"I and those of my generation probably don't believe in God, in angels, and even in miracles the way our ancestors did. But that doesn't mean we don't want to believe. We just don't know how to talk genuinely about believing anymore."
-Renita J. Weems, Listening for God: A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt
In this continuously changing world, faith must look different with the passage of time. The needs and concerns of my particular experience are vastly different than those of my spiritual ancestors-- not just my parents and grandparents, but the folks who lived in distant times... the times in which my biblical texts were written.
Unlike those times before widespread literacy, the internet, telephones, or knowledge of other continents, my world is global. I know not just the terrible and wonderful things that happen within near proximity to me (of which there are many), but the terrible and wonderful things that happen all over the world.
I can imagine that if I only knew people in Santa Cruz and seldom encountered people from beyond its geography, my faith would look different. If I didn't have a television or a phone or knowledge of the hard and soft sciences, my faith would look different. But I do have a television and a phone. I have taken numerous courses in hard and soft sciences. My level of formal education exceeds that of most human beings who have walked on this planet, including those who wrote my sacred texts.
But my human condition-- the chemicals that fire through my brain, the cycles of life... death, love, rebirth, grief-- how much have those changed? The ways that I cling to familial support and love. Certainly mothers loved their children 1,000 years ago as much as they do today. Certainly grief broke people 2,000 years ago as much as it does today. Certainly love ignited our souls 300 years ago as much as it does today.
The wisdom of our faith traditions can speak to the ancientness of our souls and characters. Scripture can speak to emotion-- to grief, anger, love, and joy because such experiences haven't passed away with the ages. But the ways we imagine the narratives must be different because our world is different. We understand and relate to our surroundings and neighbors differently. The challenges of our world are similar and different. Childbirth, parenting, marriage, love, infidelity, grief, death... job insecurity, terrorism, global climate change, racism, food insecurity, chemotherapy, surgery, car accidents...
"Traditional" imaginings of God (we'll ignore that imaginings of God have varied over the ages more than most "religious" people would tell you) are inadequate for the modern experience. Clinging to the old can bring comfort, but it can also lack usefulness. I might love to drive around a car built in 1950, but at some point, it will likely cease to serve me well.
As we re-imagine how to communicate with each other, how to travel, how to stay informed, how to be married, how to parent-- should we not also re-imagine how we pray, how we conceive of God, how we worship, how we form sacred bonds, and how we serve our God and neighbors?
Our ritual and faith must evolve. We must challenge both the ways we believe and don't believe. We must seek new answers.
Sometimes I believe in God and other times I don't, but I've been a Christian since the first day I claimed that truth. I think the new Christianity needs to allow for theistic fluidity-- for atheism, agnosticism, monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, and whatever else might work for us because if we are honest, we can find all of those things in the Bible and if we are honest, we can probably find all of those things within ourselves (or at least our neighborhood!). I believe Christianity is bigger than our theisms and more important than our differences.
We must re-imagine worship so that it can be multivalent. We must re-imagine faith so that it is less concerned with what we believe than how we practice our beliefs in this complicated world. If we want faith to transcend time, we must find what is transcendent in our faith-- because not all of it is.
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