Faith as Allegiance

6 considerations:   1.  Faith is Allegiance

Today, we are all deeply implicated in a culture and tradition of intellectual faith. Not just from one or other side of ethical and moral debate. We all are part of it. To read, reflect on, deliberate and come to a deeper appreciation of the Scriptures, let alone other literature, is writ large in our history; and society has benefitted from it, right back to when the ‘three R’s’ were first taught to children in our schools.

But it’s a problem when ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ come to be treated as synonyms. When a response to the explosive revelation of light, life and love, injected into the heart of the Cosmos in and through Jesus Christ, comes to reside in mind more fully than in heart, body and soul. When the viability of faith is reduced to the stage of sterile apologetics and detached dogma.

An over-emphasis on intellectual reflection and validation crosses into even more dangerous territory when it is married to an autonomous individualism: when the preferences, propensities and passions of self become the centre of an intellectual process which is unaccountable to the scrutiny of society, constituted as people who are interdependent persons. Where the gods of individualism and self-determination takes centre stage.

Take these two together, the tyranny of a sterile intellectualism and a strident individualism, and we concoct a curious cocktail, one that is often sipped prior to engagement in ethical reflection. This is far from the baptist way, where communal discussion and discernment is called for, to combat the madness of the megalomaniac genius or the deranged, false prophet. The baptist way is one where there is real debate and the opportunity to listen and sense the heart, body and soul of Christ’s humanity expressed among us, resonating in and through the collective attention and consciousness of God’s integral mission, expressed through an integrated, Christ centred discourse as church together.

For such a process to work, we have to grasp the nature of faith as allegiance. Belief and faith are not, in the language of expression found the Holy Bible, synonyms. Faith is something that belongs to far more than to a mind separated from heart, soul and body. Faith is the expression of the life of Jesus Christ found within and among us: it is the desire to participate in His presence, purposes and power. It is an integral belonging that leads us into owning ethical imperatives, inseparable from the pleasure and preferences of our God. Faith arises as the character of the community God in Christ calls to be His own, a window into His goodness and glory. Faith is displayed in the humanity of Jesus Christ’s disciples gathered together.

Faith is allegiance to this God. This is no new idea. It is the essence, in the Old Testament, of Israel’s relationship to the Covenant Redeemer who calls Abram and his descendants on a path of obedience, marked by conformity to His ways. It is the relationship, in the New Testament, that Jesus builds with His disciples and that they learn to cultivate among one another. It was such an appreciation of faith, as allegiance to Jesus Christ, that led to the martyrdom of the first Christians who refused to express a higher allegiance to Caesar.

My sexuality and the way I employ it, as a baptist Christian, demands that I seek to express such an integral part of my being as an expression of this allegiance to Jesus Christ, in his aspirations, attitudes and actions. In a way that is consonant with the narrative of God’s commands to His people, patent in both Old and New Testament Scriptures. To act otherwise is to act outwith faith. What does such an understanding of faith require of us?

This perspective is the first that I would ask to be woven into conversation, as people explore ethical and moral issues. What is the pleasure of God, shown to and expected of the community of Israel and the early church? What was the attitude to a person’s sex and sexuality expected among the people of God, in Old and New Testament and in the early history of the church? Such questions are essential ones for those who follow the baptist way.

The second of these six, introductory essays, designed for Social Media, will follow in the New Year. In it, I will offer an introduction to the 2nd of 6 considerations I would invite you to weave into your discourses: the notion of ‘costly grace’. I pray, however, that this first, introductory essay will offer you opportunity to reflect and rejoice in God’s calling to you to live a life of allegiance, following the path of the Son of God who entered into our flesh, living a life of authentic allegiance to our Father and our God.