My Own Theological Trajectory of Understanding Jesus
Including an excerpt from my chapter on Jesus from, "The SHIFT."
We All Have Changing Views on Jesus
Believe it or not, I’m trying to be better at Christianity.
Not because it’s a works-based-religion or anything like that. No, that’s not the conversation I’m interested in.
Rather, I’m interested in what it actually means (or ought mean) for a person to decide to be Christian. Such a choice should probably make a meaningful difference on your life, right?
So since I’m trying to be better at being Christian (aka, practicing Christianity), that means I’m therefore trying to be better at being a follower of Jesus.
And that leads me to efforts (especially recent efforts) of trying to understand more and more what it actually means, looks like, sounds like, and feels like to follow in the way of Jesus.
What started with a question of, “What does it mean to say you love Jesus,” has now evolved to larger questions about who Jesus is and was, and how that relates to the word/idea/name of “Christ.”
In fact, if you missed it, I recently published a few articles on this exact topic.
If you read them, I’m curious if and how it:
Reflected ideas that you used to posses, but no longer do;
Aligned with your existing thoughts and ideas about Jesus;
Presented ideas about Jesus that seem too far out there for you
But even if you didn’t read them, here’s a question for you:
Q: If you were to envision your Views-on-Jesus as an unfolding trajectory, do you know where you’ve been?
Where you are?
And where you might be heading?
Another way to put it:
You were not born with a particular belief about Jesus installed into your brain that then remains unaltered for your entire life.
You don’t have to think too hard about this in order to understand what I’m saying. Go ahead and consider what you used to believe about Jesus 30 years ago. Now go back ten years. Now think about right now.
Those are probably different, right?
For some of you it’s wildly different. Others perhaps it’s more subtle shades of gradation but still, the point remains: your Views-on-Jesus have been unfolding over time.
Which raises an interesting question…
Have you arrived?
Do you think that what you believe about Jesus today will ultimately be what you think about Jesus for the remainder of your life?
Possibly. Some people do go this route. They reach a certain belief about something and never really question it.
But if you’re a person who values an open mind, curiosity, and learning—and since you’re reading a newsletter titled, Perspective Shift, then that probably describes you fairly well—then odds that how you think about Jesus right now will be different than how you might in ten years.
How does that thought make you feel?
In 2020 I published my second book, The Shift, intending for it to be a survival guide for people leaving conservative/fundamental Christianity and moving toward a more open/progressive expression of Christianity.
I devoted several chapters to addressing some of the more significant theological questions people have when they make the shift, including:
What to do when the idea of God stops making sense
What to do with the Bible
What to do with your love/hate relationship with church
One of my favorite chapters, though, was Chapter 5: Believing (in?) Jesus—What to do with the question, “Who is Jesus?”
My main point was to suggest that it might be more important that we believe Jesus as opposed to believe in him. Meaning, much of religion (including Christianity) focuses on the importance of believing the right things. With regards to Jesus, this has often meant we must believe he is God-in-the-flesh, 2nd person the Trinity, literally rose from the dead, and so on.
And yet when I read the Gospels I don’t encounter someone who was hyper focused on correct belief. I encounter a Jesus who had invited people into a relationship with God (specifically the kind that he himself had) and modeled for them what that looked like.
If we want to talk about “belief” and “Jesus,” I think it’s more apropos to say that Jesus would hoped we believe him—which is to say, to trust him on matters such as:
love is the better way, that
forgiveness is better than revenge, that
mercy is greater than sacrifice, that
serving people is part of what it means to live a good life,
and so on.
In Chapter 5 I also did a brief outline of my own particular theological journey with Jesus, or what I called the “unfolding trajectory” up above. Below I’m going to share that portion of the chapter because it might be helpful to have someone (like me) describe what this unfolding has looked like in my life so that it can give you the freedom to do a similar thing for you and your life.
I’d love for you give this a read and then maybe consider reflecting on some of the shifts you’ve noticed in your life with regards to your views-on-Jesus. And, if you’re up for it, maybe share with us in the comment section?
(And, if you haven’t yet, I also invite you pick up a copy of The Shift. Either order from Amazon—where I earn $0, lol—or order directly from me and not only do I earn at least some money but I’ll sign it!)
Chapter 5: Believe (in?) Jesus
An excerpt.
On the heels of turning five, I decided the time had come. Moments after my dad tucked me in on the top bunk, I hollered his name back down the hall. He returned, flustered at what I must want now. I sprung to a sitting position and declared, “I’m ready to accept Jesus into my heart!”
Now, if this happened in my home today with any of my four boys, in addition to questioning where such an idea came from, I would assume they were pulling out yet one more card in their attempts to delay bedtime. Having already asked for a drink of water, a new and improved stuffed animal, and nighttime snug-snugs (our family’s term for snuggling), they now think they can put off sleep by appealing to some cosmic transaction involving the admittance of a dead Jewish guy’s ghost into their hearts. However, my dad—good fourth-generation Baptist that he was—delighted in such a delay. After all, five minutes of lost sleep is a small price to pay for escaping the flames of eternal torment. He flipped on the light and led me through a version of what we called the Sinner’s Prayer.
Not that it made sense to me as a five-year-old, but in my short time on Earth, I’d evidently heard enough Sunday school lessons to pick up on the importance of such a prayer. Thus began my journey with Jesus. Growing up, I identified as Christian because, in addition to praying the prayer at five years old, that’s how my white, American, middle-class parents raised me. If you would’ve asked me anytime between the ages of five and fifteen, “Who do you say Jesus is?,” I would’ve responded with something like, “He’s my personal savior.” At some point, I also learned that Jesus sat in the middle of this mysterious God triangle as the second person in the Trinity. So, not only was Jesus my personal savior, but I grew up learning that he was God, too.
The summer I turned seventeen, I tagged along on a trip to a conference in Southern California, unexpectedly altering the course of my life. The conference trained high schoolers to do street witnessing, and there on the sandy shores of Huntington Beach, while questioning surfers about the state of their souls, I discovered a desire (or “calling,” as I named it) for full-time ministry— transforming me from a nominal Christian to the oversaved version of myself I will discuss in detail in chapter 9. Jesus became the Lord of my life as I committed to follow his teachings and pledged to become a pastor.
Two years out of college, fresh with a degree in pastoral ministry and working as an associate worship pastor at a church in Salem, Oregon, I started reading books my Baptist college professors never would have included on their syllabi, thereby expanding my appreciation for Jesus beyond the limited scope of my familial heritage. I learned more about the central component of Jesus’s teaching, a.k.a. the kingdom of God. Up to that point, I believed the kingdom of God (or “of heaven,” as the Gospel of Matthew calls it) served as just another way to say “life after death.” But at twenty-four years old, I came to see how Jesus cared about life here and now, and that his prayer involved God’s will being done on Earth. Had you asked me then, “Who do you say that Jesus is?,” my response might have been, “He’s the inaugurator of the Kingdom.”
A few years later, Kate and I moved just outside Phoenix to join a young, fast-growing evangelical church where I added another layer to my answer for “Who is Jesus?” The lead pastor of our church saw everything through a lens of social justice, revealing to me for the first time how Jesus’s message focused on the margins of society. I learned how the kingdom prioritizes the forgotten and privileges the outcast, the littlest, the lost, and the least. As a collection of stories and poems from marginalized people, the Bible testifies to a God who stands on the side of the oppressed. So, as I approached my thirtieth birthday, I would’ve described Jesus as “the liberator of the oppressed.”
Fast-forward and, after getting fired from two churches in the span of two years,2 and with most of my conservative beliefs firmly deconstructed, my wife and I decided to start a new progressive Christian church in San Diego. Our community consisted of people with a wide range of religious backgrounds and beliefs. Had you asked me at thirty-two who I thought Jesus was, about the only thing I could’ve offered was, “Jesus is the embodiment of the Way.” I took this to mean that living like Jesus seemed to be the best way to live. I would talk about the life and teachings of Jesus as empowering people to come fully alive and experience all of what it means to be human. I would talk about forgiveness being better than revenge, of peace being better than war, of love being better than hate, and so on.
Today, should Jesus ask me “Who do you say that I am?,” I would answer much, much slower. Most days I might even go with “I don’t know.” Don’t misunderstand me—in the twenty years since I gave my life to the calling of ministry, I have not let up on the gas of seeking after God and learning about Jesus. It’s just that nowadays I know more about what I don’t know than about what I do. If pressed, I’d probably say Jesus is the illuminator of love, as gushy and esoteric as that sounds. Someone who shows us what unconditional and sacrificial love looks like. He very well may be more than that, but he is at least that for me.
When I take a step back and summarize the evolution of my journey with Jesus, an interesting shape emerges. You can trace my trajectory from a small, personalized perspective of Jesus as someone who exists solely for my benefit to something much larger and more universal. What began as a very granular and specific sense of Jesus’s identity grew over time to something nuanced, expansive, and inclusive. You could envision it like an upside-down funnel.
