Quotes about Belief

I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through their experience, when and where they existed.

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

Believing is easy. It gives us wiggle room to think our way out of a tight spot. But trust doesn't have any wiggle room. It explodes it. Trust is about being all in.

The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway (as Qohelet would say). That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust.

Faith describes our whole way of looking at life and how we act on that.

We reimagine God in ways that account for and make sense of our experience.

a literal reading of Genesis is not the firmly settled default position of true faith to which one can "hold firm" or from which one "strays." Literalism is a hermeneutical decision (often implicit) stemming from the belief that God's Word requires a literal reading.

We have to die, and the choice is ours. If we don't, we are still holding on to something. And if we are holding on, we aren't really following. Just sort of following. Standing around. [Oh God, what did I sign up for? This Christianity thing is hard. Deep breath . . .] The apostle Paul chimes in, too: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2:19—20)

no one lives in the scripted places of the Bible all the time, where God shows up as planned, tells us exactly what we need to do, and things work out

The big lesson I learned from wrestling with my own curveballs is how deeply my faith in God had been cemented in fear—which is to say, how I viewed God as very much antagonistic toward me. And so any thought on my part of listening to my experiences and interrogating my inherited faith—to inspect its boundaries let alone climb over its walls—was seen as a crisis that had to be averted or at least resolved immediately.

Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the "sin of certainty.

my disruptive experiences are not outside impositions to or an attack on my faith, but are the soil out of which my faith matures and takes shape.