[personal history omitted]
I want to live in a Christian community. I think about this much. I would like someday to belong to a committed ecumenical Christian community. Within that community I would like to be part of a group of men who share a common life of prayer and devotion and who seek to serve God by applying his care to the world around them.
I am a Christian. My home church is part of a fellowship in the Plymouth Brethren tradition. Much of my extended family belongs to this group. Here in Madison I go to Geneva Campus Church.
The Nicene Creed summarizes my beliefs. My attempt to unfold some of the meaning of Scripture and the Creed follows.
I believe that the source of everything is a rational, personal being we call God. God is primal, great, and good. His existence is independent of His creation.
I believe that God created the universe to be the domain in which He demonstrates and exercises His attributes. The created universe demonstrates the glory of God's nature in three ways: (1) representationally, as a sort of hierarchy or system of icons whose ultimate referent is their Creator, (2) by providing evidence of God's thoughtful design, and (3) by being the place where God manifests His activity and presence.
It was God's eternal purpose to be fully imaged and manifestly present in His creation. God created men and women in His image, the unique creatures which can fully reflect His personal nature.
I believe that God gave people the ability to accept Him or reject Him. Because we have chosen to do what is contrary to God, we are by nature separated from Him, and the whole creation which He has put under our care experiences this separation and the disorder and suffering that results.
God responded to our sin not by discarding His broken creation, but by fully investing Himself in it. In the person of His Son, He permanently assumed a human body, thereby binding Himself irrevocably to the Creation and committing Himself to its complete sanctification.
God sent His Son Jesus, the incarnate, uncreated, and perfect image of God, to die for our sins and reconcile us to God. Those who receive Him are cleansed from sin and in fact become participators with God in redeeming the world.
God waited for His redemptive response to fully reveal Himself in creation. Jesus reveals in human flesh that God is a unity of three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The distinctive characteristics of the persons of the Trinity are revealed in the relationships among them. Jesus' incarnation made it possible for us to become "caught up" in the Trinity by participating as physical and spiritual beings in their relationships. As the Son is begotten of the Father, so we become begotten of God and call Him Father. As the Son is the image of God, so we are being conformed to the image of Christ. As the Spirit expresses God's presence, love, relatedness, and unity, so the Spirit dwelling within us unites us in communion with God. It is God's eternal purpose to form a people who dwell in unity with the Triune God in the creation in which God has placed us as mediators of His presence and care. By His incarnation Jesus makes the Church able to participate in the mystery of the life of the Trinity.
The life history of a person whom God saves is patterned after the life history of Christ, and is like a picture of the history of the Creation. Our regeneration is analogous to the coming of Christ to redeem the world. We still struggle with sin and suffering and ultimately suffer bodily decay and death, but expect to share in Christ's resurrection at the time of judgment, and ultimately to enjoy communion with God. Similarly, the Creation is groaning and decaying under the consequences of sin and suffering, even though the kingdom of God has entered through Christ. Ultimately the creation will experience a kind of death and resurrection. The form of this world will pass away, the creation will be reconstituted, and God will dwell with His people and be manifestly present in creation. This will happen when Jesus, who is the firstfruits of the resurrection and the firstborn and the Lord of all creation, returns to judge the world and to purge and reclaim from Satan's cohorts the creation which He repurchased by His blood.
It is our ultimate hope as Christians to dwell with God in resurrected bodies in a reconstituted creation, in which His kingdom has fully come and where Jesus is present in His physical body in the midst of the Church, which is also His body.
The world's problems are so interwoven that it is hard to restrict myself to one problem. I was impressed by this when I attended the conference about the response of the church to HIV/AIDS. One issue I care deeply about is sexual love. I believe that God created the marriage of a man and a woman to be an image of the mystical love relationship between God and [humanity] that God created us for.
I believe that a Christian ethical response to world problems begins with a basic understanding of what God is doing in the world through history.
But I am choosing to write about the human destruction of the earth and its ecosystems. I believe that this is due primarily to selfish use of the earth's resources.
[details omitted]
God created man in His image and put him in the garden to take care of it. We still have this responsibility to serve God by extending His care to the world in which He has placed us. We invite God to treat us as we treat what He has put under our care and what he has permitted to come under our power. We are eternal creatures, and so the way we treat God's creation has eternal consequences.
God is in control. Mostly he chooses to work through frail and flawed human beings rather than by simple fiat. This introduces a moral dimension into the world. We are called to battle with God, trusting in His direction and ultimate control.
Most of us have control only over a tiny part of creation. We are responsible to be faithful over what we affect. I believe that we are each responsible before God to try to live in a way so that if more people lived the way we live, the creation would be more healthy and people's needs would be better cared for. This requires both refraining from harming the creation and expending positive energy to protect and restore it.
To address the problem of wastefulness and destruction it is critical to address the root problems of selfishness and carelessness. Philosophies that proclaim that life is about gratification and self-fulfillment need to be challenged. Justifications for unconcern about the plights of others need to be exposed at their moral roots.
We can also address problems by building models of right ways of living. Christian community is in fact one way in which we can model what it means to live in right relationship to God, one another, and the creation.
God has given people a diversity of gifts for the building of human society. I believe that the Church is to be the archetype of what God created human society to be, and Christian communities can demonstrate the love and the unity in diversity that the Church exists to bring about.
Other people have indicated to me that one gift I have is an ability to think and contribute to conversation, especially one-on-one or in a focused discussion. I have strong passions to know God, to understand the world, and to live rightly. Studying math has helped me develop habits of careful thinking, precise communication, and understanding the structure of other people's ideas whether or not I share their presuppositions or frame of view.
I handle differences of opinion by bridling my impulses to assert my own opinion, by trying to understand why other people think what they think, and by trying to explain my own thinking.
Some behaviors I try to avoid are:
Principles of conflict resolution that I try to follow are to acknowledge authority, to try to reason, and to clearly define choices and consequences.