from george's website

i would encourage you to check out george's website (link on right), but here is a copy and paste from his post today, out of the book "myth of certainty" which i received on my doorstep this morning.

The goal of faith is not to create a set of immutable, rationalized, precisely defined and defendable beliefs to preserve forever. It is to recover a relationship with God. He offers us a person and a relationship; we want rules and a format. He offers us security through risk; we want safety through certainty. He offers us unity and community; we want unanimity and institutions. And it does no good to point fingers because none of us desires too much light. All of us want God to behave Himself in our lives, to touch this area but leave that one alone, to empower us here but let us run things ourselves over there.Faith in God, then, is not a belief system to defend but a life to live out (though systematic thinking about our beliefs can help us decide how to live). Mistaking this active life of faith for an institutionally backed and culturally bound belief system is similar to reducing the Mona Lisa to paint-by-numbers. Anyone can see that the paint-by-numbers picture has a relationship to the original, but how foolish to think they are the same thing. This is not at all an argument against the church, whose role I take to be crucial. Rather, it is an argument for the personal, risky, never-completed nature of our relationship to God. My desire is for an open-eyed commitment to the life of faith, and the responsibilities it entails, that includes a sensitivity to the great tensions under which faith must live in the modern world.
As a belief system, the Christian religion is subject to the many ills of all belief systems; as an encounter with God, it transforms individual lives and human history. God does not give us primarily a belief system; he gives us Himself, most clearly in the person of Jesus Christ, so that truth and meaning can be ours through a commitment to that love with which He first loved us. The risk is great, but the reward is infinite.