Christian Faith

I believe that the starting point for my personal beliefs on the major doctrinal issues of the Christian faith is the Bible. The Bible--especially the New Testament--is significant because it explains and interprets the life, work, example, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In history, the New Testament had a mission that made Christianity universally significant to moral experience.

I believe that the nature of God is divine and all loving, as both the Creator of the world and its Providential protector. I believe that God is engaged with humanity, always encouraging us toward life and light, and that the greatest gift to humanity was Jesus Christ. God is also engaged with the universe, always encouraging it toward the movement that is an indicator of life.

I believe that sin is a condition of the human heart in which we turn away--deliberately or thoughtlessly--from God's goodness and protection and that its consequences are felt in our relationships with other people. Sin is self-defeating, however, because any advantage is short-term, and it cuts off the possibility of complete happiness.

I believe that Christianity could be nothing without Christ, who, in the person of the Son of God, vividly embodies the relationship of God to human life and the character of the relationship of Christians both to one another and to non-Christians. Christ is bound up with human experience, having partaken entirely of human experience and, through the Redemption, having supplied

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be controlled by mankind and toward ways of being that mankind can control. Whenever a rational attitude is at work, so is a consciousness of action and belief, and so is a tendency toward making social meaning out of human existence. That is explained by Weber's editors Gerth and Mills: The principle of rationalization is the most general element in Weber's philosophy of history. For the rise and fall of institutional structures, the ups and downs of classes, parties, and rulers implement the general drift of secular rationalization. In thinking of the change of human attitudes and mentalities that this process occasions, Weber liked to quote Friedrich Schiller's phrase, the "disenchantment of the world." The extent and direction of "rationalization" is thus measured negatively in terms of the degree to which magical elements of thought are displaced, or positively by the extent to which ideas gain in systematic coherence and naturalistic consistency (Gerth & Mills, 1946, p. 51). It may seem contradictory to refer to a sacral sense of the cosmos as a disenchantment with the world, but what is important to recognize is that a systematic application of the idea of the holy confers on human experience more rational faculty than, s

Category: Philosophy - C