Sunday, June 16, 2019 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

**What Does a Christian Have to Believe?**

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 8
Acts 8:26–38

Jesus is God saying to each one of us, “Your faith in me can be as tentative and diffident and fragile as may be, but my faith in you will never waver, not for one single second.”

Sam Wells

In the beginning of his book entitled The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg recalls a conversation he had with a stranger as they sat next to each other on a plane. Apparently Borg told her that he was a professor of religion, because she immediately told him what she thought of the Christian faith. “I’m much more interested in Buddhism and Sufism than I am in Christianity,” she stated. When Borg asked her why, she replied, “Because they’re about a way of life, and Christianity is all about believing. I don’t think beliefs matter nearly as much as having a spiritual path and following a way.”

I’ve been wondering if that particular understanding of Christianity, that Christianity is first and foremost a system of beliefs, might be one of the motivations behind our sermon series’ big question today: What does a Christian have to believe? Now, to be fair to Borg’s seatmate, the equating of Christianity with a system of beliefs makes sense. We do, after all, recite one of the creeds of the church each Sunday. Although we are using a different one here this morning, typically we use the Apostles’ Creed, that ancient creed that came together sometime between the second and eighth centuries, the creed that begins “I believe in God the Father Almighty.”

Furthermore, today is Trinity Sunday, a Sunday on which we usually preach about God as triune: One in Three Persons. The Trinity is a theological doctrine whose truth can only really be spoken about at slant, as poet Emily Dickinson would say. On Trinity Sunday, we proclaim we believe that in God’s great mystery, God is divine community in the heart of God’s very being.

One more example as to why it is understandable to define Christianity as a system of beliefs: Today we will receive new members at the 11:00 a.m. service. The first question I will ask them in front of this congregation will be “Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” Actually, that is not what I say. I am being a little bit of a trickster. Rather, I ask “Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.” That one verb change makes a huge difference. But hold on to that for a few more moments. Let’s stay with the verb believe for a while longer.

According to the late Dr. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, former director of Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, the English word believe has,

in usage, connotation, and denotation, undergone an arresting transformation in recent centuries—one that has had an unprecedented negative impact on Western religious life. [Our English] “To believe” in Latin is opinor, opinari, meaning “opinion.” But that is not a religious word. [So to remedy that discrepancy, the early scribes translating the Greek New Testament into Latin] used the verb credo, a verb that means “I set my heart upon” or “I give my loyalty to” as the word to describe religious believing or faith” (quoted in Diana Butler Bass, Christianity after Religion, p. 119).

In other words, both in the original Greek and in the early church, “believing” was not an intellectual opinion, something that primarily had to do with one’s mind, some kind of scholarly assent. Rather, it was meant to be more of an orientation, a worldview. Credo is actually the word behind our creeds, as well. When we say “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” it would be closer to the original meaning to say “I set my heart upon God the Father Almighty.”

Does that change things for you? Rather than implying that we need to intellectually completely understand and agree with everything that comes after the words “I believe,” when we frame it more as an orientation—“I set my heart upon”—it automatically shifts us to being more about trust, to being more about a matter of both heart and mind, rather than only mind. With that shift, our big question changes from “As a Christian, what do I have to believe?” to “As a Christian, upon what or whom do I set my heart?” This is why early English would use the verb belove rather than believe. I belove God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

But that is not the only way our modern English has made our religious life more complicated. To muddy the waters up even more, as religious sociologist Diana Butler Bass points out, in Greek, what we call faith is actually an active verb—pisteo—which more accurately means “to faith.” Yet in our modern English language, faith is solely a noun and not a verb. We have no equivalent active word. So just as we did with the verb believe, so we have done with faith. We have made “to faith” into a noun, an object or subject but not an action. No wonder Borg’s seatmate and the rest of us often assume that it is our cognitive speculation about God that matters the most. What does a Christian have to believe?

In her research, Butler Bass has found that when “people struggle to believe, or stop believing in this or that, their stories almost always share [that] important assumption about belief: the assumption that ‘Belief’ is the intellectual content of faith.” And yet, “Christianity was never intended to be a system or structure of belief in the modern sense; it originated as a disposition of the heart,” Butler Bass concludes (Christianity after Religion, pp.116–119).

We see that disposition of the heart in this beautiful story of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch. Philip is told by a messenger of God to get up and go to a particular road, which he does immediately. When he arrives, he discovers this court official from Ethiopia reading the scroll of Isaiah. When Philip realizes what he is doing, Philip asks the official “Do you understand what you are reading?” I love the person’s answer, “How can I, if I have no one to teach me.”

Through the Ethiopian leader’s response, Philip hears the contours of God’s call and hops in alongside him to tell him not just about Isaiah but also to tell him about what Philip knows of Jesus, the one whom Isaiah foretold. And after Philip tells this court official what he trusts about Jesus, how he has given his own heart over to Jesus, the Ethiopian official is overwhelmed with joy. He spots water and immediately asks to be baptized. “What is to prevent me from being baptized,” he proclaims. Philip decides nothing, and so both of them go down in the water together, and new life begins.

I chose this particular passage to intersect with this sermon not only because it is a beautiful story about the ever-widening embrace of God for the whole world, but also because Philip does not stop the Ethiopian official in the middle of his joy in order to tell him that he has to agree to a full system of theological doctrines before he can enter into the Christian community. Rather, Philip must have sensed that the Spirit had already begun to orient the court official’s heart towards God, giving him the desire to follow in the Way of Jesus. Therefore, Philip decides it is appropriate for baptism to be the beginning of that new Christian’s journey, rather than something that can happen only after the official intellectually assents to what it all might mean.

So it is with us. Baptism is always just the beginning of our life of faith. We don’t have an age of accountability. We do not wait until we have it all figured out before we enter the waters of baptism. If we did, we would never do it. So let me give you my answer to the question “What does a Christian have to believe?” My answer, at least for us Presbyterian Christians, is “not much.”

Now stay with me. I am not trying to be flippantly relativistic. But the only real question for membership in the Presbyterian Christian tradition is “Do you trust in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” Or, we could phrase it, “Are you willing to set your heart upon Jesus Christ and to be oriented to God in the Way of Jesus as best as you can be?”

These two ways of speaking that question, using the verb trust or rephrasing with the Latin understanding of credo are much closer to what our biblical tradition and the early church would have understood. Retired religion professor Harvey Cox makes the case that from the time of Jesus to around 400 CE, Christianity was primarily understood as a way of life based upon trust in Jesus and a full embrace of his teachings. “To be a Christian [in that time],” Cox writes, “meant to live in his spirit, embrace his hope, and to follow him in the work he had begun.” But then, around 400, when Christianity became the established religion of the empire, this “dynamic sense of living in Jesus was displaced by an increasing emphasis on creeds and beliefs.” Cox claims that nascent beliefs “thickened into catechism, replacing faith in Jesus with tenets about him” (quoted in Christianity after Religion, p. 117).

Now, I do want to be clear about one thing. Trusting in Jesus, setting your heart upon God in the Way of Jesus, orienting your life towards the mystery of the Triune God, does bring with it responsibility. While the only thing one has to do in order to be a part of the Presbyterian piece of the body of Christ is profess a trust in Jesus, membership in the church does come with some expectations. This is why we have an Inquirers’ class. It’s not so much to make sure everyone will give intellectual assent to a system of doctrine but rather so that folks know what they are getting themselves into when they say yes.

Allow me to read for just a moment from our Book of Order, the second part of our denomination’s constitution:

Membership in the Church of Jesus Christ is a joy and a privilege. It is also a commitment to participate in Christ’s mission. A faithful member bears witness to God’s love and grace and promises to be involved responsibly in the ministry of Christ’s Church. Such involvement includes: proclaiming the good news in word and deed; taking part in the common life and worship of a congregation; lifting one another up in prayer, mutual concern, and active support; studying Scripture and the issues of Christian faith and life; supporting the ministry of the church through the giving of money, time, and talents; demonstrating a new quality of life within and through the church; responding to God’s activity in the world through service to others; living responsibly in the personal, family, vocational, political, cultural, and social relationships of life; working in the world for peace, justice, freedom, and human fulfillment; caring for God’s creation; participating in the governing responsibilities of the church; and reviewing and evaluating regularly the integrity of one’s membership, and considering ways in which one’s participation in the worship and service of the church may be increased and made more meaningful.

Did all of you members know all that?

It can feel like a lot. And yet, as those who have or who are preparing to set one’s heart upon the one we know as God in Jesus Christ, how could we not live within the contours of those responsibilities? When we give ourselves over into the trust that God will fulfill all of God’s promises of love and justice, wholeness and full welcome, though what our Book of Order calls us to live out will not be easy and we will never get it all right, we won’t be able to stop ourselves from trying. And every time we mess up, we will pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and try to be faithful again. It is simply who we are as a people who follow the One who is the Way.

In a book of sermons entitled Help My Unbelief, Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge preaches this to a New York City congregation: “No matter how troubling your doubts may be, no matter how inadequate you may feel compared to others, no matter how often you may feel that you are just going through the motions, you would not be here this morning if you did not have some germ of faith, however small. That is the Holy Spirit of Christ already at work in you. It is enough” (Fleming Rutledte, Help My Unbelief, p. 9).

“What does a Christian have to believe” might not be the most useful frame for our lifelong journey of faith. But “Upon whom do we set our heart?” along with its follow-up question “How does that orientation of faith-ing [to make it a verb] change our lives”—well, those two questions open up all kinds of grace-filled freedom for us to explore. Amen.