Imagine if your pastor believed ...

Imagine for a minute that next Sunday you're pastor gets up on the pulpit and says: "You know, I've been thinking. I believe that Mary really was a perpetual virgin. I believe that the bread actually becomes Christ body. In fact, I think that probably the Catholic church or the orthodox church is legitimately linked to the original church founded by Christ." How would you react? How do you think the pastor should be treated? Quite likely, the pastor would be pulled in front a board and warned, saying "either get your ideas right or you will no longer occupy this pulpit." And he would get a fair and firm warning. Why? Because those issues matter to us.

Now I don't mean to pick on pastors, because many are splendid people. But think back to your experiences with pastors you've had. What if you're pastor has not lead you to care about the poor one iota more than you did before you met him/her. Is there less pride in your life now than when you came under his tutelage? Has your patience increased? Probably most of us have very similar dispositions as 5 years ago. But isn't that much more of a tragedy?

Is it more important that you not have an idiosyncratic (from the outside) view idea about Mary, than that you actually care and feed for the poor. Its interesting because Christ says that in judgment day he is going to say to the ones he sent to hell "I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, naked and you clothed me not, sick and in prison and you visited me not." It seems to me to be a very practical religion, Christ-following is very simple, straightforward and tangible. And yet when we think about the idea of not gaining these characterisitics under a pastor we dismiss their absence as unimportant (because only legalistic minds dwell on them) but when it comes to ultimately benign ideas, we become indignant, irate and ready to review the pastor's worthiness as our leader.

This helps demonstrate what our core beliefs are. What defines us as Christians are not the beliefs that we hold that produce actions (beliefs like: God identifies himself with the poor so therefore help them) but creedal statements which are ultimately so opaque that the common man cannot make heads or tails out of them (and I would argue that the theologian can lose himself in his own slop of words).

This distinction is key: action producing belief vs. non-action producing beliefs (aka benign beliefs).

The most interesting thing about beliefs (and in particular benign beliefs) is that we tend to think people are 'godly' for what they choose to believe, as if beliefs were something you could turn on and off like water. Suppose I was to offer you $100 dollars, could you believe for 30 seconds that Santa Clause was real. Could you do it? What about $1000 dollars? What about eternal life? No, of course not! Because beliefs are representing reality. You do not choose what reality is, so, if you are honestly trying to know the truth, you cannot just decide to believe something that you don't. You wouldn't be trying to represent the world anymore! So, suppose the pastor honestly believes in the virginity of Mary, or suppose you don't. Neither of you are more honourable or less. You just happen to believe this. Maybe one of you is 'dumb' or 'uneducated' or 'tricked' but those are not moral flaws!

However, you are certainly accountable for whether you follow through with your action producing beliefs. You are definitely free to choose to help the poor or not, to exercise patience, to offer a prayer of thanks, to put others above yourself. And when we are not godly persons - we should worry about whether we are 'Christian' or God followers. We should not be worrying about whether we are God followers when we stumble across new beliefs.

You might object and say, 'Yes but we are commanded to believe in Jesus.' Yes, and by that he does not mean to take the theological corpus as you have twisted it (and rely on your fallible, and mostly uninformed interpretations of the Bible) and believe in that (sorry that does sound synically :( ). It means, that you need to believe in him, listen to what he says! If I believe in my coach, I listen to him when he says 'Kent, you can be an all-star point guard but you need to work on your left hand' instead of saying in my head 'Nope, my left hand is fine, I need to work on my foot speed.' To believe in him does not mean arguing about whether he is the best coach in the league or being convinced that I have all the answers to his critiques. It means I listen to what he says to me!

And yet when it comes to Jesus, 'believing in Jesus' seems to mean that we subscribe to a certain packages of ideas about him rather than actually just listening to what he commands us to do! This promotes the situation where it is possible to 'believe in him with your lips but to have your heart from him'. But what does he say: "If you love me, keep my commandments." And later what to the epistle writers say about him "If any man love not the Lord Jesus, let him be accursed when the Lord comes."

Revisit your central beliefs and when you feel your faith most violated. What does it say about you?