On Matters of Faith
I often sit and read various church statements of faith. They vary depending on denomination, but all hold to a basic idea: their faith is grounded in a doctrine rooted in a deeply held spiritual understanding of life. Some testify to being Bible-based, others Apostolic, and still others locate their faith in the words of the church fathers. All churches – regardless of denomination or lack thereof—structure their foundational beliefs tightly around their statement of faith. It is so foundational that churches are more often called faith communities.
I am Episcopalian by tradition. I love the smells and bells. But I understand that those things are for me—tools that help me express my faith more fully within a community I have found a home in. It is not the right way of worship. It is a way of worship. And for those of us within the community, our traditions of incense and bells help bring our communal celebration alive.
I love Midnight Mass, with the nave so full of incense that eyes are tearing and inhalers are being emptied. And yet, if you ask any parishioner there, they will all say, “I think this year we may have had just enough incense.” There is a communal love of the tradition. And within these traditions – and every other tradition of the Episcopal Church – we carry our faith forward and openly display it in our weekly recitation of the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed during baptisms, weddings, and other events. These creeds state the foundational beliefs from which our faith is derived.
But after years of studying this topic, I have come to understand faith in a much simpler and far more profound way. For me, at the core level, faith is the ability to live in the uncertainty of life. From that flows my entire understanding of doctrine, scripture, community, and the nature of Jesus and the Divine.
Faith is not fact – because faith begins where certainty ends. When facts are treated as final answers rather than invitations into mystery, they do not strengthen faith; they replace it.
And yet, faith does not float unmoored from reality. It is grounded. There are numerous writers within the first century who speak of Jesus outside of what we now call the Bible – enough to establish that Jesus was a historical figure, that he taught, and that he was crucified. These facts do not negate faith; they make faith possible. They set the table, but they do not eat the meal.
What many call “strong faith” is often just fear that’s been armored. It needs absolutes because it cannot tolerate vulnerability. My faith does the opposite – it accepts vulnerability as the cost of being real.
Systems built on control do not want a living Jesus walking around – teaching, healing, and unsettling the rules. A dead Jesus can be contained. A living one cannot. This is why an obsession with blood often coexists with:
Indifference to present suffering
Comfort with state violence
Moralizing cruelty
Resistance to questioning
Because the cross, stripped from life, becomes a symbol that justifies suffering instead of confronting it.
Certainty requires no trust. It requires only agreement. Once everything is settled, faith has nothing left to do. It becomes maintenance. Policing. Defense. But uncertainty demands something much harder and more honest: presence without guarantees.
Uncertainty is honest faith because:
It admits finitude – you don’t pretend to see the whole.
It leaves room for correction – you expect to be taught by life.
It resists idolatry – you don’t confuse your understanding with God.
It keeps love primary – you choose a relationship over being right.
A weak faith clings to certainty because it cannot survive tension. An honest faith stays in the tension without turning cruel. Uncertainty isn’t the absence of faith. It’s the environment faith actually lives in.
There is a point at which fixation on the crucifixion stops being reverence and becomes repetition of violence – not consciously, not maliciously, but structurally. When a community centers its faith on blood, suffering, and payment, it risks internalizing the logic that violence is redemptive in itself. And once that logic takes root, it distorts everything downstream.
We see this most often in the visualizations of the persecuted Christian. I am not saying there is no actual persecution – but far too often the image is hijacked for nefarious reasons, knowingly or not. It creates a disconnect from the life of Jesus. And the life is where the danger really is:
The table fellowship
The refusal to shame
The disruption of purity systems
The challenge to religious authority
The insistence that love of neighbor reveals love of God
Those things threaten power. They threaten certainty. They threaten hierarchy.
The crucifixion, by contrast, can be made safe – because it’s over. It can be ritualized, aestheticized, turned into transactions. Blood can be theologized in a way that silences the voice that spoke before the nails.
A clear example of this inversion comes from an NPR interview in August 2023 with Evangelical theologian Russell Moore. Dr. Moore described pastors coming to him expressing concern that their parishioners were enraged by sermons they perceived as promoting “liberal ideas.” Those ideas turned out to be the Beatitudes – Jesus’s own words. The congregants wanted only the blood. They had turned Jesus into an escape mechanism hanging on a cross. His life and teachings were no longer important.
This inversion of the gospel message lies at the root of many problems within Christianity today. A fixation on the crucifixion at the expense of Jesus’s words distorts the message itself. There are some who, given the chance, would push the spear deeper so that more blood might wash over them. Their personal relationship is about them, not about community.
We now have megachurches with tens of thousands of members, and instead of a community of one body, they have a crowd of thousands. They put on armor, wrap razor wire around their Bibles, and wage war against principalities and powers – yet strangely, in this battle, the only injuries are inflicted on fellow humans who simply disagree.
Here is the truth they do not understand: truth that cannot be questioned cannot be trusted. They have trapped themselves so tightly within doctrine that they cannot examine it or look beyond it.
Yes, I have doctrines. Chief among them is this: I could be wrong. I must have faith in that uncertainty. Others that shape my beliefs include:
Love without conditions looks like danger – yet it is the only true love.
Humility looks like weakness; it is silent strength that does not need to brag.
God is larger than doctrine – mine or yours.
Love outranks law. Love forms law. Without love, law becomes condemnation.
Conscience matters. Why we act is just as important as how we act.
Lives matter more than systems. When the church sins – and it will – the person harmed matters more than the institution’s health.
Faith is more than individual. It is communal.
The moment absolutes move into identity, worth, punishment, destiny, or exclusion, they stop pointing toward God and begin policing the human soul. Love becomes conditional. Mystery becomes dangerous. Faith becomes something to perform rather than inhabit.
It is the difference between faith as shelter and faith as enclosure. One protects life. The other erodes it.
What I am really saying is this: a faith rooted in love, uncertainty, and questions will always feel threatening to systems built on control, certainty, and fear – not because it is aggressive, but because it cannot be absorbed.
The result of this incompatibility is often the accusation: “My faith is strong enough to be your demon.” I am not claiming malice. I am naming projection.
To systems that survive on absolutes, questions look like rebellion. Unregulated love looks ungodly. And the meek are not supposed to inherit a thing. So the system does what it always does: it demonizes what it cannot dominate. And thus I – and many others – become demons.
So for me, faith remains in the realm of uncertainty. Life is lived in uncertainty, and my faith must reflect that reality. This does not weaken faith. It directs my faith away from myself and toward God – exactly where faith should be anchored.
-Richard ©
I often sit and read various church statements of faith. They vary depending on denomination, but all hold to a basic idea: their faith is grounded in a doctrine rooted in a deeply held spiritual understanding of life. Some testify to being Bible-based, others Apostolic, and still others locate their faith in the words of the church fathers. All churches – regardless of denomination or lack thereof—structure their foundational beliefs tightly around their statement of faith. It is so foundational that churches are more often called faith communities.
I am Episcopalian by tradition. I love the smells and bells. But I understand that those things are for me—tools that help me express my faith more fully within a community I have found a home in. It is not the right way of worship. It is a way of worship. And for those of us within the community, our traditions of incense and bells help bring our communal celebration alive.
I love Midnight Mass, with the nave so full of incense that eyes are tearing and inhalers are being emptied. And yet, if you ask any parishioner there, they will all say, “I think this year we may have had just enough incense.” There is a communal love of the tradition. And within these traditions – and every other tradition of the Episcopal Church – we carry our faith forward and openly display it in our weekly recitation of the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed during baptisms, weddings, and other events. These creeds state the foundational beliefs from which our faith is derived.
But after years of studying this topic, I have come to understand faith in a much simpler and far more profound way. For me, at the core level, faith is the ability to live in the uncertainty of life. From that flows my entire understanding of doctrine, scripture, community, and the nature of Jesus and the Divine.
Faith is not fact – because faith begins where certainty ends. When facts are treated as final answers rather than invitations into mystery, they do not strengthen faith; they replace it.
And yet, faith does not float unmoored from reality. It is grounded. There are numerous writers within the first century who speak of Jesus outside of what we now call the Bible – enough to establish that Jesus was a historical figure, that he taught, and that he was crucified. These facts do not negate faith; they make faith possible. They set the table, but they do not eat the meal.
What many call “strong faith” is often just fear that’s been armored. It needs absolutes because it cannot tolerate vulnerability. My faith does the opposite – it accepts vulnerability as the cost of being real.
Systems built on control do not want a living Jesus walking around – teaching, healing, and unsettling the rules. A dead Jesus can be contained. A living one cannot. This is why an obsession with blood often coexists with:
Indifference to present suffering
Comfort with state violence
Moralizing cruelty
Resistance to questioning
Because the cross, stripped from life, becomes a symbol that justifies suffering instead of confronting it.
Certainty requires no trust. It requires only agreement. Once everything is settled, faith has nothing left to do. It becomes maintenance. Policing. Defense. But uncertainty demands something much harder and more honest: presence without guarantees.
Uncertainty is honest faith because:
It admits finitude – you don’t pretend to see the whole.
It leaves room for correction – you expect to be taught by life.
It resists idolatry – you don’t confuse your understanding with God.
It keeps love primary – you choose a relationship over being right.
A weak faith clings to certainty because it cannot survive tension. An honest faith stays in the tension without turning cruel. Uncertainty isn’t the absence of faith. It’s the environment faith actually lives in.
There is a point at which fixation on the crucifixion stops being reverence and becomes repetition of violence – not consciously, not maliciously, but structurally. When a community centers its faith on blood, suffering, and payment, it risks internalizing the logic that violence is redemptive in itself. And once that logic takes root, it distorts everything downstream.
We see this most often in the visualizations of the persecuted Christian. I am not saying there is no actual persecution – but far too often the image is hijacked for nefarious reasons, knowingly or not. It creates a disconnect from the life of Jesus. And the life is where the danger really is:
The table fellowship
The refusal to shame
The disruption of purity systems
The challenge to religious authority
The insistence that love of neighbor reveals love of God
Those things threaten power. They threaten certainty. They threaten hierarchy.
The crucifixion, by contrast, can be made safe – because it’s over. It can be ritualized, aestheticized, turned into transactions. Blood can be theologized in a way that silences the voice that spoke before the nails.
A clear example of this inversion comes from an NPR interview in August 2023 with Evangelical theologian Russell Moore. Dr. Moore described pastors coming to him expressing concern that their parishioners were enraged by sermons they perceived as promoting “liberal ideas.” Those ideas turned out to be the Beatitudes – Jesus’s own words. The congregants wanted only the blood. They had turned Jesus into an escape mechanism hanging on a cross. His life and teachings were no longer important.
This inversion of the gospel message lies at the root of many problems within Christianity today. A fixation on the crucifixion at the expense of Jesus’s words distorts the message itself. There are some who, given the chance, would push the spear deeper so that more blood might wash over them. Their personal relationship is about them, not about community.
We now have megachurches with tens of thousands of members, and instead of a community of one body, they have a crowd of thousands. They put on armor, wrap razor wire around their Bibles, and wage war against principalities and powers – yet strangely, in this battle, the only injuries are inflicted on fellow humans who simply disagree.
Here is the truth they do not understand: truth that cannot be questioned cannot be trusted. They have trapped themselves so tightly within doctrine that they cannot examine it or look beyond it.
Yes, I have doctrines. Chief among them is this: I could be wrong. I must have faith in that uncertainty. Others that shape my beliefs include:
Love without conditions looks like danger – yet it is the only true love.
Humility looks like weakness; it is silent strength that does not need to brag.
God is larger than doctrine – mine or yours.
Love outranks law. Love forms law. Without love, law becomes condemnation.
Conscience matters. Why we act is just as important as how we act.
Lives matter more than systems. When the church sins – and it will – the person harmed matters more than the institution’s health.
Faith is more than individual. It is communal.
The moment absolutes move into identity, worth, punishment, destiny, or exclusion, they stop pointing toward God and begin policing the human soul. Love becomes conditional. Mystery becomes dangerous. Faith becomes something to perform rather than inhabit.
It is the difference between faith as shelter and faith as enclosure. One protects life. The other erodes it.
What I am really saying is this: a faith rooted in love, uncertainty, and questions will always feel threatening to systems built on control, certainty, and fear – not because it is aggressive, but because it cannot be absorbed.
The result of this incompatibility is often the accusation: “My faith is strong enough to be your demon.” I am not claiming malice. I am naming projection.
To systems that survive on absolutes, questions look like rebellion. Unregulated love looks ungodly. And the meek are not supposed to inherit a thing. So the system does what it always does: it demonizes what it cannot dominate. And thus I – and many others – become demons.
So for me, faith remains in the realm of uncertainty. Life is lived in uncertainty, and my faith must reflect that reality. This does not weaken faith. It directs my faith away from myself and toward God – exactly where faith should be anchored.
-Richard ©
On Matters of Faith
I often sit and read various church statements of faith. They vary depending on denomination, but all hold to a basic idea: their faith is grounded in a doctrine rooted in a deeply held spiritual understanding of life. Some testify to being Bible-based, others Apostolic, and still others locate their faith in the words of the church fathers. All churches – regardless of denomination or lack thereof—structure their foundational beliefs tightly around their statement of faith. It is so foundational that churches are more often called faith communities.
I am Episcopalian by tradition. I love the smells and bells. But I understand that those things are for me—tools that help me express my faith more fully within a community I have found a home in. It is not the right way of worship. It is a way of worship. And for those of us within the community, our traditions of incense and bells help bring our communal celebration alive.
I love Midnight Mass, with the nave so full of incense that eyes are tearing and inhalers are being emptied. And yet, if you ask any parishioner there, they will all say, “I think this year we may have had just enough incense.” There is a communal love of the tradition. And within these traditions – and every other tradition of the Episcopal Church – we carry our faith forward and openly display it in our weekly recitation of the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed during baptisms, weddings, and other events. These creeds state the foundational beliefs from which our faith is derived.
But after years of studying this topic, I have come to understand faith in a much simpler and far more profound way. For me, at the core level, faith is the ability to live in the uncertainty of life. From that flows my entire understanding of doctrine, scripture, community, and the nature of Jesus and the Divine.
Faith is not fact – because faith begins where certainty ends. When facts are treated as final answers rather than invitations into mystery, they do not strengthen faith; they replace it.
And yet, faith does not float unmoored from reality. It is grounded. There are numerous writers within the first century who speak of Jesus outside of what we now call the Bible – enough to establish that Jesus was a historical figure, that he taught, and that he was crucified. These facts do not negate faith; they make faith possible. They set the table, but they do not eat the meal.
What many call “strong faith” is often just fear that’s been armored. It needs absolutes because it cannot tolerate vulnerability. My faith does the opposite – it accepts vulnerability as the cost of being real.
Systems built on control do not want a living Jesus walking around – teaching, healing, and unsettling the rules. A dead Jesus can be contained. A living one cannot. This is why an obsession with blood often coexists with:
Indifference to present suffering
Comfort with state violence
Moralizing cruelty
Resistance to questioning
Because the cross, stripped from life, becomes a symbol that justifies suffering instead of confronting it.
Certainty requires no trust. It requires only agreement. Once everything is settled, faith has nothing left to do. It becomes maintenance. Policing. Defense. But uncertainty demands something much harder and more honest: presence without guarantees.
Uncertainty is honest faith because:
It admits finitude – you don’t pretend to see the whole.
It leaves room for correction – you expect to be taught by life.
It resists idolatry – you don’t confuse your understanding with God.
It keeps love primary – you choose a relationship over being right.
A weak faith clings to certainty because it cannot survive tension. An honest faith stays in the tension without turning cruel. Uncertainty isn’t the absence of faith. It’s the environment faith actually lives in.
There is a point at which fixation on the crucifixion stops being reverence and becomes repetition of violence – not consciously, not maliciously, but structurally. When a community centers its faith on blood, suffering, and payment, it risks internalizing the logic that violence is redemptive in itself. And once that logic takes root, it distorts everything downstream.
We see this most often in the visualizations of the persecuted Christian. I am not saying there is no actual persecution – but far too often the image is hijacked for nefarious reasons, knowingly or not. It creates a disconnect from the life of Jesus. And the life is where the danger really is:
The table fellowship
The refusal to shame
The disruption of purity systems
The challenge to religious authority
The insistence that love of neighbor reveals love of God
Those things threaten power. They threaten certainty. They threaten hierarchy.
The crucifixion, by contrast, can be made safe – because it’s over. It can be ritualized, aestheticized, turned into transactions. Blood can be theologized in a way that silences the voice that spoke before the nails.
A clear example of this inversion comes from an NPR interview in August 2023 with Evangelical theologian Russell Moore. Dr. Moore described pastors coming to him expressing concern that their parishioners were enraged by sermons they perceived as promoting “liberal ideas.” Those ideas turned out to be the Beatitudes – Jesus’s own words. The congregants wanted only the blood. They had turned Jesus into an escape mechanism hanging on a cross. His life and teachings were no longer important.
This inversion of the gospel message lies at the root of many problems within Christianity today. A fixation on the crucifixion at the expense of Jesus’s words distorts the message itself. There are some who, given the chance, would push the spear deeper so that more blood might wash over them. Their personal relationship is about them, not about community.
We now have megachurches with tens of thousands of members, and instead of a community of one body, they have a crowd of thousands. They put on armor, wrap razor wire around their Bibles, and wage war against principalities and powers – yet strangely, in this battle, the only injuries are inflicted on fellow humans who simply disagree.
Here is the truth they do not understand: truth that cannot be questioned cannot be trusted. They have trapped themselves so tightly within doctrine that they cannot examine it or look beyond it.
Yes, I have doctrines. Chief among them is this: I could be wrong. I must have faith in that uncertainty. Others that shape my beliefs include:
Love without conditions looks like danger – yet it is the only true love.
Humility looks like weakness; it is silent strength that does not need to brag.
God is larger than doctrine – mine or yours.
Love outranks law. Love forms law. Without love, law becomes condemnation.
Conscience matters. Why we act is just as important as how we act.
Lives matter more than systems. When the church sins – and it will – the person harmed matters more than the institution’s health.
Faith is more than individual. It is communal.
The moment absolutes move into identity, worth, punishment, destiny, or exclusion, they stop pointing toward God and begin policing the human soul. Love becomes conditional. Mystery becomes dangerous. Faith becomes something to perform rather than inhabit.
It is the difference between faith as shelter and faith as enclosure. One protects life. The other erodes it.
What I am really saying is this: a faith rooted in love, uncertainty, and questions will always feel threatening to systems built on control, certainty, and fear – not because it is aggressive, but because it cannot be absorbed.
The result of this incompatibility is often the accusation: “My faith is strong enough to be your demon.” I am not claiming malice. I am naming projection.
To systems that survive on absolutes, questions look like rebellion. Unregulated love looks ungodly. And the meek are not supposed to inherit a thing. So the system does what it always does: it demonizes what it cannot dominate. And thus I – and many others – become demons.
So for me, faith remains in the realm of uncertainty. Life is lived in uncertainty, and my faith must reflect that reality. This does not weaken faith. It directs my faith away from myself and toward God – exactly where faith should be anchored.
-Richard ©
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