The Call :: Essays Papers

The Call Touching Christ Jesus’ initial call is not to believe, but to come. The disciples have no answers when they leave their families and their occupations, merely a person and a promise. Faith, therefore, is not professing a certain checklist of dogma or signing a statement (as schools like Wheaton require for entrance). As James May put so eloquently in his fall chapel talk, the person of faith, as demonstrated by the woman with hemorrhaging in Mark 5:25-34 dares to touch Christ amidst the masses swirling around him. It was in the doing that she encounters Jesus, and he responds: â€Å"Your faith has made you well.† Therefore, I agree with Stassen and Gushee, who challenge,â€Å"[T]here is not authentic Christianity, discipleship or Christian ethics apart from doing the deeds he taught his followers to do† (S&G 486). Faith does not require an action; it is an action. So how do we touch a Christ who is no longer physically present with us, especially when clouds of opinion about him swirl around us? As the disciples were asked to trust the promise that Jesus would recreate their identities as â€Å"fishers of men,† we must begin our journey of discipleship by examining what promises we have been given as God’s people. The Word of God Certainly, most Christians would agree that these are most readily found in the Bible. But as I have been challenged more recently, and as Stassen and Gushee articulate, â€Å"It is not possible in principle to set limits on where God’s truth might be discovered, and thus to place some ultimate outer boundary on the ‘sources of authority’ for Christian ethics† (S&G 90). While I think Stassen and Gushee make some bold claims about the Bible being the â€Å"sun around which all other sources of authority are to orbit† (isn’t Jesus the Son around which all authorities are brought into proper order (Philippians 2.5-11)?), they do emphasize the balance of seeing God’s Word as neither an ancient, irrelevant relic nor an answer-book for all present-day circumstances. To practice Christian ethics, then, Christianity must understand the Bible as only one means of revelation, and a means that requires constant scrutiny and guidance to understan d if we’re really hearing the fullness of God’s Word within its complex pages. Thus, Christians can understand that the promises of God are neither restricted to the Bible (where would the illiterate of the world be?