The Other Jesus: A Book Excerpt

The Other Jesus By Greg Garrett

Chapter 2: Faith and Belief

Some years ago, in the early 1990s, I met one of my heroes, Maya Angelou, a writer, civil rights activist, actress, singer, and person of faith. If you don't know Maya Angelou, go and Google her this instant: she's Oprah on multivitamins.

Ms. Angelou came to Baylor University, the fine Texas university where I have taught for the past twenty years, to give a campuswide lecture, and during her stay she did two things that I have never forgotten. First, at the banquet welcoming her to Baylor, she gently—but vocally—took us to task for the lack of diversity represented in the dining room. Although Baylor has become a more racially diverse school than even our huge public university neighbors, that night, as Ms. Angelou pointed out, the only black faces in the room—besides hers—were waiting tables. As I looked around, I saw white faculty, white administrators, and even some prize white students. It stung to recognize the truth of her observation, but I believe it has made a difference in Baylor ever since.

Second—and I blush a little to relate this, as I do every time I tell it—Ms. Angelou was invited to visit a class in the English Department, and after she had finished speaking and the students were filing out, I went up to thank her for coming.

Learn more about this featured book in the Patheos Book Club here .

Read a conversation about faith and practice with friends and fellow authors Greg Garrett and Brian McLaren here .

I understand, now that people say such things to me, how patronizing I was to her, how what I intended as serious praise sounded like something far less. And knowing that I intended only compliment, I try to react with something like her grace and dignity when someone gives me a taste of my own medicine.

"Ms. Angelou," I told her, "I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am for what you've written and all you've done. I'm amazed at everything you've accomplished."

And then the shame begins. "And to think," I said, "you're a Christian."

I think what I meant by that was something like "And how great that a Christian accomplished all these things." In those days, although I would have described myself as, at best, "culturally Christian," just as some Jewish people describe themselves as cultural Jews, I didn't much like Christians. Maya Angelou restored my hope a little, as Martin Luther King did, that maybe I could be some kind of Christian someday, but my general reaction to Christianity in those days was not exactly positive.

So I'm sure that what I intended as "Thanks for giving me hope in Christianity" actually sounded like "I'm really kind of amazed that a Christian would care about any of these things, let alone do them so well."

Ms. Angelou was sitting at a desk when I went to speak to her, and she had taken my hand when I introduced myself. She still held it as she looked up at me. A gentle smile broke across her face, and she shook her head—at my question or at me or both.

"Oh, honey," she said in that deep rich resonant voice, "I am not a Christian. I am trying to be a Christian."

She squeezed my hand as punctuation and let it go.

Then she said her good-byes, got up, walked out of the classroom, and as far as I know, out of my life forever.

But as I heard historian Thomas Cahill say recently at Washington National Cathedral, "Acts of generosity have untold consequences," and this act of generosity may have saved my life—or at least begun that action.

Though it would be years—literally—before I could get my head around what she had offered me that day at Baylor, after a long time, after some wandering in the wilderness and thrashing in the dark places at the bottom of the sea, I realized that what she was presenting me with was a new way of believing in God, a way of questioning that didn't demand all the answers, a way of pilgrimage that didn't depend on a single moment of faith. That way could be (and has been) satisfying and life changing, a journey growing out of a decision, rather than a single decision isolated in time and space.

In unChristian , David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons do more than just record all the bad things that people (and by "people," I include, possibly, you and me) have thought about Christians in recent years, as expressed in their polling data. They also draw some conclusions, one of which has to do with belief and salvation: Most people exposed to Christianity are barely getting their feet wet, since many popular ways of being Christian make Christian faith into "mere mental allegiance to a religion. The truth is that when a person makes a commitment to Christ, it is just the first step into a much-larger reality." [i] And so it should be, although it certainly starts with a commitment of some sort.

It is that larger reality that Ms. Angelou was trying to communicate to me and that I, steeped as I had been in evangelical American Christianity, could not yet get my head around.

When I was a little boy, I was taught that Christianity consisted largely of answering a certain question in the positive: "Do you believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Savior of the world?"

Mere mental allegiance, if you will.

Once they had answered the question—"Have you been saved? Do you know the Lord?" or "Have you professed a belief in Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?"—in the affirmative, many Christians felt secure in their salvation and left it at that.

So Christianity has often been taught as this equation you solve for x . Something simple and, once solved, done. You can be saved if you read a Gospel tract and assent to its final page. There are three Bible verses, four spiritual laws, five rules of salvation, or a Sinner's Prayer.

In any case, in many Christian traditions, if you answered the question correctly and agreed to the conditions stipulated by your tradition, that was it: you were a Christian. Faith, belief, and eternal life could all be boiled down once and for all into a single question and a single answer. As long as you made that profession before you died, you were set. (I had a childhood fantasy that diverted me during many sermons: I would be a bank robber and kiss a lot of girls and accept Jesus on my deathbed after as depraved a life as the ten-year-old I could imagine.)

And yet, there's Ms. Angelou—may her words echo down through the ages:

"Oh, honey, I am not a Christian. I am trying to be a Christian."

Not just "Do you believe?" but "What do you believe?"

And "How do you believe it?"

Today, as polls like the one in unChristian tell us, many Americans are spiritual refugees, adrift from the traditions they once occupied, if only as an accident of birth. Some have found safe harbor and community in other faith traditions; some are happily voyaging alone; some are feeling windswept, and waves are crashing over their bows. And while a vast number of people continue to find fulfillment in a religious life marked by simple truths and onetime belief statements, for many others, that seeming tropical paradise has not been even remotely tempting.

In my own case, some years ago, after my boat had sprung leaks and I had narrowly escaped rocky waters, I pulled into a harbor where people began, rather than ended, their spiritual journeys. For me, that place was St. James Episcopal Church, an inclusive, multicultural, multiracial church in East Austin, Texas, and more recently, St. David's in downtown Austin. For writer Anne Lamott, another of my heroes (and another who thought Christianity had nothing whatsoever to offer her), it was St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, an inclusive multicultural community in Marin City, California. Perhaps you've heard other stories or have your own connection to an unlikely group, to a community of believers you stumbled into that rescued you and started you on an authentic journey of faith.

And perhaps you are still looking.

If so, please don't stop. There are such places all over the United States, no matter where you might find yourself. For over twenty years, for example, I have taught in Waco, Texas, described by some as the Baptist Vatican. You might indeed set foot in a dozen extremely conservative Southern Baptist churches before finding a Baptist church that imagines people on a quest to work alongside God in the healing of creation. But eventually you would find yourself at Lakeshore Baptist Church, or at Seventh & James Baptist Church, or at Dayspring. And there, even there in one of the strongholds of conservative Baptist life, you could begin a spiritual journey that would be meaningful and lifelong and not revolve purely around your answering an altar call to claim your salvation once and for all.

And if you don't find the place you're looking for, you could always create your own. My friend Chris Seay started University Baptist Church in the middle of a ruined neighborhood in Waco, offering dynamic worship and a call to social justice. He has since planted Ecclesia, a church in the artsy and freewheeling Montrose district of Houston, which drills water wells in Africa and gets girls out of sexual slavery in Asia. All it takes to be a church is other people who want to worship and serve Christ.

In the churches where I spent my childhood, I was taught that faith was static: the answers were all known, all contained in the Bible, which was God's instruction manual, and that inside the walls of the church, we were in a safe haven from a dark and dangerous world. At St. James Episcopal, though, I was taught that it was okay to ask questions, that doubt was a necessary element of faith, that we journey toward understanding individually and in community, and that I should expect eventually to patch up my battered boat and journey back out into the world rather than dwelling forever in my safe harbor.

Most important, I was taught that faith and belief are verbs, not nouns; we don't believe and sit down, content that we are saved. As Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, puts it, once we take an initial step of trust, "the actual teaching, the doctrine, flows out of that." [ii] We don't have to know everything from the start; much will be revealed on the journey. William Sloane Coffin put it this way: "I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings." [iii]

We begin to believe and go right on believing, even though sometimes, given the state of things, it requires real effort.

But if we don't assent to a simple salvation equation, what do we believe?

What makes us Christian if it isn't a declaration of faith?

My rector (the priest in charge) when I walked in the back door of St. James Episcopal in Austin was Greg Rickel, the Episcopal bishop from western Washington we met in the introduction (chap. 1). During my confirmation class, he taught us the basics of our faith; I discovered that there were plenty of things I'd been taught while growing up that didn't seem to matter anymore—and some things I had never been taught that mattered a great deal.

Brian McLaren has written that one of the things that turns away those seeking Jesus is that too often they are asked by the churches or denominations they enter to "swallow a lot of additional stuff"; these are things that are not essential items of faith, perhaps, but they have become so important in those traditions that they can't be separated from true orthodoxy. In Pentecostal churches, say, it might be the importance of speaking in tongues; in Baptist congregations, it might be the condemnation of dancing or alcohol; in Roman Catholic circles, it might be veneration of the saints. These are things that these Christians believe define Christianity, even if they're not necessarily accepted by other followers of Jesus as important. [iv]

How do we sort these out?

What do we believe, and how?

For many people, these questions can be answered satisfactorily by the historic creeds of the church: the Nicene Creed, the Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed. For many centuries these creeds have been a gathering place for Christians from various traditions and beliefs, and they remain meaningful today. Some years ago when Chris Seay and I began working on a new Bible translation for emerging Christianity, The Voice , we rounded up writers and scholars from all over the contemporary Christian landscape. There were people from the emerging Christian tradition like Chris and Brian McLaren; there were members of mainline Protestant churches like Lauren Winner and Phyllis Tickle and me; there were evangelical Christians; there were Roman Catholics. There were liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

And all of us were involved in putting together this enormous, costly, and quite controversial project for Thomas Nelson, the world's largest religious publisher. It's better known as the publishing home of such folks as Billy Graham and Christian inspirational writer Max Lucado than as the home of cutting-edge Christianity.

I'd have to speculate that there was some nervousness at Thomas Nelson around gathering all these different birds inside one cage, and I'm sure they expected (and got) some attacks on the project because of that. To defuse charges of heresy or unorthodoxy, the publishers asked Chris and me if there was any way we could come to some basic agreements on what we, as a group, believed. I know from experience, often through interactions with people I love, that many people who call themselves Christian nonetheless seem to hold some particular beliefs that are diametrically opposed to mine.

At the Voice project, none of us wanted to sign some narrow statement of belief (unless, of course, it was our own narrow beliefs), but it didn't take us long to realize that we did have something we could all affirm: The Nicene Creed, something that has been repeated by Christians since the early days of the church.

The creeds are actually the formational documents of Christianity. We call them creeds because they come from the Latin word credo , which means "I believe" or "I give my heart to." When we say the creeds, as many Christians do in worship and in prayer, we are declaring that these are the beliefs of our hearts, that these are the beliefs that define who we are, the stories by which we understand our own stories.

The two best-known creeds, the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed, go back to the very first centuries of the Christian Church, and they embody a set of beliefs that, challenging as they might be, have satisfied Christians for over fifteen hundred years. They also, as you have heard, represent a set of unifying beliefs around which Christians from different traditions can still gather, which is what they were intended to do; when the Roman emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, the gathered Catholic bishops put together a set of beliefs that the majority of them could assent to; a later version, the one we say now, emerged from a similar council of bishops.

Although we'll explore them in our next chapter, at their heart, what the historic creeds do is tell a story about God's desire for us and how we understand and experience God: We say that we believe in one God, the God who created the universe, whom we experience as the Father. We say that we believe that Jesus, who was called the Christ, the Anointed One, was his Son—sent to earth in human form to pursue us and draw us back into close relationship with God. We say that we believe that a Spirit, a third manifestation of God, was sent to comfort and instruct us. That's it as far as what Christians agree in the creeds to believe about God, but it seems to be enough; it seems to open the door for people to approach this story as they can and will.

Some people believe every word of the historic creeds literally; some approach them as a narrative that they believe whether or not they are literal fact; some say them as a regular profession of faith: these are the things I want to believe. In each case where people believe them with their hearts, however they understand them with their heads, they are professing their faith in God, and in Jesus as the one who is their path to God.

That's not to say that some people don't have trouble saying the creeds. In one of his many books, the liberal Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong wrote that he had difficulty in saying the creeds because they contain so many supernatural elements, so many frankly unbelievable things. (I myself used to mumble parts of the creed that I couldn't yet accept in my heart, although now I speak out strong and clear.) Ultimately it seems to be less concerned with what is believable and more concerned with what I want to believe. The writer Kathleen Norris tells a story in her book Amazing Grace about a seminarian and a Greek Orthodox priest who seem to think of the creeds in opposing ways. The seminarian keeps asking the priest, "How am I supposed to say the creeds if I don't believe them?"

And every time he asks, the priest just says, "Keep saying them and you will believe them." [v]

In twelve-step spirituality there's a like understanding—"Fake it until you make it"—and a Christian version of this comes from Ignatius of Loyola: "Act as if you have faith, and faith will be given to you."

But in each case, I think it's important to know that people don't consider faith to be settled once and for all; rather, you "do" faith, you work at it, you try to understand what you believe and why.

I am trying to be a Christian.

That's part of the journey, and part of why—for what we're calling here "the other Christians"—a little doubt, a few hard questions, or even a big I-don't-get-it are not deal breakers. It's not all about assent; it is all about intent.

And it's also important to recognize that faith is often a challenge and sometimes difficult. The Bible is filled with contradictions: different portraits of God that seem hard to hold together, verses—or entire books—of the Bible that seem to stand in tension with each other. There are historical and cultural elements in the Bible that frighten and disturb us, such as the violence, the cultural chauvinism, the disrespect toward women.

Yet, as we'll discuss in a later chapter, there is a clear message that emerges from this tangle of stories: The Bible tells us that there is a God of creative love who desires a relationship with human beings, a God who is willing to forgive our mistakes, failures, and rebellion if we will only turn to God.

For many American Christians, this relationship is often transactional: If I believe what I'm supposed to believe, then God will do things for me in return. Even some progressive Christians fall into this trap, although for us it's often less about "orthodoxy" (believing the right thing) then it is about "orthopraxy" ( doing the right thing). In either case, though, it becomes a matter of false belief.

Let's be straight on something that is true regardless of which transaction we believe in: If God is truly God—that is, the Creator and Ruler of the universe and all that—then we owe God everything. And God owes us nothing. God created us. God sustains our lives. God has told us that we can choose to have fullness of life in relationship and service.

To imagine that either by your belief or your actions you can induce the great power of the universe to act in a certain way is not faith: it's magic. So whether it's a megachurch pastor saying that if you believe hard enough or give enough, God will make you rich; or a Christian social justice advocate saying that if you do the right thing for others, God will do the right thing for you—any belief that we control or with which we influence God is equally flawed.

What God gives us—chooses of God's own free will to give us—is love, and the sense of God's presence in all times, good and bad. What God offers us is relationship, and that is pure grace, certainly more than we deserve.

When I first started working on this book, one day I was in Union Station in Washington, D.C., people watching while I waited for my train. A young couple caught my eye—a handsome young soldier and his beautiful girl in a red dress were walking hand in hand—when suddenly they turned, twirled, and were dancing under the vaulted ceiling. As they danced, they looked at each other, whispered to each other, and laughed. In that moment, I believe they were totally and completely alive.

God has created us for relationship with him, as the Genesis story of Adam and Eve first tells us. It's almost impossible to take this story literally as an account of the two first human beings, but we can take it seriously as a story of how God seeks to be in relationship with us—and seeks our obedience and acquiescence.

But we have to be willing to give ourselves to the dance.

If the girl loves her soldier, she will not force him to love her—in fact, since he has been created with opinions and free will, she cannot force him. She can only trust that if he loves her as she loves him, that he will tell her—and show her—by taking her hand, by stepping out onto the dance floor.

Our relationship with God operates in similar fashion. God's hand is extended to us from before our ability to respond to it. God has always loved us. And God will go on loving us, even if we do not take God's hand and step out on the dance floor, even if we do not choose to love God back. But if we do choose this, we enter into the fullness of life and experience all that God has planned for us.

It is by thinking of belief as relationship—rather than belief as an exam we must pass—that we enter into true life with God. It isn't enough, the Bible tells us, to believe in God. One can believe in God without having a relationship with him, and Jesus tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that when judgment comes, many people will say they believe in Jesus, although they don't honestly know him at all: "'It is not anyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' who will enter the kingdom of Heaven," Jesus tells us, "but the person who does the will of my Father in heaven" (Matthew 7:21 NJB).

The Gospel of Matthew goes still farther; throughout its pages it tells us that belief is not enough, that what we must be doing is what Jesus teaches us to do. Belief should change us. The Greek word metanoia is often translated in the Bible as "repentance," a word that has taken on all kinds of unpleasantness from its use by hellfire-and-brimstone preachers and accusatory Christians. I want to reclaim it for our twenty-first-century Christianity, since what it truly means is transformation , the sense of turning your life around, of becoming an entirely new person.

When you believe, or begin to believe, it should take you from the path you were on and plant your feet on a new one.

Not yet at a destination, of course.

But on the way.

Discussion Questions

What is your own understanding of what and how we believe in God? Has your conception changed over your lifetime? How would the idea of pilgrimage differ from the mainstream idea of the profession of faith? What does each idea offer? The author writes that we should not expect God to do what we want. How does this differ from some understandings of religion? Why do we pray if not to get what we want? Can you remember a time when you or someone you know changed for the better? What caused that change? For Further Reflection and Study

Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church : A Memoir of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). In this personal account of her journey of faith, Taylor recounts her transition from priest to professor, from someone who experienced God primarily within the church to one who found God all around her.

Paula Huston, By Way of Grace: Moving from Faithfulness to Holiness (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007). In this book about faith translated into virtues, Huston explores transformative Christian faith and practice by focusing on the cardinal virtues of the faith as exemplified by different saints.

Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004). McLaren explores the variety of ways Christians have believed, arguing that each offers something of value, that too many artificial distinctives are introduced alongside real doctrine, and that belief not put into action is dead.

Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). The archbishop of Canterbury introduces the most important elements of Christian faith by taking readers on a guided tour of the great creeds. The central idea: God is worthy of our trust.

[i] . David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian , 82.

[ii] . Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), viii.

[iii] . William Sloane Coffin, Credo (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 7.

[iv] . Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 44-45.

[v] . Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 64-66.