CREDO

 

By John W. Burgeson

Work in progress – this draft written March 28, 2003

 

I Peter 3:15 reads:

 

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, …

 

In this essay, I declare my Christian position, the reasons for it, and discuss two key theological concepts (symbols), the person of Jesus Christ and the call of the Christian to servanthood.

 

 I am a member of the First Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Durango, Colorado. My beloved brother Paul is a  Lutheran (ELCA) pastor in Ohio, my esteemed second son Samuel is a Southern Baptist minister in Texas and Carol, my cherished wife of 45 years, is a Candidate for ordination in the PCUSA, now in her third year of pursuing the Mdiv degree at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.

 

The PCUSA Book of Order asks nine questions of ordination candidates. Three of these are:

 

Q1. Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledging him Lord of all and Head of the Church, and through him believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

 

Q2. Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?

 

Q6. Will you in your own life seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, love your neighbors, and work for the reconciliation of the world?

 

A1.  “yes.” I became a Christian in 1962, in one of six epiphanies I can identify in my life.  My relationship with Jesus Christ is the top priority in my life. Jesus the Christ is a real person, and I know this to be true.

 

A2.  “yes,” but how this works  in practice is a never-ending quest. I relate to Anslem’s “Faith seeking understanding.”

 

A6.  “yes.”  Over the years there have been many servanthood opportunities. Besides serving in the church and being youth leaders, SS teachers, occasional fill-ins for the preacher, etc. Carol and I were together active in the Civil Rights movement of the mid 60s. We wanted to “change the world,” and we did that, not the whole world for everybody, of course, but the whole world for three persons, as we adopted and raised to adulthood three orphans from Korea along with our other five children. We have looked for other ways to serve, mission trips to Haiti, Panama and Mexico, serving as foster parents, serving meals in a soup kitchen, political posts, etc. Currently, my mission is Habitat for Humanity; I work in construction with them weekly. Why H4H? Frederick Buechner once wrote: “The place God calls you to be is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.“ (A SEEKER’S ABC, 1993, page 119). For me, H4H is that place. I am also active in science/religion dialogs on the Internet.

 

I spoke of “six epiphanies.” For those who do not accept the concept of “previenient grace,” perhaps there were only three, for the first three happened to me before I became a Christian and had to do with (1) my intellectual direction, (2) my career choice and (3) my life mate. I will pass over these in this essay, not because they are unimportant, but because they are peripheral to the essay topic. I will relate epiphany #4; it was pivotal.

 

Raised in the Lutheran (ELCA) church, by age 17 I had rejected Christianity. I broke my mother’s heart when I was in college.  She asked if I were reading the church magazine she was faithfully sending; I replied that I was not and that she might as well save her energy. In all my college years I darkened a church doorway exactly twice. When my dad was ill and thought to be about gone, I remember a conversation with the minister at the hospital. It was not my finest hour.

 

At age 26, after a two-year career as a physicist devising killing machines for the government, my childhood sweetheart and I were married. I was then pursuing a career in computers with IBM. Benjamin (son #1) was born a year later and suddenly Carol was leaving me on Sunday mornings (with our son) for worship. One night she confided in me that I was not the #1 love of her life – Jesus Christ was. I could live with that; after all she was just in love with a symbol. I thought.

 

Something that obviously meant a lot to Carol, however, had to be taken seriously. I had not thought much about ultimate questions. I determined to do what I always did (and still do) in such circumstances, study the questions; address the issues. Such study can be dangerous to a brash young non-Christian. By 1960 I had become a deist. I did not know it then, but I was following the same path CS Lewis had followed 32 years earlier.

 

Having determined that the God-concept was more rational than atheism, I was not altogether pleased, for I thought the world could have been made a lot better. But, of course, I had not been asked!

 

The person of Jesus Christ was the next hurdle. Like Lewis, I began attending worship (and even SS classes). At one time Carol and I attended a series of classes at a nearby Lutheran church (Missouri Synod). I’m a good student; I aced the classes. The pastor assumed I’d then join the church; I told him that understanding the material was in no way the same as thinking it true. He urged me to join anyway, and nearly lost me to the faith altogether, for if I joined I’d have to assent to that in which I did not believe. If this was Christianity, I told him, a pox upon it.

 

About that time I began to have discussions with the God I doubted could (would) hear me. I told him that I did not believe in this Jesus; that I saw no rational way in which I might believe; that if he was as powerful as the preachers told me, he’d have to convince me himself. I was at that point willing to believe; no more than that.

 

Telling God you are willing is risky. An epiphany came to me one evening as I sat on our sofa, conversing with a visiting pastor. It was unexpected. At one point in the conversation he asked me what I thought of Jesus Christ. Much to my amazement, my mind and mouth both assented to the classical Christian proposition that he was the very Son of God, and was, indeed, my savior. It has been 40+ years since that event; I hold it in my mind clearly. It parallels in many respects CS Lewis’s epiphany on September 28, 1931, while riding in his brother's motorcycle sidecar to Whipsnade zoo. When Lewis set out, he writes, he was not a Christian. When he arrived, he was. When I sat down that evening, I was not a Christian. When I arose, I was.

 

Since 1962, Carol and I have been blessed, because of frequent career moves, to be part of many faith communities, each of these teaching us new dimensions of the Christian life. We began as members of a rural Evangelical United Brethren congregation. It was there I discovered the truth of I John 3:14, which reads (Berkeley):

 

“We know that we have passed from death into life, because we love the brothers.”

 

I looked around that small sanctuary one Sunday morning and was suddenly struck by the undeniable fact that I LOVED these country folks, where heretofore I did not do so. Where did this “unnatural” care for their well being and happiness come from? If not an epiphany, it  was certainly (to me) a confirmation that my embracing Christianity had to be on the right track.

 

In our travels, we usually attended “The church of Holy Proximity.”  We have been with the Ohio Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers), two independent churches, Orthodox Presbyterian, Evangelical Covenant (Swedish), Church of God Anderson, Southern Baptist, Nazarene and four different PCUSA fellowships. We have learned much from each of these. Each has their specific strengths and weaknesses. While there are obvious differences among them of ritual, worship, culture and tradition, there is not a dime’s worth of difference between any of them when it comes to faith essentials. I find the Presbyterian Church (USA) to be well suited to my understanding of God as it encourages intellectual questioning, accepts diversity and governs itself in a way that promotes the responsibilities of the membership.

 

While I John 3:14 has always been “my” verse, there is a second one that appeals to me very much. This is John 14:21; in the Berkeley version it reads

 

He who has my orders, and observes them, loves me.

And he who loves me, will be loved by my father,

I, too, shall love him, and show [manifestation] myself to him.

 

On my web site, www.burgy.50megs.com, there is a story about one of these manifestations, the 5th of my epiphanies. I have never written about the last one; someday, perhaps, I will. But it is very personal. And very real. I can compare it only to that of Blaise Pascal, and his experience during the evening of Nov 23, 1654.

 

To God be the glory.

 

John Burgeson (Burgy) (Imago dei)

 

The directions for this credo asked us to talk about two out of twelve “theological symbols.” Since I chose two not on the list, it seems useful to address, at least briefly, the twelve in the syllabus.

 

God. “God is not God’s name. It is the name for the mystery that lies beyond us – and in us.” I apprehend God as I study Jesus and, to a lesser extent, the other scriptures. I regard him as omnipotent, but also as one who can be surprised by what a human being, endowed with free will, may do. I am sympathetic to the “persuasive God” of the process theologians, but my own position is much closer to that of a classical theist.

 

Human Nature. That humans can choose evil is evident. That they often do so as part of a group (crowd) seems also indisputable. As C. S. Lewis, puts it, we are a “bent” race. Even the best of us has a dark side. And even the worst of us has a light side (I remember reading as a young boy an account of Hitler feeding the squirrels as he chatted with a reporter).

 

Faith. My faith is in Jesus Christ, the one who was resurrected. In this, I am quite in agreement with Paul, who writes in Gal 2:20b-21, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!" And, in I Cor 15:14, And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

 

Church. I see the church as a worldwide group of believers, past present and future, across many denominations and even outside denominations. I see it also as the local faith fellowship to which I happen to belong.

 

Christology. I hold that the scripture’s testimony is valid; that Jesus was, and is, fully human; fully divine. I hold that the resurrection was a historical event, not a symbol; that something very unusual happened on that Easter day nearly 2,000 years ago. As one trained in the sciences, I have studied the objections to this position rather thoroughly; as “science,” they are without merit or logical value.  I find among recent writers the arguments of John Polkinghorne particularly persuasive.

 

Holy Spirit. I hold that the Holy Spirit is best thought of as the presence of the living Lord (Christ). I apprehend his work in everyday life, a life that I understand as a gift from God, a life most wondrous and interesting.

 

Sin. See “Human Nature” above.

 

Salvation. (1) Although Jesus may well have said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” (I am aware of arguments that He did not actually say  this), it is obvious that he did not place along those words such phrases as “and you have to be a ‘Christian’ to get to heaven.” What, then, about people of other faiths? I am "cautiously optimistic." It seems hardly likely that the God of love described in the New Testament would shun a human being of good will (Micah 6:8) only on the grounds of an accident of birthplace and culture. Indeed, at another place in scripture, he speaks of "other sheep" in "other folds." I find the sermons of Dirk Ficca (easily accessed on the internet with a Google search) to be a useful discussion of this issue.  (2) Salvation is a lot more than “heaven after death.” If one’s salvation does not affect one’s earthly life, then it is not worth much.

 

Scripture. See my answer to question #2. I hold that scripture, while obviously not inerrant, is “infallible” in matters of faith and practice. That does not mean I accept everything the scriptures say about God. I cannot accept, for instance, the OT writers who attribute to him a command to slaughter infants (I Sam 15), or commit genocide (various passages in Joshua), or treat women as property, or condone and encourage slavery. I do hold that scripture testifies to Jesus the Christ in a necessary and sufficient manner.

 

Mystery. See “God” above. Mystery does not equal “problem.” A problem can, in principle, be solved. A mystery is inexhaustible.

 

Authority. I hold that the scriptures, properly read and interpreted, are authority. That makes life uncertain. So be it.

 

Revelation. Scripture is one revelation, and the primary one. I hold that I have had at least three, perhaps as many as six, personal revelations of my own. I admire people who can be devoted Christians and never have had such an experience. I suspect that such experiences are granted to such as me because of my weakness, not my strength.