honor the power of love and to love our neighbors as ourselves with the aim of actualizing love in the world for the sake of the common good of all (as expressed in Jesus’ call to seek first the kingdom of God).  For me, social justice is what love looks like in our communal living and public life.

I say “no” to the way the Church (the collective body of Christians over time) has sometimes abused the idea of human sinfulness and has too often used the concept of sin and the church’s supposed authority to kill, punish, threaten, and reject people in the name of God.  I do not believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God or that all parts of the Scriptures are of equal spiritual or ethical value.  I believe we abuse the value of the Bible whenever we project the message about Jesus into the Old Testament or use parts of Scripture to proof-text our own theological biases about salvation or the will of God.   From my experience, any attempt to speak about the meaning of particular biblical passages or theological doctrines with absolute certitude is a form of spiritual idolatry that should be resisted in the name of the Protestant notion of the “priesthood of all believers” and because it fails to realize that the Bible is not self-interpreting.  To my way of reading the New Testament witness and understanding Jesus’ love commandment, I see an ever-expanding understanding of the Christian community that has continually challenged our dominant views about spiritual outsiders and suspected sinners (Samaritans, uncircumcised gentiles, women, homosexuals, etc.) and that invites us to accept the boundless grace of love towards all people.   So, I am a universalist in my judgement about the relationship of Christianity to other religious traditions, believing that those who live and abide in love, whether in the name of Moses, Buddha, Mohammad or Jesus, share an equal spiritual purpose. 

I say “yes” to the spiritual and ethical demands of the Gospel of Jesus that are intended to inform and shape the Church gathered in his name.  For me, the Jesus story, as mediated imperfectly through the body of Christ we call “the Church”, continues to nurture and challenge my spiritual identity as one of Christ’s followers.  I recognize that the Church through the ages has often neglected and even rejected the central spiritual and ethical calling of Jesus to live on the basis of love and justice.  So, I believe the Church, embodied by those of us who claim to be Christians, is always in need of redemption before we can challenge the world to embrace our spiritual and ethical values.   I believe the Church’s central purpose as a worshiping community is to come together to express gratitude to for the gifts of life and to be transformed, both individually and collectively, by the love, grace, forgiveness, peace, and justice that Christ has inspired for the sake of the common good of all.          

I say “no” to every expression of the Christian faith that claims spiritual superiority over all other religious traditions in the world and that upholds a hierarchy of superior and inferior status based on gender, race, sexual orientation, or economic status.  I reject as idolatry every attempt that Christians have made or will make to justify war in the name of God or to associate any human government with the purposes of God.  I believe the Church needs to learn from its history to repent of all forms of personal and social sins that has led to destructive behavior and the crippling of the common good- i.e. slavery and racism, sexism and homophobia, imperialism and nationalism, economic paternalism, and injustice, violence and revenge, abuses of human rights, destruction of the earth, etc.

At this point in my life, I have come to appreciate the expressions of the Christian faith that speak profoundly to both the head and the heart to evoke from us a desire to live on the basis of love, peace, equity, and justice and to work on behalf of the vision of the Beloved Community as outlined by Martin Luther King, Jr.     

Lou Snead

August 2019