For some time I struggled to understand the difference between believing in things and having faith. Writers, theologians, historians and others alike seem to be saying the same thing, we are in transition. Harvey Cox has described this transition as from the Age of Belief(orthodoxy) to the Age of the Spirit (faith).
Our theological belief system goes by many different names, but the term that best describes it is Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is important, one needs to have a proper frame of reference in which one can move, its important to know where the boundaries begin and where they end. But these same boundaries also have limits in that they can keep us locked in and other things of equal importance locked out.
The limitation of orthodoxy is that it asks little of us As Richard Rohr points out ”information is not the same as transformation”.It is good, right and proper to have a workable belief system but belief systems do not change people. Some of the most rigid and inflexible people are, sadly, Christians who have a perfect orthodoxy. They subscribe and defend the idea that “believing all the right things” is mandatory-and of course this is true-yet remain unchangeable. Of course this is not unique to Christianity but to all religions.
Sometimes the church seems a little too concerned with teaching creating the impression that this is the only thing that matters. In placing too much emphasis on teaching the implication is this; if we believe the right things it will lead to the right outcomes.
This may have its origins in modernity in that believing in Jesus became the only means by which we could go to heaven and going to heaven seemed to be the only thing that mattered. In those heady days of the Billy Graham style of preaching salvation was, all, about getting your “life right with God” and then being safe in the knowledge that “going to heaven when I die” would be a certainty, with that all sorted one could get on with his or her life. Brian Mclaren called this view of salvation as ”an evacuation plan for the next life”.
In his book The Scandal of an Evangelical Conscience Ron Sider writes about the failure of evangelical christianity in that it seemed to be all about ”belief systems”. Sider says that we do not change as people because of what we believe, yet, this is implied. It’s a rather sobering reminder that the Hebrew text speaks about the orthodoxy of Satan! in that he believes all the right things this alone is some cause for consideration.
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