As I’ve mentioned a few times already in some of my previous posts, although there were several areas I once struggled with and which eventually led up to my crisis of faith, the one area that I struggled with more than any other by far (and which has almost single-handedly revolutionized my spiritual life since) has to do with the nature of faith. Although I’ve already given the gist of how I used to see the nature of faith and how I’ve come to see it now, I’d like to spend a little more time unpacking this particular area, not only because it played such a major role in my story and has had such a major impact on my own spiritual life, but because it is also the one area along my journey that I probably get asked about the most (especially by those who come to find out that I wrote a book on the topic), and an area that can be quite difficult for me to explain – and for others to understand – if not given the time or space to hash out. As such, my aim over the next several posts is to try and hash out this area as best as I can, giving a bit more detail and clarity on the topic than I’ve yet been able to do. In doing so, I’ll first unpack a little more about how I used to see the nature of faith, and then leave the rest to unpacking how I’ve come to see it now.

Like most people growing up, my understanding of what it meant to have faith (like a lot of things), wasn’t the result of thoughtful reflection or serious study. Rather, my views on faith were more or less uncritically absorbed from the culture around me. As a result, the way that I once understood what it meant to have faith is probably similar in many respects to the way that most people understood it (or still understand it). In summary, this way of understanding sees faith as more or less holding a certain set of “beliefs” or “believing” a certain set of statements to be true (usually doctrinal statements). As such, I pretty much just took it for granted that having faith (the kind of faith one needed to be “saved”) essentially meant believing a given set of doctrines to be true. This set of doctrines in some cases could be fairly short, consisting of simply believing that there is a God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that he died for our sins, etc. However, in other cases the list could be a bit longer, such as believing that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, believing in a literal Adam and Eve, in a literal worldwide flood, and in a Jesus who was literally born of a virgin, literally walked on water, literally raised from the dead, and who will literally return again someday, etc. Yet in still other cases it could be even longer, believing that the world is less than 10,000 years old, that evolution is false, that all true Christians will be “raptured” in the very near future, that God will one day destroy the world, and that those who don’t believe the right things in the end will ultimately suffer eternally in hell, etc. Indeed, I remember often being involved in debates and discussions with other Christians about which particular beliefs belonged in the list of “essential beliefs” and which ones didn’t (a critically important question when one understands faith as “believing the right things”). But, however long or short, the main point was that faith required that one believe at least some set of doctrines to be true. 

To put it a bit more sharply in light of my own experience, it wasn’t enough to simply commit one’s life to following Jesus out of a genuine desire to love God and others (perhaps remaining open in one’s beliefs and exploring them with passionate curiosity), rather it was absolutely essential that one also be in wholehearted agreement with a given list of dogmatic pronouncements (the eternal state of one’s soul hung in the balance, after all). Indeed, this way of thinking was so central that I, and many others I knew, would often use the word “believer” as a synonym for “Christian” – as if being a Christian was fundamentally determined by what one “believed.” As a result, and although it never really dawned on me until years later in my journey (primarily when I began struggling with certain beliefs), this way of thinking about faith that seemed so preoccupied with “beliefs” and “believing” had a pretty major effect on me in that it ultimately turned my understanding of faith into a “head matter” – to have faith meant, essentially, to have a certain set of beliefs in my head. Of course, it meant much more than that too (e.g. living a certain way), but believing was its core foundation. And, as odd as this seems to me now, it was something I held for many years without even giving a second thought. It wasn’t until I started realizing that my beliefs, to a large degree, weren’t so much the result of active mental choices on my part as passive representations of whatever happened to “seem true” to me (something that didn’t always seem to be under my control) that I really began to think about it. 

In short, since I believed that faith was required in order to “go to heaven when I die,” that faith meant “believing certain things to be true,” and that “believing” was more or less outside of my control (it’s not as if I could simply “choose” to believe whatever I wanted), it began to seem strange to me to think that God cared so much about what I “believed” – so much in fact that he was willing to damn me to hell for all eternity simply because I didn’t “get it right” (i.e. because the “right things” didn’t happen to seem true to me). But why would God care so much about what beliefs happened to be in my head? It was a question that bothered me for years (especially when certain beliefs began slipping away by no longer “seeming true” – despite my protest), and a question for which I could never quite find a compelling answer. Indeed, thinking about it today seems just as bizarre. Thankfully, however, my desperate quest for an answer eventually led me to discover that the way I had come to view the nature of faith was actually just one particular view on the matter, one of many ways that faith has historically been understood and, as it turns out, a particularly modern way of understanding faith. A way of seeing faith that was much different (and much less sensible to me) than the many other ways faith has been viewed by Christians throughout history.

Although I’ve touched on it in an earlier post (and hope to explain in a bit more detail in subsequent posts), I discovered that prior to the Enlightenment, the most common way of seeing the nature of faith had to do, not so much with the matters of the “head,” but rather with the matters of the “heart” – where the “heart” was seen as a metaphor for the deepest level of a person, a level far below what one happened to think or believe. That is, for most of history, faith was primarily the way of the “heart,” not the “head.” Although it may sound silly, this discovery pretty much turned my world upside down given the weight I had placed on seeing faith as primarily a “head matter” rather than a “heart matter” (and especially given the depth of the spiritual struggle that resulted from seeing it this way). Discovering the various ways faith has historically been seen not only led me to realize how impoverished my prior understanding to faith had been, but also breathed new life into my own faith by helping me to see its nature in a brand new (or perhaps very ancient) light. 

Over the next few posts, I hope to dive a bit deeper into some of these older ways of seeing faith, but before I do so I want to first try and flesh out the way I used to see faith in a bit more detail, echoing some of what I’ve already said while also sharing some of the interesting things I learned about its history, including how it became such a prominent way of seeing faith over the last few hundred years and how it in many ways continues to dominate how many people think about faith today.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.

Cheers,