Religious beliefs shape and are shaped by religious practices.

One example of this shaping is the way a community's beliefs become more credible to them as they engage in practices congruent with those beliefs. As Craig Dykstra asserts, by sustained engagement in Christian practices "a community comes to such an immediate experience of the grace and mercy and power of God that the 'nasty suspicion' that... theology is really about nothing more than human subjectivity simply loses its power." Belief in God's indiscriminate mercy is rendered more credible by religious practices of mercy. This is even the case for people standing outside the religious commmunity. The startling congruence betweeen the Chambonnais' mercy to strangers and their belief in a merciful God rendered their belief more plausible for non-Christians as well.

Yet no one who has read church history can conclude the truth of Christian beleif from the moral superiority of Christian pracitice (36).

posted by Peter at 12:47 AM
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