I should have called a recent blog piece, “The Way of Doubt.” Instead, I called it, “The Quest for a Moral Center, Part 1”— a title simultaneously drab and misleading. The piece was not about finding a moral center but about doubt: how doubt often leads in the direction of renewed faith. Doubt, I suggested, is not to be feared but can be a step in the direction of deeper faith. Doubt denies what needs denying, the elements of one’s faith that cannot withstand the light of reality. Doubt clarifies faith. Without doubt, faith loses touch with what is true.

Doubt does something else. It protects us from religious tyranny—just the sort of tyranny presently imposed on the Christian Reformed Church. Office holders in the CRC are now required annually to sign on to a denominational list of Reformed confessions and—quite contrary both to letter and spirit of the Church Order—also to sign on to the synod’s own rulings on the meaning of the confessions. And one is to do this “without reservation.” 

But how can you do this without first bringing to the confessions a critical eye? Is, for example, the significance of the cross of Jesus Christ best explained as “satisfaction” given to an offended God, as the Belgic Confession has it (Article 21), a notion introduced to Christian theology largely by Anselm of Canterbury in the 11^th century and not before? Or are there other and better ways to think about atonement—ways that are more scriptural? And cannot one, even if the answers to the previous questions turn out to be yes, still sign on to these historic documents as important and weighty statements of faith to be taken seriously and with due respect? And is not such an approach to the confessions more in line with the spirit of Reformation than signing on to them “without reservation?” 

In all of this, doubt is a friend. No synod can declare what is true on the basis of its own authority. If a synod were to say that the earth is flat and justify this belief on the authority of its synodical reading of the Bible, it does not make the earth any flatter. And it would only take a single circumnavigation of the globe to prove the synodical ruling wrong. 

Something like this seems to be happening with regard to the church’s condemnation of same-sex marriage. The synod of CRC has declared that physical love between members of the same sex is always wrong, even in marriage. They have done so on the authority of a theology constructed from a questionable reading of the Bible and from the synod’s own weird interpretation of the Heidelberg Catechism. These ways of reading and interpreting, whether of the Bible or the confessions, are not, as it were, delivered from heaven. They are human ideas, ideas that, for the most part, are modern in origin. They can and should be questioned.

And now against these ideas, we encounter actual queer people in love, not infrequently members of our own families, whose love seems to them and to us to be as fully imbued with joy and promise as any straight love. Encountering such couples is a bit like circumnavigating the globe: it sets experience against interpretation. It suggests that the church may have gotten both Bible and queer people wrong. A little doubt brought to the synodical table would seem to be in order. The action of recent CRC synods to rule out even raising the question appears to me to come from a certain nervousness about the synodical rulings. Synod sounds like an exasperated parent saying to a questioning child, “The answer is no, and I don’t want to hear anything more about it.” It doesn’t work for parents; it will not likely work for the church. Doubts will persist.

But let’s leave doubt behind for the moment. Doubt is the critic of bad faith, but what does good faith look like? What is the positive to doubt’s negative. It is, it seems to me, faith not as something settled and done but faith as a quest for God and truth: “A long journey in the same direction,” to steal a line from Eugene Peterson (who stole it from Friedrich Nietzsche). What makes it “faith”—a word that in the Bible always has the sense of “faithfulness”—is that having set out on the path towards truth, one persists, even if the destination is not entirely clear. You take the next step. 

This way of thinking about faith is not new. You meet it in the scriptures, which often describe the Christian life as a walk—a journey. You discover it in a particular way in the letters of Paul. Take, for example, Paul’s apology for his life in Philippians 3. Having laid out his religious credentials (vss. 4-6), he says that all of that is so much BS (quite literally says it, leaving the “bull” off the word). What matters for Paul is the Christ-life, which he considers not as something one has but as something one becomes (see verse 10). He concludes this section of Philippians with:

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but this one thing one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14, NRSV)

“I press on,” he says. He hasn’t yet arrived at the goal, will not arrive at the goal. I am reminded of a later successor of Paul, Gregory of Nyssa. In his The Life of Moses, Gregory says that the journey on which we are embarked, the journey toward divine truth, is never completed. There is always more, always another step. It’s in the nature of things, as he Gregory says:

True Being is true life. This Being is inaccessible to knowledge.  . . . What Moses yearned for is satisfied by the very things which leave his desire unsatisfied.

Faith is faithfulness to the quest, to the goal, as Paul has it. The assumption that one has grasped it is a sure sign that one has not.

Which brings me to Galatians, as I promised a couple of posts ago, and to Paul’s brilliant argument in Galatians about the shape of the Christian faith. In this letter, he is arguing against a notion of faith that had locked faith down to the past—to old distinctions, old ways. The issue was a requirement, apparently newly instituted at the time of writing of the letter, that male gentile converts be circumcised. Other Torah requirements may have also been at play. In the 2^nd chapter Paul tells an unflattering story about Cephus (Peter) who, Paul alleges, ate with gentiles as long as no one else was around but kept his distance when the “men of James” came to town. But for Paul and perhaps for the Galatians also, the issue comes down to circumcision—an ancient marker of identity. For the Galatians, this requirement was fully biblical. How could one be a faithful Christian if one were not faithful to the Torah? For Paul, who had grasped a new kind of community, a community that included Jews and gentiles, enslaved people as well as free, women as well as men, the requirement of circumcision was replacing the power of the Spirit with the ways of the past. Having once seen the new community as revealed by the Spirit, he could not unsee it. 

The issue reminds me of what has happened in the CRC. In Galatia, the issue came down to circumcision; in the CRC, it’s come down to sexuality. As a result, in the CRC, sexuality has taken on an outsized importance. An overture to Synod 2024 from Classis Iakota, an overture favored by a majority of the synodical advisory committee, asked the synod to declare that “unchastity [code for homosexuality in the CRC] and sexual ethics” are “salvation issues.” Although many delegates voted for it, in the end Synod did not adopt the overture, saying instead that “Scripture is already clear that all sin, including unrepentant sin, is a ‘salvation issue.’” What this comes to is that same-sex couples are, according to the CRC synod, “unsaved.” Not only that, but anyone suggesting anything to the contrary is also treading on thin ice of hell. 

As the synod perhaps sensed in backing away from the overture itself, although not from the view that sexuality is a “salvation issue,” this way of thinking is theologically problematic. It introduces a “grace and something else” view of salvation. One is saved by grace and maintaining straight sexuality. You need both. But, of course, if you cite one “sin,” what about others? What about tax cheats? Verbal abusers? People who drive over the speed limit? People who espouse Christian nationalism? The list is long.

In its formulation, the synod distinguished “unsaved sinners” from those who are saved by repentance. It’s “unrepentant sin” that is a “salvation issue.” They base this on Q&A 87 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which in turn is based on such passages as 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Galatians 5:19-21, where we have lists of sinners of various sorts (Hans Dieter Betz suggests that these lists are purposely disorganized to represent the disorder of sin). At the end of the lists, Paul appends a judgment: “Whoever does these sorts of things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:21; 1 Corinthians 6:10 is similar). The synodical formulation appears to take “inherit the kingdom of God” as a statement about eternal salvation. These people are not going to heaven.

But this interpretation is wrong on two counts. The first is that it misreads the text. “Inheriting the kingdom of God” is not about heaven and hell. The theology of heaven and hell is constructed mostly out of non-biblical materials; it does not appear here. What Paul has in mind—the statement itself may come from an early baptism catechism—is that one cannot at the same time do these sorts of things—the vices in the lists—and participate in the rule of God. The one excludes the other. 

I will have more to say about this below, but there is a second way that the synodical formulation gets it wrong. It has to do with repentance. Of course, one should repent of one’s sins. In the church I attend we get on our knees every Sunday to repent of our sins. But the issue is not repentance; it’s sin: what the sin is in this case. For those on the one side of the debate, the sin is sex with the wrong sort of partner (and any claim to the contrary); for those on the other side of the debate, the sin is excluding from church leadership and the sacraments those who live in committed and loving relationships (marriage), regardless of the genders of the partners. Synod 2024 and the synods that preceded it assumes that they are on the right side of sin, but what if they have gotten it wrong? What if it is they who should be repenting? Would they then regard their “unrepentant sin” as a “salvation issue?” 

I’ve strayed a bit from Galatians in order to contextualize it in terms of the present controversy in the CRC. One can read the CRC situation into Galatians. The recent rulings of the CRC synod excluding people from full membership are not dissimilar from the actions of the Galatians excluding the uncircumcised. They impose on the church a backward-looking understanding of faith. To take Paul’s language in Galatians 3:2-3, the CRC appears to have preferred the works of the Law to the voice of the Spirit. At least, so it appears to many of us.

It’s to this tendency in the church to circle the wagons that Paul addresses himself in Galatians 3-5. He begins with Abraham. This is a canny exegetical move. Paul notes that the birth of faith—the first faith of Abraham—precedes the giving of the Torah in his scriptural chronology by some 430 years (3:17). In Genesis, long before Moses, we have, “Abram trusted Yhwh, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (15:6). Faith—the “long journey in the same direction” kind of faith—is first.

What this entails for Paul is that all true faith is Abraham faith (3:9). Abraham faith has the essential character of open-endedness. As the writer of Hebrews notes, Abraham does not know where his journey of faith will lead (Hebrews 11:8). In the Genesis story, Yhwh offers Abraham a promise, a promise of heirs not only, but of blessing. Through him and his heirs, blessings will flow to all the rest of the world. How precisely this will happen is not immediately clear. What is clear is that he has heard the voice of God, and trusting that voice, he steps out in faith. He “believes.” 

This is the sort of faith that the Galatians are in danger of losing. They have nailed faith back down to a set of rules. Keep these rules, they believe, and you are faithful. But this is faith that leads nowhere, faith without a destination. It’s righteousness as compliance, not righteousness as a journey. Paul says that this sort of righteousness fails to dream beyond what presently exists. It fails to dream of a new world (kingdom of God) in which the old distinctions of ethnicity, social status, and gender no longer matter (3:28). 

Paul calls the Galatians to spiritual adulthood. Using the metaphor of a last testament (translating diathēkē as “covenant” in 3:15 and later is misleading; Paul has in mind a will or last testament). He suggests that we have come at last into spiritual adulthood, and with adulthood, we are no longer subject to the old rules. The time has come for us to take ownership of the estate. Ownership comes with both freedom and responsibility. Take up your freedom, Paul urges the Galatians (and us, his latter-day readers). Risk stepping out in faith. Dream of a new world. Hear the call of the Spirit. Lean into God’s future.

I will not have done Paul justice if I do not add here a complication in this picture of spiritual adulthood. We do not exercise adulthood, as it were, on our own. In a second and equally brilliant exegetical move, Paul notes that the promise to Abraham is to him and his heir (Genesis 15:5). Not “heirs,” Paul insists, but singular, “heir” (3:16). By Paul’s lights, Abraham has only one heir: Jesus. We participate in the promise not on our own but by participating in Christ. And—here I’m severely shortening up Paul’s argument—we participate in Christ through the Spirit of Christ who comes to us in the call of the gospel (and in the apostolic testimony). 

This is an answer to the question that frequently gets raised by those who want law rather than Spirit. How do we know we are on the right path, as we live out our spiritual adulthood? We know by looking at Jesus. Not just by looking at Jesus but by listening to what Jesus says, as we have it in the apostolic testimony (the New Testament). And through the Spirit who comes to us in the preaching and the sacraments in the liturgy of the church. The Spirit is always the Spirit of Jesus. If our adult decisions do not lead in the direction of Jesus, they are moving in the wrong direction.

Paul makes this point explicitly in chapter 5, the well-known passage in which the apostle says that we already know what sin looks like. In case we don’t, he gives a suggestive list (5:19-21). I’ve already discussed this list. He adds to it another list, the fruit of the Spirit, which leads in what seems to be a carefully considered order from love to self-control. Faith is manifested in transformation: transformation of ourselves as we anticipate the transformation of the world. As I said earlier, faith is not about having but about becoming.

This adult faith requires dreaming, imagining a world in which love embraces us all, a world in which we can be truly ourselves. Paul urges his Galatian churches to lean into this sort of spiritual adulthood. Perhaps he would make the same recommendation today. He would be not surprised that the journey of faith has taken us to new insights, that old boundaries are coming down, and that we are discovering anew that love’s embrace is more inclusive than we thought. As he says, “In Christ, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision [read, neither queer nor straight] makes any difference but rather faith working through love” (5:6). 

Clay