You Haven't Reached the End of Your Spiritual Journey

Q: I love your column. It's one of the few worthwhile things our paper has kept as they've continually purged and cut important features and sections to cope with the decline in circulation and advertising. As such, your column is one of the reasons we continue to subscribe. I do have a question for further clarification.

In a recent column, you responded to a question regarding a Christian mother/Jewish father, where you said: "First of all, there's no such thing as a half anything. If you believe Jesus was the Christ, the Messiah, who came to earth to die and be resurrected for your sins, then you're a Christian. If you don't, you aren't. Period."

Your response seems too cut-and-dried for such a complex issue. For example, I attend and enjoy a Lutheran Church, but I subscribe to the theology of Marcus Borg and John Shelby Spong, who essentially reject literal interpretations of the Trinity, the Virgin birth and the Resurrection. Each Sunday, I recite the creeds and willingly take part in communion, as I find them comforting "traditions," but I don't take them literally (as Lutherans believe that the bread and wine are transformed.). For me, it's more metaphor and a comforting symbolic ritual.

Theologically, I'd probably be better off at a Unity Church, or perhaps Unitarian, but I find the approaches of both more of a philosophy than religion. I don't think of myself as a hypocrite, but at the same time, I can't honestly "proclaim" or proselytize, as do "true believers" and/or fundamentalists.

I believe in God and find Jesus' teachings important and relevant, but I can't come to grips with the core Trinity/Resurrection/Virgin birth component of Christianity. That said, can someone like me still be a Christian? According to your statement, the answer is "No." - W., via godsquadquestion@aol.com

A: Thanks for your kind words and important critique. Frankly, what you are is less important to me than what you're trying to become. Let's leave to God the final judgment about whether or not you are, in fact, a Christian.

What is clear is that you're a Christian in your spiritual journey. You're honest enough, however, to realize that what you believe is different from the teaching of Christianity. Such honesty is refreshing. Many people are so wrapped up in their own egos that they insist the teaching of their faith is ever and always just exactly what they believe.

I encourage you to live with that difference and pray about that difference. God is not through with you yet, and you're not through with God or Christianity. The great Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig was once asked if he observed one of the ritual commandments of Judaism and he answered, "Not yet."

You haven't yet entered the mystery of Transubstantiation and Incarnation. Maybe you never will, and maybe the reason is that you're right and these are just symbolic truths. But maybe there is truth in these teachings that you can and will discover. The point is, you are comfortable in a traditional faith community, even if you're not yet comfortable with its full theology.

My view is that just asking the questions the way you do is enough to keep you on the path to a truth I pray you'll discover in time. The best course is not to join a church that never challenges you, but to humbly affirm both your conscience and your inherited faith.

XXX

Here's another comment on the distinction I made between killing and murder, and my clarification that the biblical commandment is not, "Thou shalt not kill," but rather, "Thou shalt not murder."

Q: How sad that even post-Holocaust, we cannot see the horrible acts that have been perpetrated on innocent people through justification and rationalization of murder as killing. Every war, from the dawn of time, and every crime of passion were and are wrongly justified by foolish distinctions that allow murderers to ease their conscience. There can be no justification for "killing," or every "killing" will be justified. Any thoughts? - D., via godsquadquestion@aol.com

A: Because some murders are wrongly and perversely justified by incompetent theologians, or by politicians or military leaders using religion to justify their crimes, doesn't mean all killing is morally wrong. Your view is classic pacifism and I respect it even though I don't agree with it, nor does Christianity, Judaism, Islam and most secular moral philosophers.

Killing in self-defense and killing animals for food are serious moral challenges but in the end they are, I would assert, moral acts. Pacifism allows true evil to run rampant in our world. We must always be on guard that personal or collective self-defense claims are in fact morally justified, but we can't help ourselves or our world by asserting that all acts of killing are wrong.

XXX

Finally, some comments on my recent reference to Einstein and religion elicited this response from a reader:

"The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

"'My religion,' Einstein said, 'consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.'" (from "The Universe and Dr. Einstein," by Lincoln Barnett) -- Fr. B., via godsquadquestion@aol.com. -- to which I say, Amen!

(Send QUESTIONS ONLY to The God Squad, c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207, or email them to godsquadquestion@aol.com.