We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
What Will You Do With Your Doubt?
Richard Beck shared some of his thoughts on Christianity as something that for many of us is our “native religion”…something we were born into and that is, to quote Wendell Berry, “an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams.” With Christianity so foundational to our identities, doubt is a scary (and necessary) thing. What will you do with your doubt?
Richard observes that:
A lot of people who have decided to leave the faith are still, for lack of a better word, shadow Christians, still haunted by God. In the words of Flannery O’Connor, Jesus remains for many this wild, ragged figure moving from tree to tree in the back their minds.
But for others the “better possibility” has been for us to intentionally step out of the liminal space, away from the cognitive dissonance, to invest in, cultivate, and renew our native religion.
For those of you who are in the thick of your doubt, you might want to pick up a copy of Greg’s book, Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty.
Image by Davi Ozolin via Compfight
Category: General
Tags: Benefit of the Doubt, Doubt, Faith, Richard Beck, Wendell Berry
Related Reading
Leaving Westboro Baptist: Damsel, Arise
Burstein! via Compfight A reader pointed us to this fascinating article about the defection of Megan Phelps-Roper from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church (Thanks Rocky). She’s the granddaughter of the founder and preacher Fred Phelps. It’s an amazing story of how sometimes doubt can lead to grace and courage. From the article: In the fifth…
Why Christ, not Scripture, is Our Ultimate Foundation
In a previous blog I argued that all our theological reflection must not only be Christ-centered, it must, most specifically, be cross-centered. I now want to begin to unpack some of the most important implications of adopting a cross-centered theological perspective. My ultimate goal is to show how a cross-centered theology is able to resolve the…
2 Ways We Misinterpret God’s Promises
In the church where I first found Christ, we used to sing a hymn called “Standing on the Promises of God.” The hymn itself isn’t bad, for it focuses entirely on our relationship with God. But in many cases, I’ve found this phrase applied in ways that express, and reinforce, a magical kind of faith.…
Video Q&A: Faith and the Historical Jesus
Greg is trying something new in order to answer more of your questions. He’s going to be taping himself addressing your questions with no polish of any kind: raw and unedited. You’ll notice in this first one that he’s pretty low in the frame of the camera, and we’ll be tweaking this as we go,…
Getting Married or Buying a Car?
We’ve been slowly working our way through the ReKnew Manifesto. Currently, I’m offering some thoughts on the second of our convictions, which states that it’s time for us to rethink what we thought we knew about the nature of faith. Studies have shown that over 80% of Americans say that they believe they are “saved”…
Do Something Beautiful
Wonderlane via Compfight Richard Beck posted this reflection of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet with her hair and the idea of a Christian aesthetic. It’s inspiring. From the blog: More and more, I’ve come to describe my faith in similar terms, in aesthetic terms. Some things in the world–big global things and small things I…
