A Shifting Faith is a Living Faith
Why changing our beliefs/interpretations/opinions is a healthy, holy thing to do
Every day my phone suggests some pictures from my camera roll. It’s usually five or six pictures ranging from a couple weeks ago to more than a decade. It’s become a daily ritual, and one that has helped me keep perspective on how much life, and my kids, have grown and changed.
It’s also given me a helpful way to understand how my faith, and the Christian Tradition itself, has shifted and changed. We have tended to see our doctrines and creeds as the full and final forms of our faith. What if, instead, we saw them as pictures, snapshots of moments in time? They help us mark and remember key moments in the evolution of our faith, but they are never intended to halt or freeze our progress.
When I look at my kid’s baby pictures, I never assume that we’ve captured the fullness of them as a person, or that in a particular picture they are the full and final version of who they will become. Instead, it gives me a glimpse of a moment in time on their journey. I don’t defend those photographs; I cherish them. These pictures help me understand and appreciate how my kids have grown into who they are in the present.
I think there’s a connection here that should inform our understanding of faith. Our creeds and doctrines—formulated in the fourth century, sixteenth century, or even the twenty-first century— aren’t the final, be-all-end-all pronouncements we’ve been taught to think they are. They are snapshots of our spiritual ancestors processing their questions and experiences in real time, just like our pictures will give our descendants a glimpse of us during this era. They capture for us how they were working out their understandings of faith then and there, as ours will show our descendants how we did the same here and now.
One of the pushbacks I get in response to this kind of thinking is a verse from the book of Jude that says the exact opposite of what I’ve said here. It reads like this:
Beloved, while eagerly preparing to write to you about the salvation we share, I find it necessary to write and appeal to you to contend for the faith that was once and for all handed on to the saints. (Jude 1:3, NRSVue)
If this isn’t a gotcha, what is? Well…not so fast. It’s important to think about the context of this short little letter and how that informs our understanding of “the faith that was once and for all handed on…”
Scholars date Jude to the early second century, sometime after the year 100 CE. It was written, as the reference above states, to essentially call out and condemn those in the Church who did not agree with the author’s understanding or interpretation of what we would anachronistically call “early Christianity.”1 The “faith,” the author suggests, is a fully formed and codified understanding, and the job of the faithful is to pass it on to the next generation, like a runner in a relay race passing on the baton to the person responsible for running the next leg.
But what was the content of that “faith”? It might be surprising to some that it doesn’t look like what might be considered orthodoxy, or “right belief,” by many (if not most) Christians today. There was no doctrine of the Trinity, no Original Sin. Atonement theories like Penal Substitution had not yet been developed. In fact the idea of the Virgin Birth was only a couple decades old at this point. The “faith that was once and for all handed on…” has always been a work in progress. It was never settled, codified, and frozen in time, and it still isn’t. Faith has always been evolving and changing, and continues to do so today. That progression is baked into the crust of the Tradition, which means that changing our beliefs/interpretations/opinions is a healthy, holy thing to do. It’s us stepping up to the plate and taking our swings, just like those who came before us and, hopefully, those who come after us. Our task is not preservation, but creative and imaginative engagement with what came before to shape what comes next.
Which brings me back to the pictures of my kids. They love, and I mean LOVE, to scroll through the images on our phones and see how much they’ve grown. They ask questions about what they were like back then, and get a ton of joy from looking back at earlier versions of themselves. At the same time, we keep taking new pictures, because they keep growing. I hope we will do the same when it comes to our faith, documenting what we are learning and how we are growing. As it turns out, a shifting and changing faith is actually a faith that is alive and growing.
While many people refer to the Jesus movement in the first 300 years “early Christianity,” I think a case can be made that Christianity, as we understand it, was a later development that happened gradually between the second and fourth centuries. A fantastic book on this is After Jesus Before Christianity. It becomes evident that the early Jesus movement was diverse in both theology and practice.