Religious Belief and Religious Pluralism

Greetings

If I were to write from a particularly arrogant stance, I might try to persuade you that Healthy Liberal Christianity is inherently superior to other forms of religious belief and practice, including other forms of Christianity. And I would be wrong to try to do so!

On the surface, it seems that Liberal Christianity contains a fundamental contradiction, for on the one hand, a person might say “This is what I believe with my whole heart”, and on the other hand, that same person would also be prepared to affirm the legitimacy of other spiritual paths. Don’t I have to believe that something is “right” in order to believe it? Not necessarily, for it turns out that the issue is not about who is right.

Let me illustrate my point in this way. When meeting a couple for the first time, my wife and I have often been interested in finding out how they got together, fell in love, and decided to get married. And everyone’s story is marvelously different. If I listen carefully and respectfully, I might even find out how their lives were enriched and broadened by virtue of the new room that the very experience of falling in love created in them. Each lover discovers the capacity for deeper understanding, compassion, intimacy, and appreciation for life that goes even beyond the immediate connection with the beloved.

Now when someone tells me how they fell in love and they identify the object of their love, should I take offense that they didn’t fall in love with the same person that I fell in love with? Of course not!! You see, the experience of falling in love at all is much more significant than the identity of the particular beloved. So, too, is it with faith and belief.

Falling in love is a dimension of growing up. Falling in love helps us to grow beyond the selfishness and narrowness of our ego-based perspectives. Falling in love opens us up to the realm of the miraculous. Falling in love engenders hope in the face of a challenging future. Falling in love elicits the divine image in a way that brings us to the most sacred manifestations of our own humanity. Falling in love is really important.

But of course, I’m not only talking about a romantic version of falling in love. I’m talking about falling in love with God, not necessarily as a separate being, but as the underlying reality of love, relationship, creativity, connectivity to the whole universe, hope, purpose, and all the rest that might define our spirituality.

The development of a romantic relationship serves as a useful template for our relationship with the Divine, too. All relationships, (perhaps especially those that float on the wings of romance) begin with a large measure of what might be called “projection.” In other words, we see in the other person much more than what is actually there. In the first throes of love, we are blinded to some of the realities of the situation by the experience itself, while that same blinding experience prepares our inner being to perceive life more deeply and magnificently than we could have seen it before. Over time, the layers of unconscious expectation (you know, like our expectation that the beloved will always see us as the center of their universe) that we initially laid onto the beloved must be peeled away and integrated into ourselves if we are to develop a real relationship with the real person who is “behind” the overlay of our projections. In the process (that takes years, by the way) we learn more about this other person, and as a bonus, we also learn more about ourselves.

As a result of our acculturation in a largely Western Christian environment, we are trained to expect that God will manifest certain attributes. When we withdraw our projections and set aside our preconceived notions, we then find that the idea of God is much more complex, comprehensive, and (sadly) indistinct than we expected. This can generate a crisis that gives us the choice between digging in to defend our old images of God and the alternative of embracing the uncomfortable truth that the reality of God will always refuse to be limited by our definitions. I believe that staying in the relationship promotes maturity, even if we don’t know where it will lead.

Healthy Liberal Christianity affirms that relationship with God is always dynamic – one might say, alive. So, fall in love with the divine, and then value every opportunity to hear other people’s stories of how they, too, fell in love. And when you read the Bible (or the sacred text of any other faith, for that matter), consider reading it like a love story. You might learn a lot, and be enriched by it, too.

Wayne Gustafson

"Our Faith is 2000 years old. Our thinking is not." The United Church of Christ