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
Loving God With All Of Your Mind
Rebecca-Lee via Compfight David D. Flowers posted this essay on loving God with your mind that reflects our stance on intellectual integrity as we approach Scripture. It even features a video clip of Greg talking about maintaining humility when we encounter ideas that are new to us and challenge our current understanding. It’s well worth…
Biblical Versus Magical Faith: Reflections on the ReKnew Manifesto
The second core conviction of the “ReKnew Manifesto” is that we believe it is time for the Church to re-think common assumptions about faith. Faith is at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus and to live under the reign of God. Yet Christians rarely seriously reflect on what it means to “have…
Why Bart Ehrman Doesn’t Have to Ruin Your Christmas (Or Your Faith) Part 7
This is the seventh of several videos Greg put together to refute Bart Ehrman’s claims published in the article What Do We Really Know About Jesus? In this segment, Greg argues against Ehrman’s claim that the Roman census in the birth narrative was fabricated. If you missed the first six installments you can find them here, here, here, here, here and here.
What the Cross Tells Us About God
Whether we’re talking about our relationship with God or with other people, the quality of the relationship can never go beyond the level of trust the relating parties have in each other’s character. We cannot be rightly related to God, therefore, except insofar as we embrace a trustworthy picture of him. To the extent that…
When You Doubt the Bible
Kit via Compfight Many people enter into conversations with ReKnew and Greg’s writings because they have questions and doubts about the Bible which they do not feel they can ask within their current church tradition. When they arise, and they will, what do we do with them? How do we process them in a healthy…