However I have come to understand that our God is the god of in-consistencies; in fact almost everything we know about God from the Bible is inconsistent with what people thought to be the norm: When every mythological creation story teaches a creation-out-of-something scenario, our invisible God inconsistently decides to create a world out of nothing; when in a violent world life was cheap and unimportant, God inconsistently teaches us to sacrifice and even die to save others; when a Greek god would smack you with a lightning bolt between your eyes for questioning him, our God would jump in and wrestle with a man and call him Israel; when the world preaches hate as the natural response to wrongdoing or error, God inconsistently teaches and practices love.

In her recent article written for The National Review, Jennifer Roback Morse understood the value we can find in the fact that our God is not running on batteries powered by consistency. Regarding the creation story she writes “The Hebrew account is unusual in answering the ultimate question: Why is there something rather than nothing?”[1] The Jewish mind understood that it is against common-sense to see something in existence rather than nothing and this gave them a unique perspective on the qualities and personality of God, the Creator.

Ironically, consistency, while being certainly rooted in the noble intention of questing for Truth does appear to be leading the world of Christendom on a path to irrelevance. Almost completely disconnected from the complex and multi-faceted eastern thinking of the Hebrew world, Christians are slowly turning their faith into a set of philosophical principles that can be intellectually provable, with God becoming “a source of philosophical rational principles.”[2]

The beautiful and relational teachings of Jesus have been rationalized into theological arguments that are provable via intellectual exercises – and this is ironically done a lot even by the most fervent critics of empiricism. Thus Christianity has become all about belief rather than faith. This difference may be slight but it is crucial when we set to project our faith before the world.

In essence we tell the world that God loves, yet we show them how to hate; we tell the world that God is omnipresent, but we are waiting for him to come to us; we tell them our God is compassionate yet the road to Hell is wide. Yes, we have become the inconsistent victims of our own quest for theological consistency, totally missing the Person behind the story!

In his book Out of the Question into the Mystery, Leonard Sweet outlines the differences between belief and faith. He writes “The Reformation paradigm, which tempts us to replace relationships with reason, is captured in the word belief. It is concerned with right thinking and adherence to a particular way of articulating biblical teaching. It involves systematizing and assenting—and excluding those who don’t fully subscribe to the current fashion in creedal statement. Belief is inert. It is intellectual, defensible, and typically irrelevant.”[3]

Ironically I believe that what makes the Christian belief intellectually defensible also makes it intellectually fallible; in fact this is the very reason for which Christianity seems to be losing the intellectual battle: we have turned our faith into belief. And as Sweet concludes, “Belief is Plato; faith is Jesus.”[4] I am certain that if we can intellectually prove Christianity to be right, someone out there will also find a way to intellectually prove it to be wrong.

You see, in the ancient world, faith was not the subscription to a set of convictions; rather faith was subscribing to a person, and embracing a relationship to that person. It is not the message from Christ that makes us Christians, rather our relationship with Christ and where we are in relation to Him. Dominican Herbert McCabe presents faith in much clearer terms than I could: “Our Easter faith is that we really do encounter Jesus himself; not a message from him, or a doctrine inspired by him, or an ethics of love, or a new idea of human destiny, or a picture of him, but Jesus himself.”[5]

It is evident from the Biblical narrative that our God could have easily brought forth in the Scriptures all the answers we could ever have asked for. After all if he can see the future, then could He not have anticipated all the questions we do need answers to today as Christians? Would accurate and straightforward answers to difficult questions not eliminate a lot of the strife and disagreements between Christians today? This brings to mind a recent discussion I had with my wife regarding Mt. Everest. We were watching a TV documentary on climbers who climb Everest, and the climbers were outlining all the dangers facing them, even imminent death. One out of every eight people attempting to climb Everest in fact die. The inevitable question then came up: Why climb Everest? What idiot would do that? Why risk death, or at the very least a few toes or fingers to frostbite?

Why? Why climb the Everest? Why land on the Moon? Why explore the Unknown, whatever it may be? Because we can! Because God apparently created us with a spirit willing to explore the mysterious, learn from it and become better people in the process. It is for this same reason that an omnipotent and omniscient, but also mysterious and inconsistent God chose to leave something about him up to us to discover, explore, search and find, and this search of God is not without its dangers; when some have challenged belief, they paid the ultimate price. It is God the Person who makes our faith worth dying for, not the theological abstract “God the head of the Trinity.” It is God the all-knowing Person who created Adam and Eve, and longingly asked them Where are you? It is Jesus the Person who brought Paul to his knees saying “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” God continues to teach us over and over again that our faith is about relationships, yet we continue to miss the point, and go back to an abstract creation, be it the law or a creed. Even Paul was seemingly fed up with the Jews’ search for signs and Greeks’ search for wisdom when he said We preach Christ crucified.[6] How interesting that both Jews and Greeks missed the point by missing Christ the Person and focused on Jesus the Sign, and Jesus the Gnosis!?

If then our faith is about relationships, where are you? Are you basking like a child in the glittering shimmer of your freshly painted toenails? Do you have such honest and open relationships with those around you that allow you to take pride in everything God does for you and through you? Are you climbing the Everest of your faith or are you asking who would do such a stupid thing? Are you enjoying the mystery left by God in your life or you think you have it all figured out? Where are you?

[1] Jennifer Roback Morse, Proud to Follow, http://article.nationalreview.com

[2] Michael Rie, What is Christian? p. 263-264

[3] Leonard Sweet, Out of the Question into the Mystery, p. 10

[4] Ibid, p. 10

[5] Herbert McCabe, A Sermon for Easter, p. 227

[6] 1 Cor. 1:23