“We affirm the importance of calling all persons to personal faith and faithful discipleship in following Jesus Christ.”

Yesterday I had a conversation with someone over the wording of this sentence taken from Shane Claiborne’s new monastic community website, The Simply Way. It was reproduced by Dr. Carl Ruby in a letter to the faculty and staff of Cedarville University to calm growing fears before his ill fated February 11 visit to campus. The specific sentence was suppose to reassure people of his commitment to historic Christianity.

For my friend, though, it created questions about that actual commitment. His problem was in the use of “following” in relationship to Jesus Christ, and especially faith. He wondered why a person or a community would affirm the importance of calling people to “personal faith…in following Jesus Christ,” rather than simply faith in Jesus Christ. Why would they call someone to faith in following, rather than simply belief in Jesus. While he didn’t want to be nit-picky and had neither read anything by Shane nor read the complete “statement of faith” on The Simple Way’s website, it did create red flags for him.

Those red flags relate to a broader concern with the emerging church conversations emphasis on doing or following over against believing. While he affirms our need as Christians to live out our faith and do what Jesus did, he fears that following and doing is largely at the expense of belief. And when the Emerging Church Trifecta (McLaren, Pagitt, and Jones) oftentimes do not come out and say they are in support of certain historically Christian Orthodox beliefs (like the resurrection) and even revise other ones (like hell), it reinforces those concerns. He wants to scream, “Don’t stop believing!”

I thought he was being nit-picky, however, and actually believe using the “following” language is better and stronger than simply leaving it at belief.

In his book The Hermeneutics of Doctrine , Anthony Thiselton says this of the notion of belief: Belief is a nailing of ones colors to the masts. Throughout the first 60 pages of his authoritative tomb on the communal process of doctrine, he speaks at length of this notion that belief is really not a belief until and unless it is incarnated, until one nails their colors to the mast of life by existentially living out their beliefs. He coins the term dispositional belief as the kind of belief we are called to as Christians.

Dispositional belief is action-oriented, situation-related, and embedded in the particularities and contingencies of everyday living. In viewing belief in this manner, we come to realize that “belief is a disposition to respond to situations both by expressing and by ‘standing behind’ belief utterances in situations that challenge, belief or that demand action appropriate to belief. Belief must be explicit, active, and public.” In fact, belief in Jesus can only truely be embodied. “The living out of faith, thought, and discipleship takes the form of visible, tangible, practical, bodily modes of existence; a disposition, habit and action.”

And this is where I think “following” is better and stronger than “belief.” With simply stopping at belief, we allow space for people to simply sit in their intellectual embracement of an idea, rather than forcing them to act and incarnate that idea. But with following, all of the bases are covered: you cannot follow something or someone without holding to a belief in the reality and validity of that something or someone. So in order to follow Jesus, there are a number of things that must be believed: Jesus is the promised Messiah; Jesus’ Way is what it means to be truly human; Jesus bodily rose from the dead by defeating death and providing for the forgiveness of sins; Jesus is the fullest expression of who God is and is in fact God; Jesus offers a way out of our mess of a world and into a relationship with God. Following Jesus doesn’t mean we check our brains at the door and stop believing, but instead strengthens the demands on a person by requiring a nailing of those beliefs to the mast of life through practically living them out.

While all forms of ‘following’ begin with belief’, I say a true following doesn’t end there. In following Jesus we doesn’t stop at simply mentally agreeing with a set of facts and ideas about Him. Rather, our belief in order to actually be a belief must be nailed to the mast of life; by truly believing in Jesus we must follow Him into His Way and actually explicitly, actively, publicly, tangibly, practically, bodily, and existentially live out our belief in Jesus by obeying His teachings and living in His Way.

Maybe this is why early Christians weren’t called “believers” but rather “followers of the Way.” Instead of simply believing, they were living. But in order to live Jesus’ Way and truly follow Him, they needed to believe. Similarly, may we not simply believe, but rather live and follow in the Way of Jesus. May we not stop believing, but may we not simply stop at believing. Instead, may we cultivate a robust believing that translates into a full-bodied following that truly lives out the Way of Christ while also passionately believing in it.