Quotes About Belief

I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don't, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it. As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.

Who we are and when and where we exist affect how we imagine God.

God doesn't change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.

I need a place to let go and fall back from my familiar patterns and trust God to catch me.

Reimagining the God of the Bible is what Christians do. More than that, they have to, if they wish to speak of the biblical God at all.

Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.

Paul is "our guy," and we Protestants continue to expect from him clear direction about what to believe and what to do. And Paul certainly seems to oblige. He has that alluring black-and-white, decisive, uncompromising "just do what I say" quality that some of us just can't get enough of. It's almost as if Paul's letters have become the Protestant version of the Law.

Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.

When we think of "strong" faith as something that should be free of uncertainty or crises, I believe we have gotten wrong an important part of who God is and how the Christian life really works.

Being "in" with God is about much more than the thoughts we keep in our heads, the belief systems we hold on to, the doctrines we recite, or the statements of faith we adhere to, no matter how fervently and genuinely we do so, and how important they may be.

Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That's how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it's enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

In the spiritual life, the opposite of fear is not courage, but trust.

I didn't know how to "do" faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.

We should not be surprised when we find ourselves in a similar spot, experiencing a God who is not beholden to our thinking, a God who doesn't act according to our sense of certainty, even if we can find a Bible verse or two to back it up. God can't be proof-texted. God will not be backed into a corner.

Belief and faith always have content—a what. But a faith that looks like what the Bible describes is rooted deeply in trust in God (rather than ourselves) and in faithfulness to God by being humbly faithful to others (as the Father and Son have been faithful to us). That's basically it—though it's anything but easy.

I believe that God is more interested in the who. And that means walking the walk, not just talking the talk. Better: it means walking the walk when no words are left. That is trust.

When we grab hold of "correct" thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God. We have turned away from God's invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.

I believe that the Bible does not model a faith that depends on certainty for the simple fact that the Bible does not provide that kind of certainty. Rather, in all its messy diversity, the Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe.

In other words, I believe that faith in the Creator is necessarily transrational (not antirational) and mystical. I try to remember that as I work through intellectual challenges—and I mean work through, not avoid.

Christianity is a setup for letting go of certainty. The two pillars of the Christian faith express the mystery of faith: incarnation and resurrection. Of course, there's more to the Christian faith, but two elements make Christianity what it is, and both dodge our powers of thought and speech.

The deeper problem here is the unspoken need for our thinking about God to be right in order to have a joyful, freeing, healing, and meaningful faith. The problem is trusting our beliefs rather than trusting God.

this quest for certainty is running on fumes.