As You Like It

As much as I would like to think that my beliefs are a product of deep reflection on Scripture interfacing with my personal experience, guided by and rooted in the long traditions of the Church, and rigorously analyzed with my faculties of reason, the fact of the matter is that that's probably mostly window dressing.  The process I just outlined, using four elements: Scripture, Experience, Tradition and Reason is sometimes called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (Methodists rejoice).  I had to write my first Systematic Theology paper about it, and it has generally held up pretty well in the practical theology that one uses most in my line of work.  We were asked to rank them in order of importance and justify our rankings, my ranking then: Scripture, Tradition, Experience and Reason.
In brief, my definition was that Scripture is necessary as revelation of God's story, tradition was the long and sometimes difficult task of interpreting Scripture through the ages, experience was the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit in ones life, and reason was the means by which the other three were processed into something coherent.  Sounds pretty good right?  I also backed it up with all sorts of citations and was learning to inject a good amount of appropriate humility about tension and ambiguity and the mystery of God, I got an A on the paper.
But over the intervening years, I have come to realize that most of us come to believe what we believe by a much less methodical process, (apologies to Charles and John Wesley).  We believe what we want to believe, and no clever quadrilateral process will be able to change that, absent some rather stark smack upside the head.
I first encountered the most admirable admission of this reality in the New Testament and patristic classes I had with Dr. Dale Allison (name dropping, sorry).  Dr. Allison is a well known Biblical scholar, co author of the International Critical Commentary volumes on the Gospel according to Matthew, in other words he is about as serious an academic as you can get.  As Dr. Allison taught, he would outline several different possible interpretations of a text or positions in a theological debate, and after each one he would say either, "I don't like that," or "I like that," and then explain why.
It was there that I began to consider whether I "liked" the things I said I believed.  It was then that I started to admit that my own theology was much more shaped by experience than I had wanted to admit in my Introduction to Systematic Theology paper.  It was an intellectually freeing moment, and I am very glad that I learned it from Dale Allison, because in doing so, I learned that being guided by your heart does not mean turning off your brain.  In fact, it meant allowing your heart to challenge your brain to re-evaluate dogmatic positions the brain holds in order to maintain equilibrium.
You do realize of course that our commitment to the status quo is a survival mechanism.  If we constantly challenged the "way things are" our societies would descend into chaos.  If we didn't abide by conventions and learn from the experiences of the past, we would be utterly lost and unable to make any progress whatsoever.
But every once in while, perhaps we ought to stop and ask ourselves, "do you LIKE this?"
Do you like the fact that the world is run by violence and greed?
I'm not asking if you believe that it is or whether or not it's inevitable, or anything about the nature of sin.  I'm just asking if you like it.
Do you dislike it enough to try and change it?
Do you like the things you "believe?"
Do you like believing in an angry god?
Do you like believing that your enemies are going to get what's coming to them someday?
Do you like believing that your beliefs are going to be the dividing line between salvation and damnation?

If you like believing those things, you're probably going to keep it up, no matter what anyone tells you.  I found I didn't like believing those things any more.  It started with things like the rapture, and taking Genesis literally.  I found that believing those things put Scripture, which I still believe is important, at odds with Reason to a large extent, but also with Tradition and Experience as well, and I didn't LIKE that feeling.
So here's what I do like to believe, and have, perhaps not surprisingly found supported more than adequately by Scripture and Tradition:

1. God is not angry or wrathful, God is loving.  God loves us enough to want to show us how to live without hurting each other, but God also loves us enough to let us make mistakes and to help us learn from them.  Do our mistakes upset God, yes, just like I get upset when my kids disobey or do stupid things, but there's nothing they could do to make me want to utterly destroy them.  I like to believe that God is at least as loving as I am.
2. God is generous.  You might even say wasteful.  God does things like sunsets and flowers, over and over again.  Do we strictly need them to survive?  No, not so much, everything could be gray and uniform and probably a lot more efficient, but what about beauty?  If God, like the Prodigal's father and the vineyard owners of the parable, is forgiving and generous then we probably ought to prepare for the reality that he's going to be that way with everyone, not just the churchgoing folk.
3. Salvation is a relationship.  I don't like to see my relationship with a living God as a burden.  I admit sometimes it feels heavy, but it's a lot better than feeling alone in the universe, that's absolutely crushing.  I live out my relationship with God in a community of people, who teach me how to love as I should, not just people that I like or am attracted to, not just people who I agree with, but everyone.  The Church teaches me how to love my neighbor, and my enemy.  I get to practice on real people!  I like that, and that feels like being saved from selfishness and sin.
4. God will do NEW things.  God is going to show me new people, things and ideas to like, sort of like Facebook, but better (I suspect a lot of the things will also involve puppies, kittens and babies).  When I stopped worrying so much about how the old creation happened in a literal sense, I opened up to the wonderful reality of God's on going creativity and also to the real hope for a Creatio Nova, a New Creation.  When I stopped believing in a silly thing like the Rapture, the idea of Christ coming again sounded hopeful and joyful again.

I just realized I could go on and on about this.  Because it turns out when you like to believe, you can do it better.  Try it, I bet you like it.