Christianity - a progressive faith, part 2

Members of the Progressive Christian Network express their beliefs in a series of 8 points

We are people who

1. Seek God, however understood, guided by the life and teachings of Jesus 
2. Affirm that there are many ways to experience the Sacred and that we can draw on diverse sources of wisdom on our spiritual journeys.
3. Recognise that following Jesus leads us to act with compassion and to confront evil.
4. Place hospitality at the centre of our communal and worshipping life and see the sharing of bread and wine as an expression of our common humanity.
5. Seek to build communities that accept all who wish to share companionship without insisting on conformity.
6. Know that the way we behave towards others is the fullest expression of our faith.
7. Gain more insights in the search for understanding than we do in certainty.
8. Work together within and beyond the Church to achieve a just, peaceful and sustainable world.

In this second blog I want explore the first point 'We are people who seek God, however understood, guided by the life and teaching of Jesus.'

Like Christians of all traditions we are searching for God but we each have our own concept of who God is. To the early Jewish people God was so awesome that he could not be named, he was YAHWEH,  'I am who I am',  and no human being could look on him. He could control his world and all that happened was of his making and nothing happened if he did not will it. It was a primitive faith and preceded  an understanding of God which developed following advances in th fields of science iand psychology.

Today, there is a need in each one of us for something which takes us beyond the material world, if you like we are searching for the Kingdom of God where we find the resources to live in the Kingdom of this world. The Kingdom of God is not a separate place but is found in the world whereever we see God at work. Where we see a Kingdom there must also be a King and God's Kingdom is where we will find him. Our search for God, therefore, is also a search for the Kingdom of God, which canb be found within us and all around us. That search will be a lifelong search and will lead us along different paths as we seek the One who is beyond time and space.

Christians are accompanied on their journey by Jesus, by his life and teaching. We find his story in the bible, but in the bible Jesus is presented in two ways.  The Gospels and the letters of Paul and others build a picture of Jesus which is part history and part metaphor. Both lead to the truth about Jesus because, in the words of a Native American story teller,  'I don't know if it happened this way or not, but I know  the story is true.'

When we were children we heard the Christmas stories as literally true but as we matured we began to see them through a different lens, the lens of metaphor. Once we understand them principally as metaphor, we can once again believe them as real in the sense that they record the experience of the writers and of the story tellers who passed  on the stories through generations.  Then we can say, with TS Eliot:

The end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.