True Believer (2)

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus, the one whom you delivered and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him.  Acts 3:13  NASB

The God of – Now that we’ve had some time to reflect on the meaning of this phrase in the mouth of Peter, let’s consider what this means for Christians.  We are immediately faced with a dilemma.  Christianity, as a religion, is basically anti-Semitic (see the extensive explanation of the work of John Gager, et. al.).  In other words, it defines itself in terms that oppose Judaism.  It re-interprets the symbols of the faith by converting Jewish events and practices into Christian ones (e.g., Passover – Easter, circumcision – baptism).  In the process of this self-identification, Christianity reinterprets the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as the God of Paul, a God who (according to the Church) no longer demands or expects any of the practices required of His past (Old Testament) servants.  This implies that Paul converted to the new religion of Christianity, a claim that no longer seems viable (again, see Gager, Eisenbaum, Young, Sanders, etc.).  But history and linguistics have little to do with theological self-identification.  The Church simply re-wrote the history and changed the meanings of the terms to fit its own need to be not Jewish.

Here’s the dilemma.  If all of this is true (and it’s pretty hard to deny the historical record), then most Christians really don’t serve the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  They actually serve a God whose identification has been reconstructed by the Church.  And the problem is that most Christians don’t even know this!

Most Christian are God-fearing, good hearted, devoted and sincere people who want to follow God.  They have had real, legitimate experiences with God.  They love Jesus.  They want to do what is right.  Their faith is based on these experiences.  They are not mistaken about what God did for them and with them.  But they interpret all of these true experiences according to the teachings of the Church.  So when someone suggests that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the same God who gave Moses the Torah, they react with the doctrines of the Church, doctrines that are avowedly anti-Semitic, because this is all that they have ever known.  They haven’t investigated the origin of their own doctrines.  They have trusted the preacher, who, by the way, was educated in a seminary that taught the same anti-Semitic point of view.  They believe.  They just don’t know why they believe.  And in a lot of cases, when they are faced with the possibility that the interpretation of their experiences with God might be incompatible with Scripture, they are afraid because their faith is tied to the doctrines, not to God.  If the doctrines fall apart, they are afraid that their faith will fall apart because in the Greek-based paradigm of this culture (and the Church), you must have the right answer in order to have faith.  They think that if the answers they have repeated all their lives are not correct, then their faith is mistaken.  They do not see that the answers are the result of a theological paradigm but their experiences are the result of God’s hand in their lives.  God’s hand does not depend on having all the right answers.  Faith is not theology.  Faith is trusting Him and living accordingly.  Theology is just making sense of it all.  Theology can change with new information and more learning, but that doesn’t mean your trust falters – unless of course your faith was really a faith in the answers rather than in the God behind all the answers.

This is why it is so difficult to conduct investigations like the ones found in Today’s Word.  If your faith depends on having a firm grip on all the answers, you won’t be able to look behind those answers without feeling as though you are losing your faith.  As one woman said to me years ago, “I just can’t continue.  I feel like I am losing my faith in Jesus.”  Her answers were being challenged and she needed those answers in order to believe.

Let me be as clear as I can about this.

I am not trying to challenge your TRUST in God or in His son, Yeshua.  If anything, I want to encourage you to trust Him more.  I came to this place just like you, through the Church, through the “born again” experience.  I have years and years (and plenty of degrees) of education in the Church paradigm.  I know that God’s hand is absolutely real in the lives of many Christians.  That is undeniable!  What I am trying to do is to understand why we think the way we do, where those ideas come from and how they affect our behavior.  I want the truth!   That’s all.  That’s it.  And I will go wherever I need to in order to find it.

The true believer trusts God in crisis – and sometimes that crisis challenges nearly everything.

Topical Index:  true believer, Acts 3:13, faith, trust, Church

TRAVEL NOTE

Because of travel, no book orders can be processed between Sept 1 and Sept 13.  But please don’t stop buying.  Just remember that it will take a few days longer to get the material.  Thanks.