Hi Don,
I just realized that one advantage to your point of view is that you'll never have to suffer a belief systems crash
Have you ever had one in the past?
Bets
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Bets, my whole life has been shaped by a belief system crash. Until age 21, I was progressively forced into a crisis by doubts about the Bible and my Pentecostal upbringing. It seemed that no one could answer my questions or even cared about them. But this crisis was offset by many powerful mystical experiences that assured me that the Bible expressed Truth after all. In my most potent experience at age 16, God advised me, "Young man, you crave answers, but answers are not good for you. Answers will drive a wedge between your head and your true spiritual growth. I want you to live the big questions. If you do this, they will lead you to the center of my heart." That divine word was electrifying for me and all my psychic gifts and academic abiliities seem to have arisen from that experience.
This faith crisis made me aware of new spiritual principles by which I live, of which these 2 are key:
(1) In life, theological understanding is the booby prize because it tends to give us just enough spirituality to innoculate us against the real thing. My Harvard doctorate makes me, among other things, a specialist in the development and fine points of Christian doctrine. But as a pastor, I always direct my church's gaze to the sacred experiences that each doctrine is designed to support. God does not care about how we would fill in a postmortem religious multiple-choice quizz after our death. Some of Christendom's greatest saints were simple souls who would not perform well on such a test. For example, last night at our free dinner and movie night, a large crowd watched the old movie, "The Song of Bernadette," the story of the founding of the healing shrine at Lourdes. I am not Catholic. But a largely Protestant audience was profoundly moved by the protrayal of Bernadette's extremely simple faith. Jennifer Jones' oscar-winning portrayal of Bernadette is the greatest performance by an actress I have ever seen. No, God cares more about the magnificent loving creatures we might yet become by His grace. Character forged by experience is everything; belief systems are nothing by comparison.
(2) We must embrace our faith passionately but provisionally--passionately because we need to pour out our lives in the service of God and the needy, and provisionally in the sense that we must always be open to the possibility that we are mistaken in trivial and more important beliefs.
Don