Having given a bit of background on how I used to see things before my subsequent crisis of faith, as well as an overview of the two particular areas that I came to struggle with the most (the nature of the Bible and the nature of the Christian life), what I’d like to do next is give a brief overview of how my thinking has changed since then and how I tend to see things now. However, before I do so I think it might be helpful to first touch a bit on something I discovered about the way I used to see things, a discovery that had a pretty significant impact on helping me through my crisis of faith and in sparking the subsequent shift in the way I now approach many things. 

Although I had always more or less assumed that much of what I believed and much of how I viewed the Christian faith was simply the way that Christians had always believed or seen their faith (going all the way back to the time of Jesus), during my crisis of faith I discovered something that had a revolutionary impact on the way I came to see things. Namely, I discovered that most of the distinctive features of what I believed didn’t come from some ancient or universal expression of the faith that reflected what most Christians around the world and throughout history had always believed, but rather (and surprisingly for me at the time) from a fairly modern and localized expression of the faith that reflected what a particular subset of Christians over the last few hundred years had come to believe (much of it reflecting in particular what many Christians in America had come to believe in only the last century). In short, I learned that the understanding of Christianity I had grown up with (and held throughout most of my life) was actually a modern understanding, not an ancient one. 

Despite my general awareness of the impact the Enlightenment had had on both Christianity and Western civilization as a whole, I had always sort of assumed that the primary expressions of Christianity that came about as a result of it were the ones that were more “liberal” in character. That is, although I was quite familiar with the indisputable fact that the Enlightenment had called into question much of Christianity during its time, and in a way that led to more “liberal” expressions of faith that attempted to rid Christianity of the supernatural, falsify and/or demythologize portions of the Bible, etc., what I didn’t know was that the Enlightenment had also led in many ways to more “conservative” expressions of the faith. To put it another way, I learned that the advent of modernity (with the Enlightenment as its foundation) not only affected those expressions of Christianity that welcomely accepted it, but also those expressions of Christianity that adamantly rejected it. Thus, although the expression of Christianity I grew up with sounded a lot like “traditional Christianity” (if there even is such a thing), I realized that it too was, in many ways, just as much a product of the modern world as many of the more liberal views it so often pitched itself against.

To give a few examples to help explain what I mean, I learned for one that the popular doctrines of biblical “infallibility” and “inerrancy” (often viewed as “essentials” to the faith for many evangelicals today) weren’t even first formulated until around the time of the Enlightenment (over 1,500 years after the birth of Christianity), and even then only became insistently affirmed by some Christians in the last one or two hundred years (in large part out of a pious desire to protect the Bible from what was perceived to be an attack on its authority by theological liberalism). Additionally, I discovered that the preoccupation I had with emphasizing a very literal approach to the Bible was itself also in large part a result of (or reaction to) the Enlightenment. As I had come to find out, for most Christians who lived prior to the Enlightenment, it wasn’t so much the literal meaning of the Bible that was emphasized (indeed in many cases they probably just took it for granted), rather it was the deeper and more metaphorical, or “more than literal,” meanings of the Bible that were often given primacy of place. I learned that one of the primary reasons that a literal interpretation of the Bible became so emphasized after the Enlightenment was because of the drastic impact it had, not simply upon how people came to understand the Bible, but more importantly upon how people came to understand the nature of truth. Although I will likely touch on this in more detail later on, the gist of the picture (as I came to understand it) is that the Enlightenment effectively equated truth with factuality (the latter being characterized more or less by whatever could be verified through historical and/or scientific investigation).

As a result, when people began to ask whether a given story was true or not, they began to understand that question as essentially asking whether or not the story was factual (i.e. whether it really “happened” that way). Indeed, I still see this sort of assumption all the time even today, and because it seemed so natural to me to equate truth with factuality, it was easy for me to simply assume that this had always been the case. But, as I discovered, it hasn’t always been the case and, in fact, is a very recent way of thinking (historically speaking). Of course, as a result of this Enlightenment shift in understanding what it meant for something to be true, many Christians consequently began to double-down by particularly emphasizing a literal/factual interpretation of the Bible for the simple reason that (as far as they could see), the only way a story in the Bible could be true was if it was literally/factually true. Truth and literal factuality had, in effect, become indistinguishable. In any case, such are just a few examples among many that could be given regarding the impact of the Enlightenment on the Christian faith (the identification of the Christian hope as “going to heaven when you die” and the identification of faith with belief – where belief became primarily understood in terms of mentally assenting to a proposition – being two other major ones which I have mentioned before). 

Needless to say, this discovery absolutely revolutionized the way I saw my faith. Not because I necessarily valued the ancient more than the modern – after all, just because something is ancient doesn’t automatically make it more likely to be true (indeed, a great deal of what I believe to be true today is much more modern than it is ancient in its origin, something that is likely true for all of us whether we realize it or not) – but rather because it finally sunk in for me that the way I saw Christianity was in fact only one of many ways that people have come to see Christianity, both throughout history and even in the present (and again, people a whole lot smarter and with lives filled with a whole lot more spiritual fruit than me). Although I had always assumed that the view I absorbed growing up was simply “traditional Christianity,” I finally realized that it was but one particular and relatively recent expression of Christianity among many, an expression which has been deeply molded and shaped by its conflict with modernity over the past several hundred years. Indeed, and as I mentioned in a previous post, it was this discovery of the vast degree of disagreement and diversity within the Christian tradition that, although initially serving as a primary source of struggle (e.g. how can I be sure that my particular expression of the faith is the one that “got it right”?), eventually helped serve as a great source of spiritual freedom (e.g. maybe it’s less about finding the expression that “gets it right” and more about finding one that enables you to draw closer in relationship to God).

The more I realized how many different ways there were of being Christian and of seeing both the Christian tradition and the Christian life, the more I came to see how naive I had been in my thinking. Naive not only in thinking that there was only one “right way” of being Christian (and that I happened to have fortunately grown up in its camp), but that it was critically important (perhaps even eternally important) that I remain in that camp. Coming to have a greater appreciation for this vast degree of diversity within the Christian tradition helped me to see that there wasn’t a “single right way” of being Christian. That being Christian wasn’t really about getting our beliefs or practices “right” – even though Christians have often acted that way. Rather, I came to see Christianity as something much more significant than all of that, something that wasn’t limited to one particular expression – whether of a given time, place, culture, or even theology – but something much bigger, much deeper, and much more powerful. A way of seeing Christianity I have found incredibly helpful (whether or not it is “right”) and have since come to love and embrace, a way of seeing Christianity to which I have devoted this blog to unpacking, and a way of seeing Christianity that I will attempt to share at least a glimpse of in my next post.

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

Cheers,