Before you answer that, consider the following comparative questions:
What do I need to do to ensure life after death?
vs.
What can I accept that is a given reality?
How do I need to behave in order to belong?
vs.
How does always belonging effect my behaviour?
Do I live by anticipatory action?
vs.
Do I live by applied acceptance?
Does my belief activate divine reality?
vs.
What divine reality can I believe in?
When you consider these comparisons, you may notice that the first in each grouping places an immense amount of power and responsibility upon the “believer” and their ability to perform before there is a response from God. I cannot help thinking that many of us treat ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ like it’s some kind of fairy dust that keeps God afloat and is the secret to good presents – as if God is Santa Claus and our belief is some kind of ‘Christmas spirit’ that enables the Trinity’s magical sled to travel the world (pulled by angels) and give good things to good people.
Satire aside, this performance approach is all very functional and places lots of control in the hands of certain able-bodied and knowledgeable people. And any system skewed in this way can lend itself to elitism, ableism, racism, sexism and other power-imbalanced approaches to basic needs. Should we really be surprised that religion and doctrine has suffered under the same demonisation as many other things in society? No – but when you are the beneficiary, why destroy a good thing?
If I’m being a little vague or poetic, do excuse me. To put flesh on power-imbalanced examples of the above, ask yourself if a person with dementia (and its 150 varieties) can have active and reliable faith and belief in God that matches many spoken and unspoken doctrinal salvation pre-requisites? I work in dementia wings – I can tell you, many residents would be disqualified by many salvation rubrics as having no faith or belief.
Ask yourself if somebody who lives with an acquired brain injury has the capacity to believe in God? Again, I have cared for severely disabled people – there is really no way of knowing (or confessing) a belief in God.
Ask yourself if our patriarchal culture has not excluded women from the pulpit for centuries and if this hasn’t had an effect on theology or views of God.
Simply ask yourself if God’s ‘blessing’ is espoused to be upon the wealthy more than those who are poor.
The uncomfortable list of discriminatory examples is exhaustive… so I will save you the time and discomfort.
In some recent discussions around one of the chapters in my new book, Decenter Everything, I was asked if the theological view that I was presenting could be classed as universalism. I really didn’t have an answer to that because a lot of Christians apply that label with an air of caution or distrust, like it’s a form of atheism and is to be avoided at all costs. The truth is, most people don’t understand the term univeralism, its origins, or its implications. Suffice to say the chapter on decentring God in my book does raise a lot of questions because I present a case for maturity based on an ontological and mystical union with God (think early church 300AD) opposed to something that is legalistic, contractual, and forensic (think reformers 1500AD).
These might be new words and phrases to you, and that’s totally fine, I don’t think you have to know them. But it’s good for us to consider that perhaps what God did as a collective salvation act, through (and as) Christ, has now been sliced up and turned into discriminatory individual salvation projects dependent on some very unfair prerequisites and rules we created. (And these rules span and change across denominations and religious expressions.)
Be that as it may, I am learning to (radically) accept that the eternal kind of life that Christ presents to us is one that is grounded in loving sonship (relationality) and not scope. In other words, accepting the universal and cosmic breadth of ‘God in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself’ (2 Corinthians 5:19) — and understanding that there is very little that I can do about this loving act — leaves me with the difficult daily task of accepting that I and everyone else is 100% accepted by God and included in Christ, in the Trinity.
Allowing this embodied union with God and everyone else, including neighbours and enemies, to be the truth that sets me free to be (as Tara Boothby says) loved, loving, and loveable. And I think this is good news for everyone, right now.
I’ve much more to say about this into in my new book. So go get it. Decenter Everything available worldwide. Discover More Here