Mere Belief or Active Faith: What the “Dash” Can Teach Us

I love old, historic places. Nothing compares to walking the storied streets of a centuries-old city and feeling the weight of its untold history. One such place I recently visited is the American Cemetery located in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

The State Historical Register lists it as Louisiana’s oldest cemetery and the oldest within the footprint of the once-sprawling French territory known as the Louisiana Purchase. 

Established in 1737 or earlier, it served as a burial ground for soldiers and residents of the French colonial Fort Jean Baptiste. According to the Historical Marker Database, there are many war heroes, including those from the American Revolutionary War, criminals, doctors, politicians, educators, and even a murdered plantation owner, buried there. The funeral scene from the movie Steel Magnolias was famously filmed there also.

As I walked along the tree-lined paths and read the tombstones, I noticed an area marked off by a two-foot-tall brick boundary with several large rectangular gravestones. Stepping over the brick boundary wall, I noticed that one of the graves had a plaque affixed to the bottom.

The Daughters of the American Revolution placed the marker to honor Revolutionary War patriot Antoine Prudhomme, a member of the Natchitoches Militia that participated in the Gálvez Expedition during the American Revolutionary War. 

Prudhomme’s unit took part in a series of military operations against the British southern flank, led by the Spanish Governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Gálvez, including the defeat of British forces at Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola. 

Unfortunately, like so many who shaped the course of history, he remains a ghost in the historical record, with the many tales of his adventures buried with him. I can imagine the tales he would have told of storming the ramparts of the British fort in Baton Rouge on a smoke-filled battlefield, bullets whizzing past his head. 

It occurred to me that these untold stories were part of a life only noted by the dash between the dates of birth and death on a gravestone. As I looked around at the hundreds of other gravestones around me, spanning over three centuries, I could not help but wonder about the dashes of those buried there and the untold stories of their lives.  

This thought left me with a feeling of sadness that the last memorial of these folks seemed to indicate that the most important things they did in their lives were to be born and to die, with the most essential essence of their humanity recorded with a punctuation mark.

I’ve been thinking recently about the church calendar and why we place so much emphasis on the birth and death of Jesus, but not as much on his life here among us. For instance, Christmas and Easter celebrate two of the biggest events in Jesus’ life. However, like the folks buried in a cemetery, are we focusing too much on His birth and death rather than on His actions and words while He was with us? Do we also tend to ignore the dash of Jesus’ life? 

A great example of this priority appears in the Nicene or Apostles’ Creed. In 325 AD, to bring the many factions of Christianity together, Emperor Constantine convened a council of the empire’s leading theologians to draft a document outlining a common doctrine. The Creed was further amended in 381 AD at the Council of Constantinople, which still forms the basic doctrine of 95% of Christian denominations.

The Creed notes that “for us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was born of the Virgin Mary and became man.” There is no doubt that Jesus’ birth began God’s great mission to communicate with His creation by becoming one of us. Awesome start! 

The rest of the sentence, punctuated by a comma, tells us that  “for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” 

Again, we can all agree that Jesus’ death and resurrection culminated God’s plan for salvation. 

Yet, in this virtual headstone of our faith, there is a glaring omission. Between the comma of His birth and the comma of His death, the dash, if you will, the Creed is silent on His life. It skips the healing, the radical inclusion, and the subversive teachings.  We’ve identified our belief in the beginning and the end, but have we accidentally bypassed the very “dash” that showed us how to live?

Right Belief or Right Practice?

Another word for belief is orthodoxy, which means “right opinion.” It is the body of the Nicene Creed, a statement of what one believes to be true. Of course, Christianity has over 45,000 denominations (and counting) worldwide, each with its own spin and nuances. 

Hand in hand with orthodoxy is orthopraxy, which means “right practice” also defined in Christianity as discipleship. It is what you do with your belief. In my blog post Do You Believe More Than Demons, I differentiate mere belief from faith by defining faith as belief in action, or orthopraxy.

In short, orthodoxy is what you SAY you believe, and orthopraxy, or faith, is how you SHOW what you believe. 

The word literally means “right opinion” or “correct thinking.” In the history of the Church, we have spilled oceans of ink and, tragically, oceans of blood over the concept of orthodoxy, all in pursuit of the perfect theological formula. For centuries, we have gathered in councils to debate the exact nature of the Trinity, the mechanics of the atonement, and the precise timing of the end of the world. We have created massive gatekeeping systems to ensure that everyone “thinks right.”

The Pharisees championed orthodoxy but lacked orthopraxy. The “dash” of Jesus’s life invited practice, not just philosophy. 

In The Great Omission, Dallas Willard observes that nothing in the teachings of Christ or the early church implies one can simply claim divine pardon while remaining detached from true discipleship.  He goes on to call those who accept God’s grace but not discipleship “Vampire Christians”. As he puts it, “one in effect says to Jesus, ‘I’d like a little of your blood, please. But I don’t care to be your student or have your character. In fact, won’t you just excuse me while I get on with my life, and I’ll see you in Heaven’.”

If orthodoxy is about the head, orthopraxy is about the hands and feet. As we look at the “dash” of Jesus, we find a startling reality: Jesus cared far more about how people followed Him than about how they categorized Him.

The Call to Follow, Not Just Believe

When Jesus walked the shores of Galilee, His primary invitation was never “Study me” or “Define me.” It was “Follow me.”

Think about the ragtag group He assembled. He didn’t give them an entrance exam on Christ’s dual nature. He didn’t ask them to memorize a confession of faith or say a saving prayer. He invited them into a shared life of action. He took them into the homes of the “unclean.” He forced them to confront their own prejudices by making a Samaritan the hero of His stories. He showed them that the Kingdom of God was not a subject to be mastered, but a way of life to be practiced.

Today, it seems the script has been flipped. In the modern “Imperial Church,” we have made orthodoxy the primary metric of faith. We believe that if we can align our doctrines perfectly, the rest will take care of itself. We have become theological spectators, looking down at the world and judging it by its adherence to our rules, rather than “practitioners of the road,” walking through the dust with the broken and the marginalized.

The Pharisee’s Trap

The Pharisees were the ultimate champions of orthodoxy. They knew the Law better than anyone. They were obsessed with “right thinking” and meticulous adherence to the thousands of guardrails they had built around the scriptures. By all appearances, they were the most “correct” people in Judea.

Yet, Jesus saved His harshest rebukes for them. Why? Because their orthodoxy had become a substitute for orthopraxy. They used their “right thinking” as a weapon to exclude others and a shield to protect their own status. They were, as Jesus famously put it, “straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel” (Matthew 23: 23-25). They worried so much about the “correct” way to tithe their spices that they neglected the “weightier matters of the law”—justice, mercy, and faithfulness —which today, in certain Christian circles, are shunned as weak or even toxic. At the same time, revenge, ruthlessness, and dishonesty in pursuit of worldly gain are celebrated and lifted as the good “will of God”. Can there be any stronger blasphemy against the Holy Spirit than this? 

This is the Constantinian impulse within religion: the desire to control through definition. When we prioritize orthodoxy over orthopraxy, we turn the Gospel into a gate rather than a path. It forces us to spend our energy policing the boundaries of belief rather than expanding the frontier of love.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Matthew 23: 23-24

The Goal of the Dash

The life of Jesus, the dash between his miraculous birth and glorious resurrection, serves as the ultimate example of orthopraxy. He didn’t just teach about the love of God; He was the love of God in motion. He didn’t just define mercy; He touched the leper and died for His enemies. He didn’t just preach against greed; He lived with nowhere to lay His head.

If our faith is purely orthodox, it is a static faith. James called it dead and no better than that of demons (James 2:18-19). It is a photograph of a person we admire but never actually talk to. But a faith defined by orthopraxy and true discipleship is a living, breathing movement. It is the “inside-out” transformation we discussed earlier, where the internal light naturally spills over into external action.

As I’ve reflected on my visits to historic sites like the American Cemetery, I’m reminded that we don’t remember the people buried there because of what they “thought.” We remember them because of what they did. We honor patriots like Antoine Prudhomme not because they held a correct theory on liberty, but because they stood their ground when the smoke cleared.

The Integration of Head and Heart

To be clear, this is not a call to abandon truth or to ignore sound doctrine. Orthodoxy matters because what we believe eventually dictates how we act. If I believe that God is a distant, angry judge, my orthopraxy will be defined by fear and legalism. But if I believe that God is a loving Father who seeks the lost, my orthopraxy will be defined by radical empathy, mercy, and grace.

The goal is not to choose one over the other, but to let our orthodoxy be the root that produces the fruit of orthopraxy. The “dash” is the bridge between the two. 

The world today is not looking for a more “correct” set of doctrines. It is looking for a people whose lives actually look like the One they claim to follow. People are tired of hearing “right opinions” from an angry, condemning Church. They are hungry for a community that practices the radical, self-sacrificing love of the original message.

When we move from the comfort of the stands as spectators to walking the path of the Cross as disciples, when we stop trying to “own the table” and start washing feet, we move from a dead orthodoxy to a vibrant, world-changing orthopraxy. We finally begin to do what Jesus called us to do: “FOLLOW ME.” 

 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.

Matthew 4:19