Faith, Fallibility, and the Limits of Testimony: Sharing Faith When We Are Not Reliable Judges

Dr. Weaver ended our last session by asking two deceptively simple questions: How do we share our faith? And what does it mean to share faith after everything we’ve been saying about beauty, music, fear, silence, and sensory experiences of God?

I want to begin by saying that I think those questions are exactly right—and that they are harder than we often admit. They are harder because they force us to confront something most religious traditions, including Christianity, tend to move past too quickly: we are not reliable judges of truth.

Over the last several weeks, we have talked about music that moves us, beauty that arrests us, silence that steadies us, and fear that unsettles us. We have also acknowledged that while these experiences can feel profoundly spiritual, they can also mislead us. They may support our faith, but they might also undermine it. That realization brings us full circle to a deeper problem: if I can mistake intensity for holiness, or emotion for truth, then what exactly am I sharing when I say I am “sharing my faith”?

The Bible tells us that Adam and Eve became aware of good and evil, but not that they became competent to judge them infallibly. In fact, the expulsion from Eden seems to presume the opposite—that moral awareness without moral reliability is a dangerous condition. We know that there is a difference between good and evil, but we do not reliably know where that difference lies.

So the question I want to explore this morning is: What does it mean to share faith when we must also admit that our discernment—our interpretations, our experiences, even our convictions—may be wrong?

If we take that question seriously, it changes what “sharing” can mean.

So let’s start with Adam and Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that led to their downfall.

The serpent promised them: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.” That assertion is often assumed to mean that we would acquire God’s moral capacity. But the Bible does not (it seems to me) support that conclusion. What we gained was moral awareness, not moral reliability. Adam and Eve come to know that there is a distinction between good and evil, but nothing in the narrative suggests that they now know how to discern that distinction correctly and infallibly.

In fact, the supposed gain soon turns out to be a pretty serious loss. Shame, fear, hiding, blame, and distortion enter the human condition almost at once. If Adam and Eve had become “like God” in the sense of possessing divine discernment, there would have been no reason to remove them from the garden. The removal presumes that something has gone wrong at a structural level: moral awareness has arrived without the moral competence needed to manage it.

This distinction undercuts an assumption that often accompanies religious confidence (or confidence in one’s faith). The assumption is that awareness of good and evil implies the dependable ability to judge rightly. The biblical narrative suggests otherwise. We are aware that good and evil exist, but we are not equipped to arbitrate between them with certainty. And this is not a temporary problem to be resolved through education or experience; it is a permanent condition of life outside Eden.

Seen this way, the Fall is not simply about disobedience. It is about epistemic fragility, the uncertainty inherent in what we think we know. We see morally, but through distortion. It’s as though we acquired prescription moral lenses from the Tree that are indeed a divine prescription, but our mortal brains are not able to process the moral light signals they receive through the divine lenses and turn them into sharp and clear images. We judge, then, from within the very condition that compromises judgment. 

This has immediate and deadly serious implications for faith-sharing. If my access to the good is real but unreliable, then any moral claim of mine—no matter how sincerely I may hold it—must be offered, if at all, with restraint.

This is the ground on which the rest of my talk stands. The question is not whether we can perceive goodness at all. Clearly, we can. The question is whether our interpretation of that perception authorizes us to speak with confidence on behalf of God. Once that distinction is made, the problem of sharing faith must be faced.

This concern is not new. Some of the most influential Christian theologians have taken human fallibility not as an embarrassment to be overcome, but as the very condition under which faith must be lived and spoken.

First, Augustineargued that after the Fall, human beings do not simply choose wrongly; we love wrongly, and because our loves are disordered, our judgments are distorted. We may sincerely believe we are choosing the good, while in fact we are serving lesser goods or even ourselves. For Augustine, the problem is not lack of moral awareness, but lack of moral reliability. Confidence in one’s own discernment is therefore not a sign of spiritual maturity; it is often a symptom of the very disorder grace is meant to heal.

Centuries later, Martin Luther sharpened Augustine’s insight. Luther’s famous phrase simul iustus et peccator—simultaneously justified and sinful—means that even the believer remains compromised. The presence of the Holy Spirit in us does not turn us into dependable moral authorities. Faith, for Luther, does not eliminate distortion; it exposes it. The Spirit reveals Christ, but it does not grant us clean access to truth, nor does it license us to speak as if our judgments were secure.

In the twentieth century, Karl Barth pressed the point further when he insisted that revelation is not something human beings can possess or transmit but is something that happens where and when God chooses. Faith, therefore, cannot be shared as information or insight. It can only point beyond itself. Any attempt to share faith as though it were sharing a a page from our diary, knowledge we control, risks turning revelation into a human possession, and witness into a subtle form of self-assertion.

But Dietrich Bonhoeffer rejected the idea that faithful action requires moral certainty. In fact, he argued that waiting for certainty before acting is often a way of avoiding responsibility. Christian speech and action always take place under conditions of risk, ambiguity, and possible error. Faithfulness does not eliminate uncertainty; it accepts it and acts without claiming innocence.

These theologians do not resolve the problem of fallibility. They all assume it. What they seem to me to resist is the temptation to turn faith into moral competence or religious affiliation into authority. From that perspective, witness is possible—but only when it renounces the claim to reliability.

That brings us to the uncomfortable but necessary conclusion that at its most self-aware, Christianity does not authorize confident judgment. It authorizes humility, restraint, and speech that knows it may be wrong. And that recognition fundamentally reshapes what it can mean to “share” one’s faith.

At this point it is important to ask whether this emphasis on restraint and fallibility is a later theological development—or whether it is already present in the teaching and practice of Jesus Christ himself.

One of the most striking features of Jesus’ teaching is how often he resists public religious display. When he speaks about prayer, he does not frame it as an act meant to instruct or persuade others. Instead, he says that when we pray, we are to go into a private room, close the door, and pray in secret. 

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matthew 6:5–8)

The point is not merely humility in a moral sense; it is a rejection of performative spirituality. Prayer is not validated by being seen, nor by being shared. It is properly placed outside the economy of display, influence, and persuasion.

This posture is reinforced by Jesus’ own behavior. Again and again in the Gospels, he withdraws—from crowds, from acclaim, even from explanation.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. (Mark 1:35)

But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:16)

He refuses to satisfy demands for signs.

The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.” Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side. (Mark 8:11-13)

He tells those he heals not to speak about it. Silence, for Jesus, is not evasive. It is faithful.

The apostolic tradition follows the same pattern. Paul the Apostle, for example, briefly alludes to an extraordinary visionary experience—being “caught up to the third heaven”—and then immediately refuses to describe it. 

I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:1–10)

He explicitly resists the temptation to narrate the experience, because doing so would shift attention from God to himself. He treats silence not as loss, but as protection. What matters is not the spiritual experience itself, but what it does without being displayed.

What emerges here is a mode of faithfulness that modern Christianity often neglects: the faithfulness of restraint. Jesus does not deny that God can be encountered. He does not deny interior experience. But he consistently resists turning those encounters into currency—something to be circulated, explained, or used to persuade.

This matters for our question about sharing faith. If Jesus himself places prayer, encounter, and devotion beyond public display, then sharing faith cannot mean narrating our most intimate experiences as evidence or proof. Silence, in this tradition, is not absence of faith. It is a recognition that some realities are diminished the moment they are turned into speech meant to convince.

Seen this way, silence is not a retreat from witness. It is a refusal to confuse God with our access to God. By that I mean that our individual relationship to God—however real it feels, however transformative it becomes—is mediated by temperament, culture, language, memory, fear and desire, biology and psychology, and by history and trauma.

Your encounters with God are real for you. But your experience of God is not God. When we forget that distinction, we tend to treat our experience as evidence, our interpretation as truth, our confidence as faith, and our access as authority. And at that point, we are no longer witnessing to God. We are witnessing to ourselves having encountered God—and those are not the same thing.

The refusal to confuse God with our access to God prepares us to understand why other religious traditions have taken silence even further—not as withdrawal from the divine, but as reverence for its irreducibility.

So at this point it helps to widen the lens beyond Christianity; not to replace it, but to see more clearly what Christianity has sometimes forgotten. When we look at certain Eastern traditions, especially Buddhism and Daoism, we encounter a markedly different relationship between faith, experience, and transmission.

In Buddhism, enlightenment is understood as a realization that cannot be handed from one person to another. A Buddhist monk or nun may devote an entire life to meditation, discipline, and silence, yet that realization does not become normative for others. It does not authorize instruction in the sense of moral or metaphysical certainty. Instead, the monastic life is visible but not directive. One may observe it and learn from it. One may imitate parts of it, or ignore it entirely. There is no presumption that you or I must strive to arrive at where the monk has arrived, nor that the monk’s realization obligates anyone else.

Daoism goes even further in resisting transmission by assertion. The foundational claim of the Daoist tradition is that the Dao cannot be spoken. Once named, it is already misrepresented. For that reason, Daoist practice emphasizes alignment rather than explanation, harmony rather than persuasion. Authority does not travel in words; it is suggested through posture, rhythm, and restraint.

What these traditions share is not a rejection of depth or discipline, but a refusal to universalize what should be personal realization. Experience is treated as non-transferable. Insight does not become instruction. Practice may be offered, but not prescribed. Importantly, this does not mean that these traditions never spread or have never influenced others: Buddhism spread across entire cultures and continents. But it did so primarily through modeling rather than argument—through communal practice rather than systematic persuasion.

It shows a way of honoring experience without turning it into evidence, and a way of sustaining tradition without assuming epistemic authority. The monk does not persuade the observer to meditate; the observer decides whether the monk’s way of being is worth attending to. Transmission is observational, not coercive.

Seen alongside Christianity, this raises the uncomfortable but maybe fruitful question: Has Christianity sometimes mistaken proclamation for persuasion, and witness for certainty? Or might Christian faith be most faithfully shared not by telling others what is true, but by inhabiting a way of life that does not require defense?

This is not to undermine Christianity. It is to sharpen it, to force Christians to ask whether their impulse to explain, convince, and correct flows from faith or from anxiety about their own uncertainty.

This brings us back to the heart of our recent class discussions—the unease that surfaced repeatedly as we talked about music, beauty, rhythm, silence, and fear. None of us denied the power of sensory experience. Music can calm us, elevate us, disarm us, even overwhelm us. Beauty can arrest our attention and momentarily reorder our inner life. Silence can steady us. Fear can open depths we did not know were there.

And yet, we have also acknowledged something equally important: none of these experiences is self-validating. They can accompany faith, but they cannot establish it. They can feel spiritual without being encounters with God. They can intensify devotion, but they can also mislead it.

This is why the distinction matters. Sensory experiences are companions to faith, not criteria for it. They may travel alongside an encounter with God, but they cannot reliably tell us whether such an encounter has occurred. The danger is not in music, beauty, or emotion themselves. The danger lies in allowing them to do theological work they cannot bear.

That concern has surfaced throughout our conversations. Rhythm can be hypnotic. Beauty can intoxicate. Silence can be mistaken for transcendence. Fear can masquerade as awe. None of this makes these experiences illegitimate—but it does make them unreliable as guides. They shape us powerfully, but they do not judge truly.

This returns us once more to the question of sharing faith. If my deepest sense of God’s presence came to me through an experience that is, by its nature, ambiguous and non-transferable, then what exactly am I offering when I share it? At best, I am offering a description of what happened to me. I am not offering access, proof, or instruction. Perhaps this is why religious traditions that take moral fallibility seriously tend to treat experience with caution. They don’t deny it; but they refuse to enthrone it. They recognize that what feels most compelling is often what is least trustworthy.

So the issue is not whether sensory experience belongs in religious life. Clearly, it does. The issue is whether we allow experience to become authoritative, to stand in for God; or to justify our confidence in speaking on God’s behalf. Once that happens, faith quietly turns into certainty, and encounter turns into claim. That realization narrows the path considerably. It suggests that sharing faith cannot mean sharing experiences as if they were reliable indicators of truth. Something more restrained—and perhaps more faithful—is required.

At this point we can finally return to Don’s original question: Should we share our faith? And if so, what could that possibly mean, given everything we have said about fallibility, experience, and uncertainty?

The first thing that becomes clear is what sharing faith cannot mean.

• It cannot mean sharing certainty, because certainty is precisely what we cannot possess.
• It cannot mean sharing discernment as if it were reliable, because the biblical and theological tradition repeatedly tells us that it is not.
• It cannot mean sharing experience as evidence, because experience is powerful but ambiguous, and never transferable.
• And it cannot mean sharing conclusions about God as if we were qualified to speak on God’s behalf.

What remains, when we strip all of that away, is a much thinner, more fragile, and more honest form of sharing. Not instruction, but confession. Not persuasion, but presence. Not prescription, but testimonyoffered without expectation.

In this sense, sharing faith does not mean telling others what is true. It means speaking truthfully about one’s own exposure to something one does not control and cannot verify. It means saying, in effect: This is where I stand; I may be wrong; I cannot take you there; and I cannot explain why it matters—but it does.

This reframing helps rescue a familiar biblical metaphor that is perhaps often misused: the image of planting seeds. A seed is not an argument. It is not proof. It is not even instruction. It is something placed into the world without control over whether it will take root, how it will grow, or what form it will finally assume. Growth belongs elsewhere. (I don’t see anything inconsistent in that with the Parable of the Seeds.)

Seen this way, sharing faith is no longer an act of confidence; it is an act of restraint. It does not attempt to manage outcomes. It does not assume responsibility for another person’s response. And it does not mistake sincerity for authority.

If faith is shared at all, it should be shared under protest—against our own tendency to overstate, to persuade, to correct, and to explain. What is shared should not be certainty, but orientation. Not knowledge, but posture. Not answers, but a way of standing before questions we cannot resolve. Once we see it this way, sharing faith begins to look less like a religious duty and more like a moral risk which, it you take it at all, must be taken carefully, sparingly, and without illusion about our own reliability.

So let me end with a modest proposal—not a solution, not a rule, and certainly not a mandate—that perhaps faith was never meant to be shared as content; perhaps it was never meant to be shared as certainty, and perhaps it was never meant to be shared as experience at all. Perhaps faith is shared most truthfully when it is lived in a way that does not require explanation.

That would mean that silence is not failure. It is not evasion. It is not fear. It is respect—for God, for others, and for the limits of our own discernment. It is an acknowledgment that if God can encounter us without our certainty, then God can encounter others without our meddling explanations and interventions. In that sense, restraint may be a deeper form of faithfulness than proclamation. Not because faith is weak, but because it is strong enough to relinquish control. Not because God is absent, but because God does not need our confidence to be present.

If we are not reliable judges of truth (and the story of Adam and Eve, Christian theology, and our own experience all suggest that we are not) then the most honest way to share faith may be to refuse to turn it into something transferable, manageable, or persuasive.

What we can share, perhaps, is not what we know but how we live with what we do not know; not what we have seen but how we have been changed; not answers but questions and a posture of humility before a reality larger than our judgment. If that is what sharing faith means, then it may look far quieter than we expect—and far closer to grace than pious certainty ever was.

Donald: Yesterday I shared breakfast with my late brother’s neighbor, who knew him well. I discovered that she knows my life through my brother quite intimately. They were neighbors for many years, and she doesn’t remember a day when my brother didn’t come into their home and spend time with them. He was gregarious and outgoing, and they enjoyed him greatly. My brother was not one who talked about sharing his faith; instead, he shared the experience of relationship.

Knowing how deeply involved she had been, I asked her—point blank—what drives her genuine care for others. It seemed remarkable, more than what many children give their own parents. She simply said, “Well, I’m a Christian.” At the time, I didn’t know her well enough to pursue it further.

I have never met someone who lives their faith the way she does—outside of doctrine. I live in a community of “believers,” but watching someone embody faith without talking about it has been transformative for me. I grew up in a highly structured, traditional religious system where doctrine defined the edges of life. I accepted that and have lived within it for seventy years.

To watch someone live faith without proclaiming it (she goes to a non-denominational church, but that’s about all I know) has been powerful. She’s never out in front telling people what to think or what to do. Everything is in the hands, feet, eyes, and ears of Jesus. She doesn’t share her faith—she lives it. You can ask her questions if you want, but she is never out there declaring, “This is the way you should think.”

But such is not the context in which I have lived my life for seventy years. We say “Proclaim the gospel.” We don’t say “Live the gospel” (though we assume it). The Three Angels’ Message is proclamation, and proclamation implies that you possess truth and that others need to come to see it as truth—even at the expense of what they already believe.

We’re talking as Christians among Christians, but it becomes even more complicated when engaging other religions; at least, it feels that way to me. For those of us shaped by Adventist culture and heritage, David’s remarks challenge the way we came to understand life.

David: One of the reasons I came to this group many years ago—and what continues to draw me to it—is the discovery that Seventh-day Adventism has essentially no creed except the Bible itself, and that it remains open to new interpretations. I think that openness is what allows someone with seventy years of Adventist formation to sit and listen to ideas that others might consider almost heretical—and to do so with generosity. I want you to understand how much that means.

Don: David’s essay certainly was highly provocative, especially for those of us raised with the mantra of sharing our faith. But there is something deeply disturbing about his thesis. The idea that truth might not be self-evident—or that we might even do harm by sharing what we believe—is very foreign to Christian thinking.

There is something profoundly human about wanting to be right, about holding truth dear, about relying on truth for salvation. The notion that it might not matter what we believe or that sharing belief might even be a disservice runs counter to how most Christians feel about faith-sharing.

Kiran: This talk made me think deeply about several things with which I am wrestling. In Christianity, for example, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, the first thing they do is judge themselves. They realize they are naked, and God asks, “Who told you that you were naked?” In other words, humanity judges itself as wrong.

Then Jesus comes and offers grace, saying, “No, you are loved,” and gives the ultimate expression of that love by dying on the cross. When a Christian realizes that they are loved unconditionally by the Creator, it transforms them in ways they cannot fully explain. That transformation changes how they live, especially in how they love others, like the Good Samaritan.

When it comes to Hinduism—at least as I have experienced it—it is about trying your best to live according to dharma and karma. Dharma is duty, and karma is the consequence of actions. Living out one’s duty becomes evidence of goodness. Your life itself becomes a testimony of how you are living truthfully before God. You are trying to transform yourself.

In Christianity, especially in works-based versions of it, you sometimes see something similar—almost a formula for being right with God, which then gets shared with others. But if you return to Jesus’ method, you are transformed by God’s love, and that transformation leads you to love others because you no longer feel the need to be perfect. You know you are loved, even as a sinner, and you do your best to care for others.

Where I struggle is in how this compares to Hinduism, where it feels like you are striving very hard to be better. How does that relate to others without prescribing a formula? In other words, are all religions really doing one of two things—either prescribing a method or living out transformation? That tension is something I’m still trying to understand.

C-J: What struck me was that David reflected people’s personal spiritual walks without judgment. Whatever helps someone feel comfortable in who they are becoming spiritually matters. It honors the process.

The phrase “Be here now” comes to mind. Whatever space we’re in—pleasant or difficult—is an opportunity to understand the expression of the divine in that space. It’s easy to feel that all is well when we’re sitting by the pool with a friend. It’s much harder in a war zone, or in isolation, where you ask, “Where are you, Lord?”

I think we grow best when we engage with something different from our own sense of identity. That might be a different belief system, different books, or even risking friendships. We cannot grow in isolation. We grow when we are tested—when ego, pride, and agendas are challenged.

It is very difficult, in such a short span of human time, to get everything right. That’s why we need to remain spiritually open, not identifying exclusively with one belief system, but with a higher duty to one another and to the planet. We are stewards of one another and of our environment in this dimension.

Reinhard: David began with the event in the Garden of Eden. To me, when Satan—through the serpent—tempted Eve, this was already part of a plan. When God created humans in His image, Satan knew his own status, having been cast out of God’s presence. I think he wanted to take humanity along with him in rebellion against God.

When the serpent said, “You will be like God,” we know that Satan himself wanted to be like God. That similarity is important. His goal was to destroy the foundation of humanity’s relationship with God, which is faith. By undermining Adam and Eve’s faith, he succeeded.

Faith, then, is central to our relationship with God. Hebrews 11 tells us that faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. Faith is primarily a vertical relationship with the divine, something others cannot directly observe. Only God truly knows our faith.

At the same time, faith does express itself outwardly through love. We show love to others, and through that, others see the testimony of our lives—how we relate to people, how we deal with those around us. When we pray with others, that is the fruit of faith.

So when we talk about sharing faith, it happens in different contexts. With friends, coworkers, or family members of different beliefs, our role may be simply to strengthen or encourage. With those who already believe in Jesus, we help strengthen their faith through our shared experiences.

When speaking with people of different faiths, challenges arise. For example, Muslims often argue that Jesus cannot be God because God cannot die. But we believe Jesus came in human flesh to bear the sins of the world. These are difficult conversations.

Still, the primary way we share faith is by strengthening others through love. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, of faith, hope, and love, the greatest of these is love. Love must remain central if we are to show our faith to others.

Robin: Jesus said; “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). That seems to make it clear that people themselves are not the way, the truth, or the life. Then, when I compare that with Revelation—where John sees a vision of every nation, tribe, tongue, and people represented in heaven—it suggests that faith is ultimately an individual experience.

You cannot say that attending a particular house of worship makes you right with God. Jesus was pointing us toward following his example. He knows the way, the truth, and the life because he shares in both God’s divinity and humanity. His incarnation allowed him to know, in a visceral way, what human beings struggle with, and to show that reconciliation with God is still possible, and that we can live as God intended.

C-J: Nature is dynamic, and depending on where you are, it can be profoundly dangerous—earthquakes, volcanoes, disease. But I think part of any species’ survival, spiritually and organically, is struggle. We need to struggle in order to grow. We need to find merit in struggle; otherwise, we become complacent, presumptuous, lazy, and unproductive. We stop engaging with our environment and simply let things happen to us.

It seems innate to humanity to create and shape our environment—to build a house, cut a tree, get in a car and go somewhere. That constant motion fosters growth and curiosity. Even children learn this way, through curiosity that risks harm. We want to avoid hurt while maximizing gain, but learning inevitably involves risk.

The irony is that humanity rarely learns from history, even within our own lifetimes. We know what we should avoid, and yet we repeat mistakes. We are forced into relationships—through our jobs and communities—with people we don’t like, who don’t share our values or histories. That tension forces us to reconsider what we hold as indelible truth.

I think that challenge is essential for humanity’s survival. But it has its pitfalls, and when we fall into them, it can be a long way down.

Donald: After Reinhard spoke, I asked ChatGPT about the Great Commission—the words of Christ himself. “Go.” Do not stay silent or stationary. Take the message outward. Make disciples, not just converts, but followers. Teach, baptize, invite people into public commitment to Christ, and help them live out what Jesus taught.

This is not a church invention; these are Christ’s words. They rest on two assurances: Jesus’ authority—“All authority has been given to me”—and Jesus’ presence—“I am with you always.” I’m looking at those words in light of our conversation this morning, and I think they matter.

C-J: I identify as a Christian, but I think the words you just read were very specific to a particular moment in history. The people hearing them believed this man—the one we refer to as the Christ—was the Messiah who was going to fix everything. He had already demonstrated that a shift was coming, a transition, and that they were empowered to be part of it by living in a certain way.

But they were living in a war zone—politically, economically, tribally. In that context, what Jesus was doing was not unlike what political leaders have done throughout history: telling people to stay together, be consistent in the narrative, protect one another, remember who you are, and understand that you are preparing for something beyond the present moment.

That theme runs throughout human history—people hiding in tunnels, storing food, preparing for trauma. But when we talk about our present moment, and what David is pointing to, this too shall pass. The dominion we live in, what we call reality, may not be where we should begin.

Instead, we might begin by standing still and being open to the divine presence everywhere—not just cognitively, but through the Spirit within us. That Spirit is with us always. 

When my inner life is balanced, I don’t have to work at faith. I become profoundly aware of what we call God—the Father, Jesus, the Spirit. It doesn’t stay inside boundaries. I don’t need to color inside the lines or impose limits. That may be the challenge for humanity.

The rest of creation—rocks, landscapes—doesn’t have this struggle because it isn’t sentient. What we are talking about is the capacity to see God in all things.

Carolyn: I hear much about a God-centered life, but if we leave out the cross and the extraordinary grace that comes with it, then I think we lose something essential.

When the Spirit allows us to share, we do have something to say, because not everyone knows about the cross—about how marvelous it is, and how profoundly it has changed our lives and humanity itself. That is something worth sharing.

Kiran: I’m thinking about faith in terms of stages. At a basic level, regardless of religion, people want safety, food, protection—those transactional needs. We pray, “God, give me this, give me that.” Once those needs are met, we start worrying about mistakes, guilt, and how to deal with sin.

This is where religions diverge. In Christianity, God pays the price for you. In Hinduism, you work out your own salvation. Then there’s a further stage, a kind of transcendence or mysticism, where you want to reflect God’s character, to be like Jesus, or simply to be with God. At that level, Hinduism and Christianity may look surprisingly similar.

When someone is struggling just to meet basic needs, reaching them with transcendence may not work. They’re focused on survival, not spiritual abstraction. So perhaps how we share faith depends on the stage a person is in. 

Bill: One of the Buddha’s teachings is that truth must always be examined. You should never take something at face value.

It’s like someone handing you a block and saying, “This is gold.” It feels heavy, so you assume it is. But unless you scrape it, melt it, drill into it, and examine it from every angle, you may not know what’s really there. There could be lead inside.

Truth is like that. It requires close examination and contemplation. Without that, we might believe something to be true when it isn’t.

Carolyn: The closer I get to the end of my life, the more I want to know what is true. I want to believe it. When I find myself immersed in something that feels true, it’s very hard for that not to spill over when someone asks, “How do you feel about the end of life?”

That doesn’t mean we should stop searching. The Lord can always show us new things. Above all, we need love in our hearts for all people, and our arms should be long enough to pull them in. It should not just be our words, but the Holy Spirit in our lives, doing the sharing.

David: In light of what Bill just said, he might find interesting that one of Dr. Weaver’s central themes—he’s been saying it in this class for decades—is that the Bible is not a book of answers, but a book of questions.

That fits perfectly with the image of examining a block of gold. You dig into it by asking questions. The answers may or may not come, but by asking the questions, you learn a great deal. When the Buddha urges examination, and when Don Weaver says the Bible is a book of questions, they’re really saying the same thing.

Across the world, all human beings share the same spiritual intuitions. We just express them differently. I find that deeply encouraging.

Robin: You can see the continuity between people wrestling with these questions in the Old and New Testaments. Micah (6:8) says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good: to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” And Matthew (22) writes that when Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment, he says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind,” and that the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Don: That’s a good note to ponder as we separate.

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References

The following references were supplied by ChatGPT. I have not personally read them nor checked that they exist. Caveat lector. I do tend to believe, from my own slight knowledge of the four theologians mentioned, that the perspectives ascribed to them are probably correct or, if not, then they should be. 🙂 

1. Genesis Commentary

• Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972).
• Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982).
• Augustine: Disordered Love and Distorted Judgment

Claims supported:

• Post-Fall moral awareness without moral competence
• Confidence in judgment as a symptom of disorder

Primary sources

• Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), Book X.
• Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), Book XII.
• Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), Book XIV.

Secondary

6. Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
7. Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
8. Martin Luther: Simul Iustus et Peccator

Claims supported:

• Persistent fallibility of the believer
• Spirit reveals Christ, not moral certainty

Primary sources

8. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, in Luther’s Works, vol. 25, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972).
9. Martin Luther, The Heidelberg Disputation (1518), in Luther’s Works, vol. 31, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957).

Secondary

10. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966).
11. Karl Barth: Revelation as Event, Not Possession

Claims supported:

• Revelation cannot be transmitted as knowledge
• Witness points away from the self

Primary sources

11. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975).
12. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

Secondary

13. John Webster, Karl Barth (London: Continuum, 2000).
14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Action Under Uncertainty

Claims supported:

• Ethical action without moral certainty
• Faithfulness under risk

Primary sources

14. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Clifford J. Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).
15. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans. Reginald H. Fuller et al. (New York: Touchstone, 1997).

Secondary

16. Clifford J. Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).
17. Eastern Traditions: Practice Without Prescription

Buddhism

Claims supported:

• Non-transferability of enlightenment
• Modeling rather than persuasion

Primary sources

17. The Dhammapada, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2007).
18. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, trans. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995).

Secondary

19. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1959).

Daoism

Claims supported:

• Ineffability of ultimate reality
• Alignment over explanation

Primary source

20. Dao De Jing, chs. 1, 2, 56 , trans. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003).

Secondary

• Ames & Hall, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation (Ballantine, 2003)

7. Sensory Experience and Religious Ambiguity

Claims supported:

• Experience as companion, not criterion
• Danger of mistaking intensity for truth

Cross-tradition discussions

21. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), Lectures XVI–XVII.
22. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923).

8. Summary of Governing Theological Claim

Meta-claim supported by all above sources

Human beings are capable of moral awareness and religious encounter, but not of infallible judgment; therefore faith may be witnessed, but not possessed, transmitted, or enforced.