The Trouble with Faith Statements
I want to unpack a concept that I left a bit hazy in my last blog where I said: “ So if you ask me if I "accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior", I simply can’t give a yes/no answer. Not because I’m being evasive, but because I respect definitions too much to pretend that my definitions for those words perfectly match yours…” Most Christians I know would say that this is ridiculous. They think that the idea of “accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior” has a very simple and obvious meaning, so not being able to answer it must mean that I’m being purposefully obtuse or deceitful or have simply “fallen away from the faith”. The main point of that blog was to point out that theological words and concepts are necessarily metaphorical, and thus cannot contain Truth in and of themselves. You cannot say that the statement “Jesus is God” is True, because the word “God” has so many conceptual supporting words (such as Perfect, Omniscient, Loving, Just, etc) all of which have the...