The Faith Between Us by Scott Korb

Author:Scott Korb
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596919884
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul famously says that as children we speak and understand as children, implying, of course, that there is a better, fuller way for adults to be. In other words, there is a time to put away childish things.

Yes, it's true that in the Gospels Jesus welcomes children to him, as children, and claims for them the kingdom of God, even identifying the simplicity and the purity of a child to be a kind of key. Speaking with Peter's son, Sam, on the phone once a week—always a story about what he ate with his dad or the games he played with his friends in the park down the block—is a good reminder that kids can, in their own way, know the sacredness of life: in this case, food, parents, and friends. Yet since in the same stories Jesus is never consistent in describing where the kingdom is or when it will come, and as a Christian I've chosen to take most seriously his many pronouncements that God's kingdom is here, to me these claims on the world, here and now, made for the sake of children, sound very familiar. They come not just from Jesus, but also from the mouths of economists, educators, and environmentalists alike, from the president of every senior class to every president of the United States: The world belongs to our children. And while we appreciate that children come into this world in all their simplicity—finding it everything from comic to beautiful—we discourage adolescent thumb sucking, teenage baby talk, and twenty-something make-believe friends. As September n demonstrates—for me, perhaps more clearly than any other moment—the world we've claimed for our children is far more complicated than most of us even know. And if we know this world as God's kingdom, or better, God's creation, childish approaches to faith and simple, say, unilateral, solutions to world problems just will not suffice. Yet even so, it's rare that religious people, as such, ever actually encourage each other to grow up. Growing up, I never was.

This is perhaps easiest to see among those who take the Bible at its literal word, or in communities—like the one in which I was raised—where being religious involves mostly recitation in church, where a dull yet adamant minister attempts to get his congregation to sit still while he instills the fear of what God the Father might do to us when he gets home—or, as I might have put it back then, when we go home to the Father. And as much as it means that we should put away the childish reading habits that have turned Genesis into a science textbook and the Gospels into an honest-to-God history lesson, growing up religiously depends on something more, on establishing homes of our own, say, and having faithful adult relationships, beyond the reach of what is commonly known as sacred, with friends as much as with lovers. This is the religion we should be teaching our

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