This post expresses my personal credo and is a contribution to the thread started last year by Andrew on his tentative beliefs. I started out by trying to parallel what I felt I could say with what Andrew had said but I found that we diverged too much. In particular I do not see that the story of Israel should occupy such a prominent place in a credo. This is needed to make sense of jesus’s earthly ministry but not, I think, to make sense of the post Easter Jesus.
So this is my credo- a bit pusillanimous I suppose but as much as I can honestly say.
Credo
1. I believe there is something beyond this world; which is more important than anything else and which makes sense of this world. I have had this belief nearly all my life, often the faintest of flickering flames but very persistent. It is not a belief I have reached by reason and I cannot express it in words. My lifetime’s journey has been to understand this ‘something beyond’ and in the succeeding articles of my creed I try to articulate the point I have now reached. Much of this I hold tentatively, wondering about its truth and value, and seeking by openness to God to expand my understanding.
2. I believe that humanity was created good and that we can find great beauty and joy in life. But human beings have the capacity for doing evil, both to themselves and others; and during their lives most human beings will suffer from illness and be overtaken by calamity, and all will eventually die. The story of the Fall, of a creation gone wrong, thus resonates deeply with ordinary human experience. And even the human beings who see their lives as happy and unruffled, and for whom the story of the Fall is not compelling, are likely to feel the existential ache for something beyond this world.
3. I believe Jesus Christ was the culminating point of God’s plan for rescuing our wounded world. For no reason that we can understand, God’s plan had begun with Israel as the place where the truth about God was to be experienced. But God was not the private preserve of Israel-Israel was meant to reflect God to the world.
4. Jesus preached to Israel that God is not a God of force but rather of suffering and self surrender; and God does not intervene in the world to preserve earthly interests. Jesus’s God is a God of love, who calls his followers friends, not servants. Israel rejected Jesus’s message and killed him. In some way that is hard to understand, Jesus, in dying, took on himself all the evil of the world and reconciled the world and God.
5. I believe that Jesus inaugurated a new creation with his resurrection from the dead. The new creation will abolish evil and death and all the imperfections of our world but we still await its completion.
6. I am not sure what happens when people die. I have moved away from the assumption I had made earlier in my life that after death we live in a disembodied existence. I find the New Testament idea, that God will not simply throw away his creation but will complete and perfect it, more appealing. Hence I believe that at some point after our death we will be resurrected with a body which is now perfect.
7. Our life as Christians is to reflect God to the world by following the commands of Christ to love one another, to work for justice and to be perfect as our heavenly father is perfect. In all of this we seek to substitute God’s will for our own.
8. We are guided and strengthened in this present life by the word of scripture, the counsel of our fellow human beings and above all by the spirit of Christ. Most of the time we will be in no doubt about what is good or what we should do; but sometimes we will be uncertain about both.
9 The most serious objection to Christianity is that over the 2000 years of its history, terrible evil has been committed in its name. Can a faith which has presided over such evil really command our allegiance?
10. How Christianity coheres with the other great religious traditions, I do not know. But I am sure that it does. It is not for Christians to convert other people but to encourage them in the practice of their own faith
What I wrote
I wrote this a short while back at www.surefish.co.uk where I make most noise, though more recently its move to fundamentalist debates in some cses due to new entrants has made the place less interesting.
**God exists within symbolism and language, as does communication. It is a focus outside and within, and about the highest we might conceive. It becomes ultimate desires and concerns. So much does exist within language but specialises: whilst God is about ethics it also attempts to break out of specialising. God is also known through traditions, as is any spiritual way, and these traditions come to us through various stories and claims, to be read afresh and examined and added to by very generation. One tradition is that of Rabbi Jesus, seen by immediate followers as Messiah and univeralised into a Christ, and whose power is that of ethical reversals - that the last shall be first. Another tradition is that not philosophical but practical one of Buddha, a way of clarity and salvation. We have the radical equality of Muhammad, the syncretism of Baha’u’llah and the peace resistance and loving kindness of Gandhi. But there are countless men and women who are guides to whomever they meet. We should use religion not to be tribal but to break down tribes. The exchange of ritual that coheres a group and addresses what is divine to it should extend outwards. Religion is the goal where they are like we whilst remaining they. There should never be an attempt to convert, but to meet and discuss, critically maybe but even then positively towards humanity. We should keep on learning, valuing knowledge and its insights, using it positively and to benefit. It is not always easy to know when it is a benefit, and so discussion is needed. We need a richer and purposeful language so that communtiies become enriched by the amount and quality of our conversation, into which the learning process goes.***
I hold to God in a non-realist manner. The supernatural is a dead duck. I am also torn between the Jesus (and other figures) who should be understood by historical method, but the religion that says story is more important and which is freer and more creative. I have no interest in life after death, and as Stephen Hawking recently said to the heights of Richard and Judy, it flies in the face of evidence available to us.
http://www.pluralist.co.uk