With Anselm of Canterbury, I believe so that I may understand—because I understand that that’s just how it works, for everybody, whether they know it or not. (This is part of the reason wrong belief is important: it produces wrong understanding.) As a candidate for ordination as a pastor in the Reformed Church in America, part of my task was to write a credo—a reasonably full statement of what I believe. I’ve posted the credo in ten parts which cover the following topics (among other things):
- Who is God?
- What is God like?
- The problem of evil
- Considering humanity
- The person and work of Jesus
- Relationship with God (or not)
- The Holy Spirit and the Bible
- The gifts of the Spirit
- The church and its mission
- The coming kingdom of God
For various reasons, I wrote this as a conversation between myself and someone I knew fairly well at the time, so the sections do flow into each other to some degree.
Just for fun, I also did word clouds of each of the ten sections; you can see those here.