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What is the “heart” of Christianity? What is most central to Christianity and to being Christian? The question arises in each new period of Christian history.
Furthermore, as in the phrase “head and heart,” heart suggests something deeper than the intellect and the world of ideas.
Neither can claim to be the Christian tradition. Both are ways of seeing the tradition.
A paradigm is a comprehensive way of seeing, a way of seeing a “whole.” Sometimes called a gestalt, a paradigm is a large interpretive framework that shapes how everything is seen, a way of constellating particulars into a whole.
Significantly, the change from a Ptolemaic to Copernican paradigm was not about a detail or two; it affected how the “whole” was seen.
The earlier paradigm sees Christianity as grounded in divine authority. For most Protestants, divine authority resides in the Bible. For Catholics, it resides not only in the Bible but also in the teaching authority of the church, expressed especially clearly in the notion of papal infallibility.
The earlier paradigm sees the Bible as a divine product.
The earlier paradigm interprets the Bible literally.
But soft literalism affirms that the really important events in the Bible happened more or less as they are described.
Indeed, Christian literalism is to a large extent a literalism of the spectacular. For the earlier paradigm, “the miraculous” is central to the truth of Christianity.
Faith as believing is central. The reason is obvious: the earlier paradigm’s way of seeing the Bible and the tradition is hard to believe, and that’s why it takes faith.
Of course, the earlier paradigm uses the language of God’s grace and compassion and love, but its own internal logic turns being Christian into a life of requirement and rewards, thereby compromising the notion of grace. Indeed, it nullifies grace, for grace that has conditions attached is no longer grace.
Put most simply, it sees the Christian life as believing in Christianity now for the sake of salvation later.
With the Enlightenment as its foundation, modernity called into question both the divine origin and the literal-factual truth of many parts of the Bible.
In particular, the earlier paradigm is very much a product of modernity.
The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Papal infallibility was affirmed only in 1870.
Prior to the Enlightenment, it was not the literal meaning of the Bible that mattered most for Christians, but its “more-than-literal” meaning, about which I shall soon say more. But the Enlightenment largely identified truth with factuality. In our time, if somebody asks, “Is that story true?” we are likely to assume that they’re asking, “Is it factual? Did it happen?” Truth and factuality go hand in hand.
The emerging paradigm sees the Christian life as a life of relationship and transformation. Being Christian is not about meeting requirements for a future reward in an afterlife, and not very much about believing. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God that transforms life in the present. To be Christian does not mean believing in Christianity, but a relationship with God lived within the Christian tradition as a metaphor and sacrament of the sacred.
Christian Diversity: One element in a potential bridge is the recognition of Christian diversity. Historically and culturally, there are many ways of being Christian, many ways of interpreting Christianity and living the Christian life. The notion that there is one right way of being Christian is made impossible by thinking about the diverse configurations there have been in Christian history.
The point is, there is no single right way of understanding Christianity and no single right way of being Christian.
So the issue isn’t that one of these visions of Christianity is right and the other wrong. Rather, the issue is functionality, whether a paradigm “works” or “gets in the way.”
“I’m much more interested in Buddhism and Sufism than I am in Christianity.” When I asked why, she said, “Because they’re about a way of life, and Christianity is all about believing.” She continued, “I don’t think beliefs matter nearly as much as having a spiritual path and following a way.”
This preoccupation with “believing” and “beliefs” has a crucially important effect: it turns Christian faith into a “head matter.” Faith becomes primarily a matter of the beliefs in your head—of whether you believe the right set of claims to be true.
In the Bible and the Christian tradition, the “heart” is a metaphor for a deep level of the self, a level below our thinking, feeling, and willing, our intellect, emotions, and volition.
All but two of its twenty-seven books use the noun “faith” or the verb “believe.”2
Though faith is important for all Christians, it is especially so for Protestants because of the centrality of “faith” in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.
Sometimes called a propositional understanding of faith, it is the dominant meaning today, both within the church and outside it.
This development changed the meaning of the word “orthodoxy.” Before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, orthodoxy referred to “right worship” or “correct worship.” If you did the liturgy right, the practice right, you were orthodox. Then, in the aftermath of the Reformation, orthodoxy began to mean “right belief” or “correct belief.” And faith began to mean “believing the right things.”3
Modern Western culture is the only culture in human history that has made this identification.
“What do you understand the word ‘believing’ to mean? When do you use the word ‘believe’”? Their most frequent response: “When you’re not sure, or when you don’t know.” There are some things you know, and other things you’re not sure about, and so you can only believe. Believing and knowing are contrasted.
The opposite of faith as assensus has both milder and stronger forms. The milder form is doubt; the stronger form is disbelief.
It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads—as if “believing the right things” is what God is most looking for, as if having “correct beliefs” is what will save us.
Faith as trust is like floating in a deep ocean.
Growth in faith as trust casts out anxiety. Who of us would not want a life with less anxiety, to say nothing of an anxiety-free life?
Faith as fidelitas does not mean faithfulness to statements about God, whether biblical, credal, or doctrinal. Rather, it means faithfulness to the God to whom the Bible and creeds and doctrines point. Fidelitas refers to a radical centering in God.
When the Bible speaks about adultery, most often it is not speaking about human sexual relationships. Sometimes it is, as in the Ten Commandments and in some other passages. But when the prophets indict Israel as adulterous or Jesus speaks of “an evil and adulterous generation,” they are not saying that there is a lot of spouse swapping going on. Rather, they are referring to unfaithfulness to God and God’s covenant.
In the Hebrew Bible, faith as fidelity is the meaning of the first of the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me.”7 In the New Testament, it is the meaning of the Great Commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your life force, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”
8Fidelitas means loving God and loving your neighbor and being faithful, above all, to these two great relationships.
The third way we can see “what is” is to view it as life-giving and nourishing.
To some, this way of seeing may seem naively optimistic. But Niebuhr was no Pollyanna. He knew about the Holocaust and all the terrible things that we are capable of doing to each other. The point is not that reality is simply “nice,” or that one can demonstrate that it is gracious. Rather, the point is that how we see reality matters, for how we see “what is” profoundly affects how we experience and live our lives.
This meaning of faith is closely related to faith as fiducia, as trust. What it adds, though, is that how we see reality and our ability to trust are connected to each other. Trust and visio go together; trust in God and how we see God go together.
Significantly, the last three understandings of faith are all relational.
Faith as visio is a way of seeing the whole that shapes our relationship to “what is,” that is, to God. Faith as fidelitas is faithfulness to our relationship with God. And faith as fiducia is deepening trust in God, flowing out of a deepening relationship with God.
We commonly translate credo as “I believe.” And because most modern people understand “I believe” as “I give my assent to,” many Christians have difficulty with the creeds.
But credo does not mean “I hereby agree to the literal-factual truth of the following statements.” Rather, its Latin roots combine to mean “I give my heart to.”
Most simply, “to believe” meant “to love.” Indeed, the English words “believe” and “belove” are related. What we believe is what we belove. Faith is about beloving God.
It is not because of what they don’t know about the Bible that they have difficulty with infallibility and literalism. It’s because of what they do know.
The emerging paradigm provides an alternative to biblical literalism. To use the three adjectives with which I describe it: a historical, metaphorical, and sacramental understanding of the Bible.
When the Bible is approached in this way, many of the problems that people have with the Bible largely disappear.2 The conflict between the Genesis creation stories and science vanishes. The laws of the Bible need not be understood as God’s laws for all time, but as the laws and ethical teachings of these communities.
Within the emerging paradigm, inspiration refers to the movement of the Spirit in the lives of the people who produced the Bible. The emphasis is not upon words inspired by God, but on people moved by their experience of the Spirit, namely, these ancient communities and the individuals who wrote for them.
