Throughout my ministry I have received similar questions based on things I have said or written. Here is the gist:

“You talk about the importance of biblical scholarship, critical thinking, theological reflection, and the use of academic research and tools to have a vital and viable faith. Does this mean you don’t think a simple faith is possible, or that the faith of simpler people is invalid?”

Clear up front: yes, a simple faith is possible. My grandmother lived one of the least examined, purely simple Christian lives of anyone I know, and she was a great inspiration to me, helping me (for better or worse) become the person I am today. Her faith served her well, and it helped her to serve others. She loved God and Jesus, and the Good News Bible and she didn’t waste a lot of time or energy about the things she didn’t understand. But she cared about character, integrity, and basic truthfulness. Honesty, loyalty, hard work, and charity defined her faith. Ultimately, she understood Christian faith to be about how we treat one another, particularly the stranger and the marginalized.

Unfortunately, she was pastored by some of the most narrow-minded, judgmental, less educated and self-righteous Southern Baptist preachers I have ever met, and so she learned some incredibly unChristian Christianity over the years. She once lamented to me that “it is so hard to hate Catholics, though I know I am supposed to.” This she was told almost weekly in her church. She grew to be hardcore anti-Catholic. For me, the fault lay with the ignorance, hatred, and pettiness of her religious teachers who disdained scholarship, theology, history, and the authority of scripture to draft a blasphemous and destructive faith, not with my grandmother. I once tried to challenge one of her preachers with some John Calvin and John Wesley and was mocked as being in the clutches of Satan. Sigh.

My honest problem is with those who make it up as they go along, making scripture say whatever they want it to, cherry-picking pericopes to make their disingenuous anti-gospel points, and rejecting the very best knowledge, information, thinking, research, and interpretation because it doesn’t suit them. The good information is out there for anyone who wants it. The problem is that too many people calling themselves pastors could care less. So, yes, I believe among those of us called to teach and preach, we should commit ourselves to the very best scholarship, research, history, contextualization, and interpretation possible. Those who are growing in the faith should be able to trust those who shepherd, guide, counsel, and teach and hold them accountable to the very highest standards.

Word trivia (and a bridge between good faith and simple faith). Veracity. Literally, the stem of truth, or the true pathway. It is the Latin derivation of the Greek alitheia (truth) from filalitheia (love of truth), the Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew words ’emet (אֱמֶת – firmness, solidity) and ’emunah (אֱמוּנָה – faithfulness, integrity). What got lost in translation after translation is that none of these terms about truth focused on information but on relationships. Truth and telling the truth are not the same thing. The primitive understanding of the Latin vērācitās was “to stand up for the truth of one another.” From the Christian perspective, it meant to see and acknowledge the God, the face of Christ, the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, in every individual – even those with whom you disagreed and judged. Yikes! Lying to someone, lying about someone, gossiping, insulting another was showing disdain and disrespect to God! And God was not amused! God makes us the way God wants us and it isn’t up to us to judge each other, but to teach each other.

This gets to what James means when he writes that “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will face stricter judgment.” (3:1) If teachers do not commit to the highest form of veracity, honesty, truthfulness, informational integrity, and academic scholarship, we are all in big trouble. So, even a simple faith should be fed by a stream of good information, truth, factual verification, defensible argument, historical accuracy, contextual exactitude, and scriptural interpretation. Teachers cannot just make this stuff up or proclaim personal bias as gospel truth.

We need both simple faith and incisive and comprehensive scholarship. We need bridge builders who can take complex, convoluted, and conceptual conundrum and make it as clearly and easily accessible as possible. But no one should be judged or condemned for a simple faith, as long as it is not harmful, destructive, hateful, or denies “the truth of one another.”