Beyond Belief: Finding the Heart of Christianity

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. A couple weeks ago, before I went on vacation, we dug into the idea of belief—and whether faith is really about getting all the ideas in our head perfectly arranged. We looked at how fragile and complicated belief can be, and how faith is better understood as trust (in fact, that’s what the Greek word for faith is more accurately translated). Today, I want to explore what might actually lie at the heart of Christianity once we loosen our grip on belief-as-certainty and instead open ourselves to a faith that is curious and growing. Because yes, the idea that the heart of Christianity is belief in certain ideas is a myth. Many Christians assume that the center of our religion is a set of doctrines. If you can recite the Nicene Creed without crossing your fingers, then you’ve got the heart of it. And yes, creeds have their place—they safeguard important truths and keep us grounded in the story of God. In fact, one of the gifts of the creeds is that they keep us from believing too little. Most heresies through history haven’t been wild inventions, but narrow partial truths. So, some early heresies insisted Jesus was so divine he only seemed to be a human in flesh. Or others believed he was a human who was adopted by God at baptism, but not fully divine. The truly orthodox and catholic belief is to hold together too competing truths—that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine—even though that might be challenging to conceive! And there are numerous other examples of where the creeds (and good robust theology) push us beyond simplistic belief in one part of the faith to embracing tensions that baffle the mind even as they nurture the spirit: the idea that God is one being in a trinity or persons, or the idea that the bread that is pressed into your hands on Sunday is also the body of Christ, given for you. Far from being small checklists, the creeds widen the horizon of what we dare to believe. But when Jesus himself was asked what mattered most, he didn’t list doctrines. He gave a double commandment: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s why theologians through the centuries have insisted that love is the interpretive key to the Christian faith. Augustine famously put it this way: “If it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them” It’s love—not intellectual assent—that sits at the heart. And that’s why Christianity is best described not as a system of ideas, but as a way of life. In Acts, the earliest followers of Jesus weren’t called Christians yet—they were called people of “the Way.” A way is something you walk. Sometimes you walk with clarity, sometimes with questions, sometimes stumbling. But the point is not having perfect answers—the point is the journey of love. So if we move belief as intellectual assent off of the center stage, what remains is this: trust in God, practiced through love. Worship that turns our hearts toward God. Compassion that meets our neighbor’s needs. Justice that repairs what is broken in our world. Humility that leaves us open to growth. The heart of Christianity isn’t belief—it’s love. And maybe that’s the best news of all: you don’t have to have every question answered or every doctrine nailed down before you can live faithfully. You simply have to begin walking the way of love—trusting that God will meet you there. Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.