Jesus Is Never Mad At Us If We Live With Him In Our Hearts

I suppose someone could make a distinction between a non-practicing believer and a practicing non-believer. If I had to be one, I'd rather be the latter. That says something about me.

It says I'm snooty.

But I think that distinction makes some assumptions that I don't think make sense. I don't think we can separate what we believe from what we do. I think we are always practicing what we believe. Even the practice of saying "this is what we believe" is a practice that is tied to what one believes.

So in a sense, neither of the above categories makes sense. If what I practice shows what I believe, I am always a practicing believer... of something.

But as nonsensical as those categories might be, there is a strong tendency to identify Christianity as a set of beliefs, or as an issue of belief. That is, being a Christian must mean believing certain things. There is especially a bit of confusion that says something like, "I am bad. God is good. My belief in Jesus overcomes that difference." Belief in Jesus (whatever that might mean) is the key.

Belief is the key. But so often it seems whatever else belief could mean, it means something like I believe in Jesus, I don't believe in leprechauns, I believe in a heliocentric solar system, I don't believe in unicorns, I believe in gravity, I don't believe that a sea spirit will burrow into my girl parts and make me pregnant should I swim in the ocean. Jesus (and whatever Jesus might do or have done) is just some other positive fact. It's a thing to know.

Although most people don't go so far as to propose a world that is only 10,000 years old, or say that there was an ark onto which Noah loaded baby dinosaurs, Jesus is often just a thing to know along with another pile of facts that make up the whitenoise of our lives. It's all external background to the way things objectively are. These other things, Adam and Eve petting dinosaurs, emails that tell us NASA couldn't make it to the moon without accounting for a lost day, irreducible complexity, just stack up to make what we say is our belief in Jesus a reasonable thing.

That hardly seems to be belief. You don't believe in gravity. You don't believe the earth is spherical. You don't believe that fire is hot. That's just the way things are. You can say you believe the earth is spherical, but that's weird. You don't believe it- you just say it.

Now someone might say, "Well Jesus is the Son of God- that's just the way things are. Any reasonable person would look around and say "Gravity is real, and, after sitting back and taking a look at the world- they would come to a similar conclusion about Jesus. That is what anyone would believe if they were just backed into a corner and brow beaten with the evidence."

But it's not that way. Even knowing Jesus existed historically is not the same kind of thing as "fire burns." We shouldn't say that's belief. Or if we do, we should be clear that saying we believe in Jesus is not the same kind of thing as saying the earth orbits the sun.

Even if we want to call "the earth orbits the sun" thing a type of belief, it hardly seems the type of belief that means all that much. So why are we... so many evangelicals... committed to the project of making belief in Jesus as matter of fact as "It is raining?" Well it does make things easier doesn't it? Believing in gravity doesn't seem to require too much- it doesn't require anything. It just makes me seem right when I finally come around and say, "Oh hey, I'm a gravity believer."
"Welcome to the club- we're glad you finally came around."
"Yeah I feel pretty silly now- all this time not knowing gravity- but I'm on the right side of the fence now. What should I do now that I'm a gravity believer?
"Well pretty much the same things you did before, only now don't go jumping off any buildings or cliffs."
"I don't think I would've done that before-"
"Yeah but before you would have not done it without knowing gravity was behind everything."

It seems as if we think belief in Jesus can be something like "fire is hot," that the Jesus bit is "just the way things are" and the difference between a Christian and not is what one believes. That is whether one knows the way things are. This isn't to say we don't expect a Christian to do certain things- but those things happen to be the things we'd expect that every decent person does.

...sigh...