Chapter 4

Believing Is Seeing: The Role Of Beliefs In The Life Of Faith

Tucked neatly into John Calvin’s exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, and often overlooked there, is an intriguing idea about the uses of the Bible in Christian living. The scriptures are to faith, the great Protestant Reformer suggested, what corrective lenses are to vision: both are intended to help people see things more clearly, in heaven and on earth respectively. This chapter applies Calvin’s fruitful analogy in a little different way, to the beliefs that we hold as Christians and the contributions our beliefs make to our growth in faith. In specific, the chapter focuses on three ways in which beliefs bring more clearly into view the overarching vision and message of the gospel. First they help us distinguish the Christian story’s vital center from its myriad details. Second they help us direct our ultimate commitments to what is truly ultimate rather than to idols of our own making. And third they help us see in a bitterly conflicted world communities of faith praising God “with one mind and voice.” (Romans 15:6)

The Story, the Message, and the Details

This section begins with a brief story from a distant past—when most church colleges actually held worship services on their campuses during the week. (And sometimes, even on Sundays.) On my way from chapel to class on one of those mornings, two students walking ahead of me were in animated conversation. One exclaimed to the other in considerable frustration:

I knew I was in over my head as soon as my Old Testament prof put that map up. The “possible routes of the Exodus,” he said. Oh, boy. There’s more than one? I never will get them all sorted out. Isn’t it enough just to believe that God led the people where he wanted them to go?

I happened to know this young man and appreciated both how deeply faithful he was and how unsophisticated he was in the ways of theology. Nevertheless, I could not help thinking to myself that in spite of his admitted confusion about a particular point of biblical interpretation, he was nevertheless exhibiting a solid grasp of a very important theological premise, that some beliefs count for more and some beliefs count for less in the life of faith.

Ancient Israel grasped this point well also. Long after the settlement of Canaan, the Deuteronomist relates, God’s covenant people lifted up for affirmation a very succinct summary of their historical self-understanding: “Once we were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and Yahweh brought us out of Egypt by his mighty hand . . . And he brought us out of there to lead us into the land he swore to our fathers he would give to us.” (Deuteronomy 6:21,23, Jerusalem translation) According to this passage, and its parallel version at 26:5-9, it does not seem to matter much whether faithful Jews and Christians remember all of the details about the Hebrew people’s wilderness wanderings and subsequent conquest of the Canaanites, as long as they remember Who it is who guided the process. And so it is with the church’s most important beliefs. Details provide context. Sometimes, only the devil is in the details themselves.

Many people recoil at the thought that there could be any detail at all in the scriptures that might be subordinated to a focusing on larger issues of belief. For them, God’s inspiration of the whole of the Bible is at once God’s direct inspiration of each book, chapter, and verse in it. One problem with this attitude toward the Bible is that its books do not always present the same details in the same way. What, for example, is the primary justification for insisting on sabbath rest? Is it to remember that God rested on the seventh day of creation? (Exodus 20:11) Or is it to remember that God brought enslaved ancestors out of Egypt and that those who are now servants to others deserve rest from their own labors? (Deuteronomy 5:15) Another example: according to New Testament texts, who first saw the risen Lord after God raised him from the dead? Mary of Magdala and the wife of James? (Matthew 28:1) Was Salome with them also? (Mark 16:10) Were there even more witnesses than these, such as Joanna and other women who had come to Jerusalem with Jesus from Galilee? (Luke 24:1) Might it have been Mary of Magdala alone? (Mark 16:9; John 20:1) Did Peter and John race each other to the tomb to confirm Mary’s testimony for themselves? (John 20:3) Or was it only Peter? (Luke 24:11) Or was it that all of the disciples had already set out for Galilee? (Matthew 28:16; Mark 16:7)

In an evening Bible study, members were raising these very same questions about the witnesses to the risen Jesus. A particularly plain-speaking member of the group interrupted the text citations with some very apt words: “Good grief, how many details do we have to sweat to be good Christians? When I shout out with everybody else in church on Easter, ‘He is risen!’ I’ll be saying all I need to say.” This man’s lenses of belief were in proper fit that evening. By means of them he saw clearly what the Christian story was all about, however varied are the ways that Christians have shared its details. Whether it is with the lenses of scripture or the lenses of belief, fixating on too many details in the Christian story is like staring at the lenses themselves, or trying to repair or replace them. A better alternative to both approaches is simply to look with anticipation through scriptural texts and beliefs, to the things of God.

Dealing with a Jealous God

A second way in which beliefs help us to see matters of faith more clearly is by helping us distinguish the creations of our own minds from the self-revelations of God. In the language of Genesis: “God created human beings in his own image; in the image of God he created them . . . ” (1:27) This is the exact opposite of the view that pervades modern life, to the effect that God is a contrivance of human imagination, that human beings create whatever kinds of gods they want, and that the gods human beings make for themselves are the only gods there are. Knowing the difference between the God Who is Being-itself—the great I AM of Israel’s faith—and the gods of merely human devising is absolutely essential to a mature faith. Beliefs play a major role in pointing out this all-important difference.

Toward the end of my freshman year in college, I excitedly told my mother that I had decided to major in philosophy. Because she was so supportive of my being the first in her family to go to college at all, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed by her reaction: “But philosophy is only about other people’s opinions, isn’t it?” With budding sophomoric arrogance, I mentally dismissed what my mother said as blatant ignorance on her part, and stammered out a memorably inane reply: “Well, I sure hope not.” Later, she loved to needle me whenever I began spouting off about my latest philosophical conquest. To one particularly long, involved, and self-congratulatory explanation—this time, of Plato’s theory of forms—Mom only said: “sounds to me like he worships his own theories too much.”

Years later, as a teacher of philosophy myself, I began to realize with gratitude just how deeply my mother had gotten through to me. What I still love about philosophy is its insistence on reasoned inquiry that leads to truths embraced with humility and openness to new discoveries. What most arouses my ire is the arrogance with which philosophers can so easily substitute for truth their own idiosyncratic beliefs—in both my Mom’s words and Plato’s, “opinions”—that not only close off further inquiry, but deaden the very spirit by which we pursue it. One of her own strongest beliefs, that I wish had been mine earlier, is expressed succinctly at Isaiah 55:9: “ . . . as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (KJV)

Both Jewish and Christian tradition offer the same word to name what undermines everything that otherwise can be so worthwhile about the life of the mind, “idolatry.” As Ancient Israel came to understand it, idolatry is the act of giving ultimate loyalty to something that lacks ultimacy. It is a conferring of divine status on something merely human—e.g., ancestors, parents, lovers, and rulers; carvings, paintings, sculptures, and ideas; conceptual systems, doctrines, dogmas, and inflexible rules for conduct—and making them into gods. My mother understood well what my own idolatry was all about. From the very beginning of my love affair with philosophy, she constantly reminded me to resist the temptation to worship my own mental constructs. Once, she called some of my best philosophical notions “graven images.”

I still favor this seventeenth-century way of expressing the second commandment in English; the prohibition not only against worshipping images of deity but against fashioning them at all is a “grave” matter in more than just one sense of the word. The prohibition has to do not only with the fact that people often confuse their images of and beliefs about deity with the God they strive imperfectly to represent. It has to do also with the seriousness—the grave-ity—of the confusion. Paying homage to images carved from stone and metal, painted on walls and canvases, and spoken into being with words is something quite different from worshipping God. Giving more credence to our own goals, plans, and philosophies—and to the lack of them—than we do to God’s revealed will, is something quite different from serving God with the best that is in every human being. Worshipping the God Whom images help bring into focus is something quite different from revering the images as if they were God Godself. Together with the first commandment, the second demands revering God alone as holy. “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,” the writer goes on. (Exodus 20:5) If, instead of to God, our “graven images” draw attention and loyalty only to themselves, they fit us not for everlasting life with our Creator but only for the grave.

“It’s the whole tribal religion thing that’s getting to me,” Denise told her care receiver, “and it’s making me call into question a whole lot of what I was taught about God growing up.” Before her father’s recent death, Denise had been attempting with minimal success to re-establish a relationship with both her parents after several years of living “on the wild side.” Accepting that loving her mother entailed loving her mother’s church, Denise began worshipping regularly with her mother but struggled as she did when she was a teen-ager with, as she put it,

having that angry, vindictive, grudge-nursing God I always kept hearing about pushed into my face over and over and over, all over again. I really want to make it in that church this time, but I keep going away angry, like I always did, and I’ve got to find a better way to deal with what my mother eats up like it was manna from heaven.

Denise’s care receiver, Sissy, soon realized that her sympathies with Denise’s plight and with her theology were threatening to get in the way of good listening and of encouraging her care receiver to deal with her problem in the only way that would make a good outcome more likely, with her mother directly. As Sissy expressed her issue to her peer caregivers: “What I really want to do is break out into a cheer for Denise and tell her to tell her mother that her God is too small, not to mention petty and un-pretty.” What follows is a brief summary of the ensuing dialogue between Sissy and another caregiver in the group, Wilma:

Wilma: I’m with you on that. But I’m guessing you won’t go that route with Denise.

Sissy: You’re right. I can’t react like that with Denise and be of any help to her.

Wilma: Tell me something, Sissy. I think I know why what I’m hearing about Denise’s pastor is getting to me, but I’d be interested in hearing more about why he’s getting to you.

Sissy: Because the God he’s preaching about can’t possibly be the real God that Jesus believed in. I think this preacher’s God is like the one I’ve heard about all my life too, a God made up by angry people who want their God to be just like they are.

Wilma: From what you’ve learned so far, does Denise’s Mom seem to be this kind of person?

Sissy: I don’t know, Wilma. I guess I need to ask Denise to tell me a little more about her.

Wilma: How about Denise herself?

Sissy: It’s interesting that you’d ask. In our last session, she opened up with me about a lot of things she’s been doing in the struggles for social justice and how angry she had been about how many human needs are going unmet all across the world today. And guess what she brought up next? That she thinks God is very angry about injustice, too.

Wilma: So maybe an issue for you is not with an angry God per se, but with a God who’s being depicted as being angry about the wrong things. Maybe that’s an issue for Denise, too.

Sissy: I wonder what might happen if I sat down with Denise’s preacher to see if anything like this occurs to him, too. Maybe Denise and her Mom are only hearing parts of his sermons. Or maybe he just isn’t getting across very well what he means to say.

Wilma: I wonder what might happen if Denise sat down with her Mom to see if she’s thinking anything along these lines, too.

Sissy: Maybe she’d end up a little clearer about what her Mom thinks, deep down, is really real about God. I know that I never got very close to my own mother’s personal faith until many years after leaving home, when I finally started asking her about it.

Wilma: Seems like you’ve got all kinds of follow-up possibilities here. Could I ask a favor?

Sissy: Just name it.

Wilma: Well, you’ve really got my interest up in Denise’s struggles to reconnect with her Mom, and I sure would like to follow along with you as you guys keep working, especially on the God and church stuff.

The Group: Us too!

With One Accord

The third way in which beliefs keep spiritual vision in focus is by helping us to serve the world as a united body with a single message about God’s promises and will for humanity. It was for unity among his followers that Jesus, facing imminent arrest, trial, and death, prayed so profoundly in Gethsemene: “May they all be one; as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, so also may they be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me.” (John 17:20-21, REB) These words appear toward the end of a long intercessory prayer that begins with Jesus’ special concern for his disciples and ends with his hopes for those who will come to believe in him because of the disciples’ own ministry. Of particular interest to the present discussion is the way Jesus refers to the basis for faith: “It is not for these alone (the disciples) that I pray, but for those also who through their (the disciples’) words put their faith in me.” (vs. 20, emphasis mine.) What the disciples say about Jesus will be crucial to others’ coming to believe that he is the Christ, the Son of God, and to their enjoying life together and everlastingly through him. The disciples’ words will also be crucial to building among all of Jesus’ followers the kind of unity which alone can make their witness to a hostile world both appealing and credible.

This same theme of unity is announced boldly in the letter to the Ephesians: “There is one Body, one Spirit, just as you were all called into the same hope when you were called. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, over all, through all and within all.” (4:4-6, Jerusalem translation) To people besieged by conflicting philosophical and religious pronouncements about humanity’s condition and destiny, whether in the first century or the twenty-first, there may be nothing more reassuring than hearing of a community of faith whose members are constantly uplifted by a sense of oneness with each other and with God. And at the same time, there may be nothing more discouraging than discovering that Christians are as divided among themselves over what to believe as people are everywhere else.

It has never been easy for even the most devoted followers of Jesus as the Christ to stay in agreement for very long about matters of faith. Not ten years after Jesus’ death, Jewish and Gentile Christians were seriously at odds over the role of Jewish Law in shaping their new life as his witnesses in the world. Later, St. Paul was constantly struggling to keep his Corinthian congregation from splintering into factions. And to the Galatians he wrote with considerable exasperation: “I am astonished to find you turning away so quickly from him who called you by grace, and following a different gospel . . . ” (Galatians 1:6, REB) Freedom of thought and expression—core values in all genuinely modern societies—make conflicts among Christians even more predictable and difficult to resolve than they were in earlier centuries. The church’s present-day dilemma is a particularly painful one. How does it affirm our responsibility to make careful decisions about what we assent to as Christians and at the same time caution that too much diversity of opinion about the Christian message can erode its authoritativeness to a world otherwise receptive to it?

One way to resolve this dilemma is to insist that Christians hold exactly the same beliefs and mean exactly the same things by the beliefs that they hold. If there is indeed one and only one God, one and only one savior, one and only one church, the logic goes, then there can be one and only one set of beliefs for all Christians. Therefore, anyone who resists subordinating his or her own reflections on the gospel of Jesus Christ to the normative teachings of the church cannot be a true believer. Inevitably, this truncated reasoning ends with condemnations and ostracism. People who will not conform their beliefs unquestioningly to others’ imperious demands are quickly dismissed from the church’s purview of care. And so, what begins with a profound pastoral insight—that Christianity is more credible if Christians can present a united front to the world—can end with a diabolical suppression of human beings’ God-given capacity to think for themselves and an arbitrarily-imposed uniformity that mires communities of faith in fear, dissembling, hostility, and guilt.

As these words were being written, a distressed pastor e-mailed to tell me how upset he was at the latest machinations of a small group of disgruntled clergy and laity to bring a member of their ecclesiastical hierarchy to trial. The issue, in the language of this particular denomination, was the dissemination of doctrines contrary to established doctrinal standards. “There’s just got to be a better way, he wrote, to build unity in the church than by rewarding the suspension of thoughtful reflection and discussion for the sake of unquestioning uniformity and conformity of belief.”

By means of comparing core Christian beliefs with lenses, the first part of this chapter has focused on seeing and understanding God’s world more clearly by respecting the diverse ways that Christians express the very core beliefs that also bind them in unity. The beliefs that people hold as Christians, their reflecting upon them, and their assent to them, all play indispensable roles in learning to place ultimate trust, hope, and love in what is truly ultimate—God—instead of in the myriad “devices and desires” of the human heart. Even so, as the next section of this chapter emphasizes, in the life of faith there is room, and plenty of it, for differences of opinion about matters of belief, questions about what to believe and not to believe, and unity without uniformity in our churches.

Celebrating Differences of Opinion

Notwithstanding the definitive declarations of ecumenical and denominational councils and leaders through the centuries, thoughtful Christians have always had disagreements over what their churches should teach and what they themselves should believe. Sometimes, the disagreements are over relatively trivial matters—e.g., over whether the Last Supper was or was not a Passover meal—and at other times, they are over more basic ones—e.g., over what kind of body it is with which we shall be raised. But disagreements there have been, are, and most likely always will be. The purpose of this section is to show how Christians can still be “one body” as Christ’s disciples and at the same time acknowledge that among themselves they represent sincerely held, but sometimes quite diverse, understandings even of those beliefs they also agree are vital to the life of faith.

The basics of Christians’ disagreements about beliefs

When beliefs are at issue, the disagreements that can cloud perception and judgment are of two principal kinds. The first is about which beliefs constitute the core of a common Christian understanding and which represent convictions about which we can still in good faith hold different opinions. For example, is the belief that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit as crucial to our salvation and place in the Christian community as the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead by God? Or, between the belief that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist and that he is present there only in memory, which is the more important to faith? Or, is it sufficient to believe that the scriptures witness to God’s self-revelation or must we believe, in addition, that they are that self-revelation?

That there are core beliefs that constitute part of the very foundation of faith is beyond serious dispute, e.g., the belief that God desires the salvation of all humanity, but just what all the core beliefs together are has always been a matter for discussion and debate. Beliefs which some affirm as binding upon Christians at all times and everywhere, others see as expressive only of the special circumstances of particular groups at certain periods in the church’s history, e.g., the belief that Jesus’ death was a ransom paid to the Devil for releasing the human race from his dominion.

Just as conscientious believers can and do disagree about what is and is not a core Christian belief in the first place, they can and do disagree about the implications of the very beliefs that they concede to constitute faith’s core. For instance, what follows from the belief that God is the source, sustainer, and end of human life? That no one is to tamper with the natural course of any human life for any reason? That not only are contraception, in vitro fertilization, abortion, passive euthanasia, and stem cell research unjustifiable, but blood transfusions and any other medical treatments as well? Or, what follows from the belief that no one comes to the Father except through Jesus Christ? That those who died before Christ’s first coming, or who have never heard a witness to Christ’s saving message and life, or who live Christ-like lives but by the convictions of another religion, cannot be saved?

If Christians can disagree with one another (a) over which beliefs constitute the core of Christian teaching, and (b) over what implications for the Christian life are contained in that core, then unity in the church clearly cannot depend upon mere uniformity of belief. Our oneness as Christians cannot entail that we must all believe the same things in the same way all the time. Instead, it must be capable of sustaining a considerable variety of honestly-arrived-at opinions about what faith does and does not, should and should not, stand for. It must encourage and not resist constant re-thinking of the Christian message in the light of new circumstances and challenges. The following section offers an illustration of what this process might look like with respect to one core belief of the Christian tradition, the doctrine of the Trinity.

Re-thinking the three-in-one

Although the belief that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has been one of the most celebrated of all core Christian beliefs for over 1700 years, there was and continues to be more disagreement among Christians about the status and meaning of this belief than ecclesiastical pronouncements admit. Acknowledging and respecting these disagreements can be especially relevant to understanding and overcoming a particularly dangerous conflict in today’s world, one with the potential to destroy not only the world’s peace, but the world’s future. It is the conflict between the leaders of the Christian and the Muslim religions, a conflict that has rapidly escalated into a clash between whole civilizations, with little less than the future of faith itself at stake.

What has always been especially divisive between the Islamic world and the Christian is the Christian belief that Jesus Christ is God incarnate and not merely one of God’s prophets. For Christians, this belief necessitates a radical diminution of the status and authority of every other prophet, no matter how God-inspired, from Moses to Muhammad. For Muslims, it represents a blaspheming of the divine nature and an obscene denigration of the Abrahamic monotheism which alone represents the one true God to the world. A very thoughtful and well-read layman once shared with me a conclusion he drew from his own extensive study of Islam: “The more that Muslims attack making Jesus another god, the more intransigent our churches get in appealing to the Trinity. Is there any way through this impasse? “

Clearly, the answer to this question is Yes, and its amplification must begin with an honest acknowledgment that (a) Christians have for a very long time held very diverse opinions about the divinity of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and (b) “official” Trinitarian doctrine masks this diversity. Though in 325 the Council of Nicea strongly affirmed the belief that Jesus Christ is one in essence (homoousion) with God the Father, not all serious Christian thinkers at the time found this affirmation to their liking. The most serious alternative to the Nicene formulation took the form of affirming a likeness in being (homoiousion) between Jesus and God that, nevertheless, falls short of complete identity. Those who argued this second view did so primarily out of the conviction that God is one God, whose nature is forever indivisible. To them, believing that Jesus Christ, and later, the Holy Spirit, share one divine nature is tantamount to the reassertion of polytheism: God is no longer one, but three. This is exactly the kind of criticism that Islamic theologians make of Christianity. Historically speaking, though, it was other Christians who made it first.

From the end of the fourth century to the present, the official position of the church, whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or mainstream Protestant, has been that the issues of the divinity of Christ and the tri-unity of God have been settled once and for all, to everyone’s satisfaction. The truth, though, is that one party to the original debates (the homoousion party) simply beat out the other (the homoiousion party) when the Council members finally voted on the issue, and then set out to silence its opponents by anathematizing them. The anathemas have not worked. People in the church, now as then, continue to hold a variety of opinions about expressing both the finality of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and the resurrected Jesus’ place in the Godhead.

Early in my seminary teaching, one of my best theology students, Mel, brought the issue of divergent understandings of the same belief before me in an especially poignant way. After class one day, he anxiously told me that his upcoming ordination in another denomination had just been put on hold. “My problems,” he began, “started with the Trinity:”

When the chairman of my review committee asked me how I understood it, I did my best to answer him, but his response was to call my view heretical. Then, I really got pounced on. It seemed like every member of the committee was all of a sudden interested in ferreting out everything else that I didn’t hold the correct opinion about. I’m really in deep trouble, and I don’t know what to do.

Mel was in anguish, not only because the fulfillment of his deepest sense of calling was in doubt, but also because mentors whom he respected and loved were telling him that his faith did not measure up. This situation became increasingly troubling to me. After discussing with several members of Mel’s ordination committee, at their request, their concerns about his orthodoxy, I concluded silently that my student was better able than they were to discuss the very doctrinal interpretations in dispute. With many Christians through the centuries, Mel strongly emphasized God’s oneness, and spoke of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three ways in which the one God, whose inner essence is forever beyond human conceptualization, appears to human beings. His committee refused to budge from its demand that Mel hew to the official Nicene party line—that each of the three persons of the Trinity is identical in being, and not just appearance, with God—on the (specious) ground that this is what the church has always taught and, therefore, that there is nothing left to be said about it. Eventually, my conscientious student left the denomination of his upbringing to affiliate with one more open to theological diversity than his was and still is. Currently, he is a highly respected pastor in that denomination.

As vital as it is, then, for the church to be able to speak with one voice when circumstances demand it, the one faith that it proclaims is still a oneness in, rather than in place of, diversity. Christians must remain free to re-examine in every generation what they considers to be their churches’ essential beliefs, as well as the implications that flow from them for the present day. Egregiously inaccurate appeals to “what the Church has always taught,” whether for the sake of enforcing compliance or of undermining it, can only subvert the very unity that such appeals purport to serve.

Getting the right prescription

This chapter has been exploring an analogy between sacred beliefs and mundane lenses: just as humanly wrought lenses can help to bring into focus the things of this world, divinely inspired beliefs can help to make clear the realm of Transcendence. In specific, beliefs can bring better into view the essential content and implications of what the church considers to be the heart of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. However, like eyeglasses, beliefs must be properly fitted to their users. Just as inadequately ground lenses can impair vision and damage eyes, incompletely formulated beliefs can diminish understanding and damage souls. The purpose of this final section is to make a fuller application of this lens analogy to the role that beliefs play, both for good and for ill, in the life of faith.

If beliefs are to the Christian message what lenses are to physical reality, then formulating a belief and making a lens share at least three important things in common. First both correct for the inability to see everything there is to see in the world and beyond with human eyes alone. Although many people do not need to wear glasses in order to deal with the everyday physical world, not even those with perfect vision can see unaided the very smallest and the very largest things that the earth and the universe contain. And no one, relying only on his or her own finite powers of comprehension, will ever be able to bring fully into view the greatest mysteries of faith, whose experience overwhelms every human capacity not only for description but even for utterance. In the words of the 4^th century Liturgy of St. James: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence, and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly minded, for with blessing in his hand, Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.”

Not even the most conscientiously thought out beliefs about Christ—died, risen, returning—can fully comprehend the power and the grace that lie eternally in the unfathomable otherness and holiness of God. They can, however, help Christians to say at least something about God’s greatness and goodness, dispelling enough of the “cloud of unknowing” to bring humankind’s likeness to and future with God into a clearer, even if not perfect, focus. In the final analysis, however, all words, symbols, and beliefs must finally fail to do full justice to their ultimate Subject. The adequacy of beliefs depends finally upon the sufficiency of God’s illuminating grace: “No one can truly say that Jesus is the Lord, unless thou take the veil away and breathe the living Word. Then, only then, we feel our interest in his blood, and cry with joy unspeakable, ‘Thou art my Lord, my God!’” (Charles Wesley)

A second feature shared by both beliefs and lenses is a value that is instrumental and not intrinsic, that is, their respective reasons for being have to do with the purposes they serve rather than with their own form and appearance. Like lenses, beliefs are meant to be looked through and not at. For example, we might momentarily gaze at particular pairs of glasses because we find their frames especially beautiful. Typically, though, we look at them only long enough to determine whether we can see other things better with them. The important thing about lenses is not how old or new, large or small, clear or colored, fashionable or unfashionable they may be in themselves, but whether or not we can see clearly enough by means of them. Like lenses, beliefs are not the principal objects of value. They are only aids to a better understanding of the realities that, given the ultimate and transcendent mystery of God, they can refract only imperfectly.

Finally, beliefs and lenses share in common an adaptability to the needs of those who make use of them. Whether in formulating a belief or grinding a lens, one must keep constantly in mind those whom the effort is intended to benefit. No matter how perfectly made, lenses ground to only one prescription cannot help everyone to see the same physical objects more clearly. People’s vision requirements vary too much. Similarly, no matter how widely and thoroughly discussed a particular belief may be in the church, not every member will come to understand the Christian message more definitively by means of it.

The wide spectrum of divergent beliefs that exists across Christendom strongly suggests that the structures of human receptivity to God’s revelations may be as varied as the structures of the human eye’s receptivity to physical appearances. With respect to the former, many Christians find convincing only those beliefs that focus on tangible realities described concretely, e.g., God’s face shines on those he chooses; Jesus is a friend; Hell is a place of everlasting fire and torment; Heaven is a place whose streets are paved with gold. Others, however, respond better to more abstract expressions of basic Christian truths, e.g., God is infinite, all-powerful, and all-knowing; Jesus is the light of the world; The kingdom of heaven is within; Heaven is a state of eternal rest and peace in God. For some believers, truth emerges in describing the things of God factually and literally, while for others it is to be found by rendering these same things symbolically and even mythically. To put the differences in still another way, some believers dwell serenely in the world of suggestive images, while for others only clear concepts will suffice.

Because beliefs mean different things to different people, then, both in content and form, if we are to understand their meaning at all, we must be open to learning and teaching many alternative formulations of basic Christian beliefs, in the same way that eye doctors must be open to writing very different prescriptions for the lenses that their very different patients require. Adjusting our minds to different formulations of belief is as crucial for seeing spiritual things as adjusting our eyes to new prescription lenses is to seeing physical ones. Pressuring people toward a uniformity either of belief or of doubt is like forcing them to buy glasses with identical lenses in identical frames. It is like taking greater delight in grinding and polishing lens than in seeing better through them, like admiring beliefs more than adoring the God reflected in them.