Am I A Christian?

I’ve been asked if I am a Christian.

I said that No, not in the way that most people think of the term. I wanted to say more--so much more--but felt that there wasn’t enough time and besides, I was too tired to get into it.

So I’d like to get into it. When someone asks me Am I a Christian, I want to say Yes, but… or No, but… I also want to just say what someone wrote in a blog on Patheos (apologies but I cannot find the source) when she said that she was “a human being.” It would be nice to just sometimes leave it at that.

I do and I don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I do and don’t believe in his divinity. By that, I believe in the narratives (there are more than one) and their power and their truth. But I don’t understand those narratives to be some overarching historical artifact.

Because I don’t feel that there is any overarching historical foundation to any narrative. In other words, there is only narrative. That is it. There is nothing beyond that. Nothing that we can point to and say, definitively, There! This is true and I understand it to its core! No--there is nothing that the human mind can accept that isn’t transformed into a narrative acceptable to the human mind. [I think that this is a Kantian idea, but my grasp of Kant is rudimentary.]

I believe that the human mind transforms everything within its sphere of perception into narrative. The story is elemental to human existence. To treat “story” as if it were “fact,” history, as a kind of artifact of truth, is mere fantasy.

So I accept the story of Jesus. I accept it wholeheartedly. I do not accept it as artifact...because there is no artifact to accept.

In my system of belief I can also accept the narratives of the Hindi, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the Jew. I was brought up within the Christian narrative, so that is what I am bound to more closely, but it is an accident of birth and nothing more. If I was born of Afghan parents no doubt I would be a Muslim.

So, I too, like to describe myself as a “human being.” The story, the narrative is uppermost. The arc of the Jesus narrative from virgin birth to heavenly throne is a miracle of human understanding. It can be so beautifully rendered and understood that it might bring the world together in harmony. Except for that wrinkle of human misunderstanding that states that only Jesus is true, only Jesus is God, and narrative is nothing but some child’s bedtime story.

We can view Jesus as God, Jesus as the Truth, the Light, but still understand the openness of other human concepts. Jesus can be the Only Way, but he can also be Gautama Buddha, or Krishna. How? How can Jesus be the only way but also not the only way?

Through the complementarian narrative (remember: there is only narrative!). Just as in quantum physics, so too within the human brain (which some scientists are attempting to describe as a quantum computer), we can hold simultaneous narratives/ideas within ourselves. This is merely to describe what we humans do on a daily basis. This is how we are made. We understand only what the brain allows us to understand. Our mind, again going back to Kant, is structured to reason as it must. We see the world in narrative only. That is our Reason.

What of the Bible? It, too, is narrative, or rather, it is a multifaceted bunch of narratives. In the Sepher Torah alone there are likely to be four or five different narratives threaded throughout. Evangelical Christians are likely to dismiss the hundreds of errors/contradictions within the Bible as “viewpoints.” They see no problem in assimilating an “error-free” Word of God with viewpoints that contradict one another or which contain different information (the time of the crucifixion, the robe worn by Jesus, the different ways in which Jesus is portrayed at his death, the sending by a risen Jesus of his disciples to Galilee...or to Jerusalem) or which contains simply unbelievable information (the raising of zombies in Matthew). They present the Bible as the Word of God and if one happens to see these issues crop up then it must be some weakness within human reason.

In a way that is precisely what I am saying: the weakness of human reason is that which Kant set out. We only see the world as we are structured to see it. These errors within the narrative of the Bible are not a problem for me. They are simply there, as they are there within any story, to some degree or another (although I do wonder at the “mathematical narrative, or language” which seems to be logically consistent...though Goedels theorem may offer a way out: undecidable statements will always occur within mathematics), and these can be thought of as baked into our psyche and mental acuity.

And that is what I like to call the Cloud of God.

Within this Cloud lies our sense--necessarily our personification--of the Ideal. From that Ideal we have created narratives. To flesh out these narratives we bake in historical evidence and a-historical “evidence,” or miracles and such. [As I once heard Bart Ehrman say, miracles by their very nature are non-historical.] The Bible is filled with these mnemohistorical tidbits. Layers of history and hi-story are placed one atop another and over time legend accretes with artifacts. Even more time places all within the topic of religious history, convincing many that everything actually happened as it is written down, forgetting that what was written down was a result of intermixed narratives to begin with.

So, I am a Christian as I self-define the term, but more, a human being. A human being that wonders, questions, and never trusts for the answer; for we only know what we can only know.