I’ve been thinking about why I tend to talk about Christian faith in such strongly relational terms. I suspect it has something to do with where I locate the centre of faith. For me, faith is ultimately about a person: Jesus. It is about trusting him, giving myself to him, following him and learning to live in relationship with him. That doesn’t mean I think propositions are unimportant. What I believe about Jesus matters enormously. But I don’t think Christianity begins with getting a set of propositions right. It begins with encountering and responding to Jesus.
This becomes particularly interesting when I compare that with the way some Christians talk about faith. In more propositional approaches, faith can sometimes sound like believing certain things to be true: Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus died for our sins, Jesus was raised from the dead, and so on. The crucifixion and resurrection naturally become the centre of attention because they are the events that need to be believed and explained. Faith becomes, at least in part, assent to a particular account of what God has done.
I don’t reject any of those truths. I believe the crucifixion and resurrection are absolutely central to Christianity. What I question is whether they are best understood as the primary object of faith. There is a difference between believing that Jesus died and rose, and trusting Jesus himself. The first is a proposition about an event. The second is a relationship with a person. For me, the second is more fundamental.
That distinction also changes how I understand the cross. I don’t want to reduce the crucifixion to a theological mechanism that happened to Jesus. Jesus didn’t simply arrive at Good Friday to perform a transaction on our behalf. His death makes sense within the whole story of his life, teaching, confrontation with evil, resurrection, and promised return. The cross matters because of who Jesus is and what he is doing. It reveals something about God because it reveals Jesus.
I think this is one reason I’m less satisfied with approaches to Christianity that begin with the question, “What must I believe in order to be saved?” That question tends to push us towards a list of propositions. My instinct is to ask a slightly different question: “Whom am I trusting, and whom am I choosing to follow?” The answer is Jesus. From there, I want to understand what that means. Doctrine matters, but doctrine is helping me understand the person I have entrusted myself to.
There is an important danger on the other side, though. Relational faith cannot simply mean, “I have my own personal relationship with Jesus, so what I believe doesn’t matter.” We can easily project our own desires onto Jesus and call that relationship. That is why Scripture, theology, Christian community and the witness of the church matter. They help test whether the Jesus I think I am following is actually Jesus, rather than a Jesus I have created in my own image.
So I don’t see relational and propositional faith as mutually exclusive. I see them as having a different centre of gravity. Propositional faith asks, “What is true?” Relational faith asks, “Who is trustworthy?” Christianity needs both questions. But I think the second question comes first. I believe certain things because of the person I have come to trust, and those beliefs then deepen my understanding of that relationship.
This may also explain why I find the Gospels such a natural starting point for faith. They don’t initially present me with a systematic theology that I have to sign off on. They introduce me to Jesus. I encounter his teaching, his actions, his compassion, his challenges, his conflicts, his strange and unsettling claims, his death and his resurrection. I am invited to respond to him. Understanding comes along the way.
That seems closer to the way I actually experience faith. I don’t simply believe that Christianity is true and then decide that Jesus is worth following. I encounter Jesus, become persuaded that he is trustworthy, and then increasingly discover what it means to believe and live within the reality he reveals. Faith is therefore not simply believing about Jesus. It is believing in Jesus.
Perhaps this is why I tend to put Jesus himself at the centre of almost everything. When I think about Scripture, I want to know what it reveals about Jesus. When I think about doctrine, I want to ask whether it coheres with Jesus. When I think about ethics, I want to know what following Jesus looks like. When I think about the church, I want to know whether we are actually becoming a community that reflects Jesus. And when I encounter something outside Christianity that challenges my assumptions, I don’t want to protect my existing propositions at all costs. I want to bring the question back to Jesus and see what I discover.
For me, then, faith is not primarily a mental position I take towards a collection of Christian propositions. It is a relationship of trust and allegiance to Jesus that necessarily has intellectual content. I need to know who I am trusting and what he is calling me to believe and do. But the propositions don’t replace the person. They point me towards him.
Perhaps the simplest way I can put it is this: I don’t follow Jesus because I have first worked out the correct propositions about him. I believe the propositions because I have come to trust Jesus—and the more I trust him, the more I want to understand the truth about him.
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