Faith Tests

Once I said something—a small, off-handed comment—that made a friend of mine think that perhaps I wasn’t “saved.” A few years later, a professor at Fuller Seminary wanted to check to see why I wasn’t “where the other students were” when it came to matters of faith. Failing other peoples’ faith tests has been a reoccurring event in my adult life.

That ought to mean I condemn faith tests, and yet I find the practice useful and employ mine constantly. My faith test has one question (and it’s not “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?”):

Have you ever realized the Bible or your church was wrong and chosen to believe in a good and loving God of justice anyway?

Follow-ups might include, have you ever been deeply disturbed by the Bible or made an outcast in your church? Have you ever found Jesus outside of the church and chosen to follow that Christ (no matter what she looked like) instead of the one preached from the pulpit?

The Bible lets me down almost daily. Today’s passage was from Genesis 8 and 9 after God destroys his own creation and then preserves it again through Noah and his family. He invites the family and all the living beings on the boat onto dry land. “Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: “ . . . I establish my covenant with you.”

God spoke to the men in the group and blatantly ignored the four women—four of the eight humans reportedly alive in the story. Why? Where are the women? Did God simply turn away from them and to the men? Personally, I picture the unnamed wives doing the actual work of the operation while the men took a smoke break and chatted covenants. But surely God should have bothered to include them in the covenant, right?

The short answer is, God did but the men who wrote and codified those texts didn’t realize it. The longer answer is context is important, the mere mention of the wives at all in a text so old indicates their radical inclusion in the salvific work God was inviting Noah’s family into. But Christians who read a story that indicates God only speaks to men and promises things to men must reject statements like “the Bible says it, so that’s good enough for me.” 

The fact that I fail many Christians’ faith tests is no surprise to me, since many “Christians” fail mine. So much so that I’ve decided it’s not a test of faith so much as a test of denomination. More precisely, it’s a diagnostic for understanding what someone means when they claim Christianity as their religion.

Which diagnostics we each use are important (and fascinating), but more important is how we react to others’ tests results. Fear and condemnation are not ideal. But neither is a shrug and the easy response, “You do you.” How should we respond when we discover someone else is the “wrong” kind of Christian? What are the next steps after the diagnostic test? What happens to the body of Christ when one member decides that the other member is diseased and needs to be amputated?

(What are your faith tests? How do you determine if someone is a kindred spirit in matters of spiritual importance?)