I'll confess, I've never read The Fundamentals, the clarion call to a ceetain kind of Christian beginning about 100 years ago, but I've cerrainly heard the fundamentals expounded, proposed, defended, and assumed enough to get a good feel for them. I think the fundamentals are actually pretty narrow and limited, even too thin for a robust Christian expression. Since I feel that way, I'd like to try to think about what seem to be basic assumptions of Christian faith and examine them in a moderate level of depth. This will be a work in progress, so I cannot outline the next pieces.

Where to begin? I tthink that any serious Christian thinking has to begin with a loose hand and an appreciation for paradox. If I hold any one belief too tightly, or stress any one piece of this fabric, I run the risk of losing another part of it. Beliefs are at best temporary stop gap measures to hold one's place. They change and flex, depending on where you stand.

Jesus himself was comfortable with paradox. "If you want to save your life, lose it." To think like a Christian means holding what G. K. Chesterton called furious opposites together. Only them, in the malestrom of contradiction, can a true faithfulness emerge. There is no logic in Christianity, no balance. Instead, it is a tightrope stumble, constantly pitching from one extreme to another, refusing to let go of one for the safety of another.

Sometimes people want to laugh with me about the folly of one religious trsadition or another, usually one not their own. They say, "That doesn't make any sense, does it?" I usually laugh and say, "Of course not. But I worship a man who lived 2,000 years ago who died naked and ashamed, friendless and weak, then came back to life. So, nothing should strike me as too weird."