June 27, 2025
Vexing questions, faithful responses
After one of our recent worship services, a visitor introduced themselves to me with Bible in hand. This person was on a mission, and the mission was finding the Truth. The Absolute Truth. Pointing to a rather harsh text from the Old Testament requiring that the Israelites slaughter an entire people, including their livestock, and—to this person’s disbelief—even slaughter their infants, they asserted, “The Bible is full of contradictions, how can you say its true?” They went on saying that they want to know what is the True Faith, as all faiths all cannot be true. When I asked this person why they were asking me these questions, their response was that they want to know the True Faith. After all, “if someone could prove to you that one Faith was the True Faith, wouldn’t you believe it?”
I felt this person’s pain. They (and we) live is a world where the ground beneath us seems less than solid and stable. We all desire to have more sure footing beneath us, offering us more certainty, giving us more clarity, and in the end more piece of mind.
Our friend wasn’t looking for Faith, however. They were looking for certainty, Truth, once and for all. Truth, never changing; true in every place, time, and context. But in the end, the object of faith, a divine transcendent reality, cannot, by definition, be fully known or comprehended. It is an act of faith; what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called a “leap of faith.” You trust the logic of a particular religion, but at some point you just have to say “I am willing to take that leap of belief that goes beyond what I can prove.”
As Christians we believe that God has been revealed in the Scriptures. God has also been revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus who we believe is God’s Christ or Messiah, the one who God has anointed to speak fully for God. God also continues to speak through Word and Sacrament (or word and symbol more broadly) by the Holy Spirit. Though much of this can be argued, in the end, it cannot be proven absolutely. Afterall, God is a mystery which invites us to accept God’s offer of relationship through faith not proof. This results in a range of beliefs, not the narrowness of certainty.
The genius of the Covenant Church is the latitude of faith we permit: allowing us to disagree on our interpretation of scriptures while agreeing on the centrality of the scriptures. Our denominational boundaries are soft and a bit fuzzy, but our center is fixed, Word and Sacrament which leads to new life in Christ and the growing life of faith afforded us through our covenant community with one another in Christ.
That being said, there are some hills I will die on. God is first and foremost a God of love, and God’s revelation in Christ was a revelation of love, not judgement, revealing God’s loving offer of salvation to the entirety of creation. (John 3:16-17) This, combined with all people being equally created in the image of God and being equally loved by God, is the foundation of my faith. For example, I would say that we may all have different understandings about the current global mass migration we are experiencing and how that affects us as a nation and our nation’s laws. What we must agree on, in my opinion, is that each one of those people is our equal and is equally loved by God, and we are invited to love them as well. Further, the taking of a human life is a tragedy. We may equivocate and justify the taking of a life, such as death as “collateral damage” in war. But it does not make it any less tragic. My bottom line is that every human life is sacred and ought to be treated as such.
These are my musings during from my flight to Orlando and my prayerful preparation for our denomination’s annual meeting. As I have been reflecting on how I distinguish the core values of my faith from my personal opinions in preparation for this meeting, I invite us all, individually and as a church, to enter into this spiritual practice of discernment, that we may act and speak out of the core values of our faith to a world in search of absolutism, fundamentalism, and a flattening of the mystery of God into human certainty—even self-justification. May God lead us from those temptations and deliver us from those evils.
With humility before our incomprehensible God,
~ Pastor Todd