A pastor told me how encouraging it is when, years later, former students return to tell him how they’ve made the “faith their own.” It’s a phrase he used to encourage students with, especially those near graduation.

But he also told me how discouraging it was when one particular student returned to tell how he had made the faith his own. As the former student described this thing he considered “the faith,” it became clear he had not made the faith his own but rather made up his own faith. There’s a big difference.

Over the Easter weekend, the New York Times ran an interview with Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary. In the first few paragraphs you realize she’s done the same thing. In the short interview, she uses the phrase “for me” five times, as well as several other similar statements, such as “I don’t believe” and “seems to me,” as in the sentence, “For Christians for whom the physical resurrection becomes a sort of obsession, that seems to me to be a pretty wobbly faith” (emphasis added).

In addition to rejecting the bodily resurrection of Christ, Jones also dismisses the reliability of the Bible, human depravity, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus on the cross, and eternal bliss in the new heavens and new earth and eternal torment in hell.

When my friend retweeted the article, he said, “I have more in common with Islam than I do with the religion described as ‘Christianity’ in this interview.” That’s probably not hyperbole. Readers get the sense that if the interview kept going, no remaining doctrine of historic Christianity would have been left un-denounced.

At one point, Nicholas Kristof, who conducted the interview, asks, “For someone like myself who is drawn to Jesus’ teaching but doesn’t believe in the virgin birth or the physical resurrection, what am I? Am I a Christian?” Jones responds, “Well, you sound an awful lot like me, and I’m a Christian minister.”