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.
Faith, Doubt and Agnosticism
Hartwig HKD via Compfight
Greg was recently interviewed by Premier Radio in the UK for the program Unbelievable? along with Andrew Whyte (an agnostic) on the topic of faith and doubt. They discuss their personal journeys of doubt and how this led them on vastly different paths. You can find the interview by clicking here. You can get a feel for Greg’s process of coming to question the prevailing notion of faith from the quote below taken from his book Benefit of the Doubt.
As I studied issues surrounding Scripture, however, I occasionally encountered data that seemed to undermine the historical veracity of certain narratives. When this happened, I would feel pressured by my belief in inspiration to spin the data in a way that would instead support the narrative’s historical accuracy. While I was aware that evangelical and non-evangelical scholars frequently do this, it felt disingenuous to me. Is this really what God would want me to do, I wondered?
Over the years, I have increasingly felt there is something amiss with a concept of faith that inclines me to be anything but totally honest with whatever my research uncovers. At the same time, I have gradually seen less and less reason why my belief in inspiration should require that every story conforms to our modern concept of historical veracity, and even less reason why my life-giving relationship with Christ, which has come to form the very core of my being, should be affected by how I evaluate the evidence for any particular biblical story.2 There is, I concluded, something fundamentally wrong with this “house-of-cards” model of faith, as I shall call it.
Category: General
Tags: Agnosticism, Benefit of the Doubt, Doubt, Faith
Related Reading
Why Isn’t God More Clear?
Ever wonder why God isn’t more clear and obvious? Here’s Greg’s take on that question.
Trusting God for the Wrong Things
Chloe was a smart, personable, and devoted Christian student from South America whom I had the pleasure of teaching in several theology classes. In one meeting, Chloe confessed that, despite the confident appearance that she projected, she actually lived with a sense of guilt and had never felt like a good Christian. In fact, Chloe…
The God Who Embraces Our Doubt
Lawrence OP via Compfight Zack Hunt over at The American Jesus posted some of his thoughts on doubt, and it seemed fitting on this week before the Doubt, Faith & the Idol of Certainty conference to share what he had to say. We’re thinking he must have stumbled on Greg’s book or maybe God is…
The Lord of Legend and Love
However secularized a person may be, if they have any sense at all that life has a meaning, they know it must have something to do with love. Indeed, one could argue that all of our intuitions about morality and the meaning of life are at root an intuition about the supremacy of love. At…
This Week’s Sermon: Sledge Hammer Faith
Greg is feverishly working on a new book on faith and doubt and he decided to preach on this topic for a couple of weeks. He’s also been dealing with this topic on the blog as a part of fleshing out the ReKnew Manifesto. This week he asks the question: Is certainty-seeking, doubt-shunning faith idolatrous? Many…
Is the Bible a Legal Textbook?
Olga via Compfight Too much theology treats the Bible as if it were legal textbook. In the following except from Benefit of the Doubt, Greg addresses the problems when we approach theology and Scripture this way. Incidentally, if you like these excerpts we’ve been posting from Benefit of the Doubt, you’re not going to want to…