Am I so very different?

We’re currently working on a multi cultural module at university at the moment. For our assessment we are asked to interview someone of another world view and write a report on the interview.

I was honoured and surprised when a classmate came up to me after I’d been thinking out loud in class about spirituality and suggested that s/he interviewed me for the assignment as I have a ‘different world view’ to the Christian one! It got me to think though, in my search for the authentic truth of the good news have I really strayed that far from the straight and narrow?

I believe that God created the world by His spirit, the Ruach breath of God, and that we are made in God’s image by His Spirit breathed into us with our every breath. But when I suggest that sitting quietly and listening deeply to ourselves is the same as listening to God, as he lives within us, it is suggested that I am a heretic.

I believe that Jesus came to save the world from Sin and bring the Kingdom of God on earth. But when I suggest that the sin that he came to save us from was more about the sin’s we do to each other as humans, and the way He saved us from them was more by showing us an example of how to live rather than making an eternal appeasing sacrifice that magically makes everything better when we say the magic words, people begin to pray for my soul.

I believe that everyone is made in God’s image, with something inside that intuitively years for connection with something greater, yet when I suggest that those of other faiths or none are finding their own connection with God but expressing it in a different way, I am challenged as to ‘Why I bother calling myself a Christian’.

Is all this really so very wacky? So very wrong? Am I just being a product of my engagement in a pomo society who don’t see definites? Am I just looking to justify my permissive liberal theology by thinking it through? Am I really so very different?