5

Losing My Religion

In eighth grade I found myself at yet another annual youth event. The event lasted through the weekend, with a concert on Saturday night put on by the wonderfully named band Brian White and Justice. It was an epic show, at least in the eyes of a sheltered thirteen-year-old boy who had never been to a real concert. So obviously it was objectively epic.

At the end of the show, there was an altar call. Because, well, of course there was. Guess who showed up for the altar call? That same preacher from children’s camp. Just kidding. That would have been super weird.

It was God.

And this time I was pretty sure it actually was God. Because when I found myself kneeling down to pray with my youth pastor, I realized that it wasn’t guilt that dragged me down the crimson red carpet of the sanctuary to kneel at an old wooden altar. A real sense of calling had invited me there. Maybe the bright lights and electric guitars and Brian White’s testimony had helped. Or maybe it was actually the movement of the Holy Spirit—or maybe it was all of the above. Whoever or whatever it was, I felt a clear and definitive sense of calling that night to give my life to God. Not to just get saved again—I had already taken care of that a fiftieth or sixtieth time earlier that year at a Christian haunted house or “judgment house,” where scary scenes like horrific drunk driving accidents are used (effectively in my case) to try to scare you into getting saved before you die and it’s too late to save your soul from hell. I was at the altar that night, accepting a calling to ministry, because I wanted to be down there. I wanted to answer God’s calling because I wanted to pour my life into the lives of others the way so many pastors and church people had poured their lives into mine.

I knelt at the altar pressure free that night. I felt no guilt, just a sense that I was finally on the right track—that maybe I was doing what I was meant to do. From that day forward, I knew I was going into ministry. But not just any ministry. I wanted to be a youth pastor. I was more sure about that than anything else I had ever been sure about. I would head to college knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that God had called me to be a youth pastor.

Answering a call

Well, that and playing in the NBA. I came home from that youth event and immediately told my mom that God had called me. “To what?” she asked.

To being a youth pastor . . . and playing in the NBA. She smiled, as all moms do, no doubt torn between being proud of me for trying to answer God’s call for my life and trying not to laugh at a slow, barely coordinated skinny white kid who couldn’t jump but thought he was going to make it to the NBA.

Delusional or not, I spent the next several years preparing to do both, until a broken ankle and the reality of my limited talent put an end to my NBA dreams. With athletic stardom officially off the table, I prepared for my actual calling as much as I could. This amounted to telling everyone who asked about my future that I wanted to be a youth pastor—including my teachers at school, particularly in classes that I deemed irrelevant to my career goals.

On the first day of my junior year of high school, my precalculus teacher asked us to write down why we were taking the class. My answer? “Because it is required by the state in order to graduate. I am going into youth ministry, and this class has absolutely no bearing on my future plans.” Thankfully, my teacher was a fellow Christian who fully supported my ministerial aspirations and was also equally full of grace—enough to overlook the insufferable arrogance of youth.

But I did take a few practical steps to prepare to be a youth pastor. I was active in my school’s chapter of Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and when the time came, I ran for and was elected president—a role I pursued because in my mind it was basically like being a teenage youth pastor. I also made sure to never miss a mission trip. Sure, I loved the mission trip experience itself, but if I was going to be leading those some day, I needed to be prepared. How better to be prepared to lead a mission trip than by taking at least one every single summer from the time I was in seventh grade until my junior year of college? And whenever the opportunity came to testify on a mission trip, I took it. I’d transform my testimony to the group into a mini sermon, making sure to put the fear of being left behind and going to hell into the hearts of whoever was stuck having to listen to me.

As with many other high schools, mine had a job shadow day for seniors. Naturally, I chose to shadow my youth pastor, Tony. Guess how many other people shadowed pastors that day? Somewhere between zero and none—which should have made for an awkward moment when I had to stand up in front of the entire school after all the other job fields had been called and explain why my choice didn’t fit into any of those categories. But I was so proud that awkwardness never even crossed my mind. I thought the rest of the students were suckers because I had the coolest job shadow day ever. (For the record, I was right. I had way more fun that day than I should have been allowed to get school credit for.)

When it finally came time to apply for college, I knew two things: one, I wanted to be a religion major; and two, I wanted to get as far away from home as possible. But my college needed to be a Christian school, and not just any Christian school. It needed to be a Nazarene school, because I couldn’t trust what kind of liberal theology might be taught somewhere else.

The choice was easy. The Church of the Nazarene had a school on the opposite side of the country in San Diego, California. Point Loma Nazarene University sits right on top of a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. You can stare at the Pacific while you eat lunch in the cafeteria and go surfing between classes. The baseball team can watch their home runs sail into the ocean. It seemed like the perfect place for a teenager itching to get as far away from home as possible.

But when it came time to turn in my application, I hesitated. Point Loma was beautiful. It was far away from home and, most importantly, down the street from an In-N-Out Burger. But then a still, small voice started talking as I filled out my application. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit, but it may just have been my burning desire to know everything and be the smartest. In my mind, Trevecca Nazarene University, in my hometown of Nashville, had a better religion department, and all I cared about was taking the best religion classes possible so I could learn as much as possible and show everyone how smart I was.

Trevecca may indeed have had the better religion department. But it was just as likely that I thought it did because I was familiar with it. I had practically grown up on campus. Most of my family had gone to college there, half of them worked there, and the church I attended was on campus. Either way, it was a genuinely tough decision for me. I desperately wanted to get away from home, but at the same time I was terrified of not following God’s will for my life, which I understood to be like the biblical prophecy of Jack Van Impe: a predetermined but veiled road map, decipherable only through clues I had to figure out in order to go to the right place, do the right things, get the right job, marry the right person, and make God happy.

I wrestled long and hard with the decision and spent countless hours in prayer. In the end, my application to Point Loma never left the small desk in my bedroom. I chose Trevecca. Partly because I really did think it offered me the best preparation for ministry, but also probably because all my friends were going there. Desperate as I was to get out of Nashville, I was too much of a coward to move across the country by myself.

That’s how I ended up in Biblical Exegesis with Dr. Dan Spross at seven thirty in the morning. It was the very first class I ever took in college, and it was even less exciting than it sounds. I hated it. In my mind, college was going to be like AP Sunday school. I’d had all the answers in regular Sunday school, so AP Sunday school was obviously going to be a breeze.

Unprepared

How wrong I was.

And not just because college turned out to be nothing like Sunday school. Taking Biblical Exegesis as my first class in college was a mistake. I was woefully unprepared for the rigors of college life. Hell-bent on signing up for religion classes as soon as possible, I had taken as many AP exams and CLEP tests as I could during high school so that I could skip most or even all of my general education classes. My plan succeeded. I entered college academically as a sophomore, which meant I could immediately start taking religion classes normally reserved for real sophomores after they got their feet wet doing real college work. I didn’t care about any of that, but I should have. Jumping that quickly into the deep end of the pool meant I never got to wade through the shallow end of Gen Ed classes. I never got to learn how to learn in college, how to write in college, or how to accept the fact that college isn’t like high school.

So when I crossed the linoleum threshold that first morning of college and sat down for my first Biblical Exegesis class, my expectations of religion classes were shattered. Instead of getting candy for answering questions about the Bible, we were handed a three-hundred-page book and told to write a ten-page paper about it by the following Monday. I was crestfallen. When class was over, I went into a tailspin about whether this ministry thing was something I actually wanted to do. Not because the professor did anything wrong. Far from it. In fact, by the time I graduated, he ended up becoming one of my favorite professors in college. I simply wasn’t expecting my religion classes to be that hard, that rigorous, and to be honest, that boring.

What you’ve got to understand is that, as ridiculous as it sounds, I really had been looking forward to this class and New Testament Theology and Introduction to New Testament Greek and all the other religion classes. In my mind, I really did think they were going to be like Sunday school, except more fun, because we would be getting into all the deep theological stuff we usually skipped over in Sunday school because there wasn’t enough time or interest from my classmates in discussing the minute details of penal substitution atonement. But most importantly, I thought religion classes were finally going to give me all the academic ammunition I needed to figure out the end times and shoot down anyone who disagreed with me. But my religion classes weren’t anything like that. There was redaction criticism to learn about, and Greek verbs to conjugate, and educational theories to learn, and I hated it.

All of it.

That first semester was a war of attrition, and I was very quickly becoming the vanquished foe. But there was hope in the form of a meeting I had with the New Testament professor, who also happened to be my advisor. We had to meet to arrange my schedule for the spring semester. For most normal students, this would have been a boring meeting just as soon to be avoided. For me, it was the opportunity of a lifetime. It was my chance to have all my ideas about the end times confirmed, all my questions about the rapture answered—by a real bona fide expert.

A map that doesn’t exist

As I sat outside my advisor’s office that afternoon, my heart was racing in anticipation as if I were a kid on my way to Disney World for the first time. In my mind I was. In my mind, religion professors had the greatest job imaginable. They got paid to sit around and talk about theology all day! How could life get any better than that? Their offices had to be the happiest places on earth.

But that wasn’t the only reason I was excited to be there that day. I couldn’t wait to show off my theological brilliance, impress my professor, and win his undying admiration for how astutely I understood the mysteries of the end times. I don’t think I had even sat down on the old cloth-covered chair in his office before I began assailing him with my dispensational theories and questions. I didn’t take another breath for at least twenty minutes. Every theory I had I shared. Every suspect for the Antichrist I named. Every Israel-related news event I dissected. When I was finally done, I looked at my advisor and said, “So what do you think?” He cracked a sly grin, as if this wasn’t the first time he had heard this sort of thing and I hadn’t just blown his mind with my incredible insights into the end times.

And then he spoke.

I was expecting affirmation of my expertise, maybe a little bit of clarity on my prophetic timetables, or at least a phone call to the department chair letting him know my advisor was so impressed by my genius that I would be joining the faculty. What I got instead was something else entirely. In a calm, patient voice he said, “You know, Jack Van Impe seems like a smart guy to me. But the problem I have with him, and folks like him, is they’re trying to pinpoint places on a map that simply doesn’t exist. They’re right: we are living in the end times. But we have been ever since Jesus walked out of the tomb.” I’d never been so stunned into silence. I felt like the emperor with no clothes, dragged out before the masses. My apocalyptic delusions had been laid bare. Sensing my embarrassment, my advisor quietly signed my class schedule and gently sent me on my way.

What happened next was a whirlwind of shock, confusion, and anger. I locked myself in my dorm room until I could find the courage to show my face in public again. I immediately went into denial mode. My professor may have had my undying respect as an authority on all things biblical before that meeting, but I had barely made it out of his office before deciding he was a fool. He had to be. The end times were so clear! The fulfillment of prophecies in the news was so obvious. Maybe if I could just get him to watch one episode of Jack Van Impe Presents he would understand. Maybe he’d get it and come over to my side, to the side of truth, the side of Jesus.

The denial lasted for days, weeks, months even. When I finally began to make space in my head for the possibility that maybe, just maybe, a guy with a PhD in New Testament knew what he was talking about, the denial slowly began to fade. It was replaced by anger. I was mad. Really, really mad. At first, my anger was directed squarely at my professor. Why couldn’t he have just gone along with what I said? Why couldn’t he have just politely smiled, nodded, and sent me on my way? My ignorance had been bliss. Who did he think he was, anyway? Oh right, an expert in the New Testament.

Just accepting that simple fact took far longer than it should have. After all, the very reason I was so excited to share my end-times ideas with him was my respect for his biblical expertise. But acknowledging that he knew more than I did wasn’t just about my arrogance, though that certainly played a role. Acknowledging he knew more than I did meant admitting he was right and I was wrong—not just about some random topic, but about a core tenet of my faith, a defining part of my identity.

If I had been so wrong about the mysteries of the end times, then maybe I wasn’t quite as smart as I thought I was. Simply accepting that possibility—that I could be wrong about something I was so sure I was right about—took countless weeks and months of self-reflection. Forcing myself to confront the reality that maybe I didn’t have everything figured out was hard. I was still angry with my advisor, but I still trusted my other religion professors, so I turned to them for leads on books I could read and biblical experts I could consult to prove how wrong my advisor had been. They obliged, but I didn’t find the proof I wanted to shove in his face. Worse still, those biblical experts all agreed with him.

When I finally came around to accepting the fact that I was wrong, the anger didn’t subside. It simply began to be directed elsewhere: toward Jack and Rexella, toward Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, toward anyone and everyone who had ever suckered me into believing in end-times prophecy and the rapture. How could they have tricked me into something like that and made me look like a complete fool in front of my professor?

Eventually my anger turned inward. After all, if anyone was to blame for all of this, it was me. I was the sucker. How could I have been so naïve? So gullible? So dumb? My whole life I had prided myself on having all the Sunday school answers, being the top Bible quizzer at church, and knowing everything there was to know about the Christian faith. At that moment, I couldn’t have felt any dumber, and it was that embarrassment that turned to rage.

But being the nerdy church kid I was, that rage didn’t turn into anything scandalous. It turned into petty, childish protests only recognizable to me. Why? Because while I may have begun to have my doubts about the rapture, I was still terrified of hell, and I didn’t want to do anything that would have completely jeopardized my soul.

My rebellion was cliché. Super, incredibly, ridiculously cliché. I stopped doing my homework. (Like I said, super, incredibly, ridiculously cliché.) I got a D in my second semester of New Testament Greek after turning in all of one assignment that semester, so I felt like a rebel. I had stuck it to the Man! For a while, at least. But then I lost my academic scholarships and found myself torn between the love of feeling like a rebel and the terror of massive student loans.

The next step in my grand plan of rebellion was to stop going to chapel. Again, super cliché, but it felt hardcore to a kid who never missed church. Ever. Chapel was held three times a week. I started going zero times a week—or if I did go, I sat in the back and took a nap. Such a rebel. Unfortunately for me, the school’s threat of penalties for missing too many chapel services wasn’t a bluff. I racked up several hundred dollars in fines, and had it not been for the grace of the assistant dean—who, after I groveled in his office on bended knee, reduced my penalty to a more manageable dollar figure—I would have had to take out another student loan to pay for them.

But there was still church to skip.

To be fair, lots of churchgoing kids skip church when they go off to college, if for no other reason than that Mom and Dad aren’t around to make them go. But I relished it, staying as far away from church and anything resembling church as I could.

Then I changed my major.

I held on to the religion part, because I still liked studying religion. But I wanted nothing to do with the practical, ministry-oriented classes. Because I had started college academically as a sophomore, I had time to burn. (At least I thought I did; I failed to realize that graduating in three years instead of four would have saved me a huge chunk of money.) So I took on a double major: history and political science. My thought was twofold: this double major was the closest thing our school had to a prelaw program, and being a lawyer seemed like the furthest thing from being a pastor. Plus, I had seen A Few Good Men a whole bunch of times and figured it would be a cakewalk.

I know this will come as a shock, but it wasn’t.

So I tried getting a tattoo—a religious one, of course. I chose the symbol known as the Chi-Rho, formed from the first two letters, X and P, for “Christ” in Greek. I made sure to get it tattooed on the hardest of hardcore places: my ankle, because “how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet” and all that (Isaiah 52:7). Then I got a few piercings. When that didn’t solve my spiritual crisis either, I took a trip across the country to Yellowstone to find myself. All I found there were sore feet and exhaustion from a hiking excursion for which I was woefully unprepared.

By the time all was said and done, I was still as bitter and angry as ever. If anything, my newfound doubt about the rapture was just the first loose thread to be pulled. The rest of my faith began to unravel as well. After all, if I had been wrong about the rapture, what else had I been wrong about? A lot, it turned out. It would take me several years to find out just how much I was wrong about and how many people I had unfairly passed judgment on.

I might have seen it all coming had I paid just a bit more attention in my advisor’s Introduction to Biblical Faith class. On one of the very first days of class, he gave us a warning about where our religious studies would lead. Had I paid attention, I might have been able to see my crisis of faith coming over the horizon. I heard the words he said—that’s why I can tell you about it now—but back then I was too arrogant to think it ever could or would apply to me.

Before we dived into actually studying the Bible or the nuts and bolts of the Christian faith, our professor warned us that what we would be studying would likely challenge some of the things we thought we knew about the Bible and Christianity. We might be uncomfortable with, or even mad at, some of the things suggested in class or claimed by the authors we would read. We would encounter ideas that ran counter to what we always thought we knew to be true.

But that was okay, he said. Even though what we were learning would probably be painful, it was all a normal part of the learning process. This learning process, according to French philosopher Paul Ricœur, can be best understood in three stages.¹

First naiveté

The first stage of the process is called the first naiveté. This is the precritical stage of our understanding or knowledge of the world, in which we accept what we are taught without giving it much critical thought or attention. For me, that would have been the Sunday school period of my life—or really all my time growing up and learning something in church. I implicitly trusted the people charged with teaching me the faith. Not that I shouldn’t have; none of them had any nefarious intent to mislead me. But I trusted my Sunday school teachers and the adults in my life without question. Whenever they told me something about the Bible or Jesus or God, I believed that whatever they said was true.

Most of us do the same when we’re young. And more of us than we care to admit stay in this stage long after we grow up. A not-insignificant number of us never really grow out of it. Need proof? Just take a look at your social media feed and see how many people regularly share information that is clearly incorrect but that they take to be the gospel truth because the source seems authoritative. Some of that is the result of confirmation bias—something even the most educated and wise can fall victim to. But when we accept the word of an authority figure simply because of their perceived authority and without question or reflection, we’re likely still living in the first naiveté.

Critical reflection

One of the core purposes of higher education is to move students out of the first naiveté and into the next stage of learning and understanding: critical reflection. You might also call it the humbling stage. That is just me talking, not Ricœur. But for me, the biggest lesson from the critical reflection stage isn’t the knowledge you gain—though that is certainly important. It’s the humility that comes as your eyes are opened up to how much you don’t know and how arrogant you were in your naiveté.

Now to be clear, this usually isn’t an overnight realization. When you first get to the critical reflection stage, it’s rough and embarrassing. My rapture-shattering conversation with my advisor was my baptism by fire into critical reflection. I didn’t leave his office joyful over my newfound enlightenment; I left angry and embarrassed. And I stayed that way for a long, long time.

Had I paid attention that first day in Introduction to Biblical Faith, perhaps this stage wouldn’t have lasted quite so long. After all, my professor had tried to warn me. He had tried to prepare me for the inevitable moment when I would come face-to-face with indisputable proof that a belief that I was once so sure was right was actually wrong. When that time came, I wouldn’t be able to do the mental gymnastics necessary to wiggle out of it. When that time came, he warned, I had a choice to make. I could bury my head in the sand, refuse to believe it, and live the rest of my life in willfully ignorant denial (kind of like if Neo had chosen to take the blue pill and plug back into the Matrix). Or I could continue down the road of discovery and learning, no matter how hard or scary or painful it might be.

The path of willful ignorance is easy, comfortable, and known. It’s filled with plenty of fellow travelers, because many take it. But more than a few choose the more difficult path—or, like me, many find themselves forced onto it, because intellectual integrity eventually leaves them with no other choice.

I say eventually, because when the door to critical reflection was first opened, I didn’t run through. I slammed it shut and ran as hard as I could the other way. I tried going back to living in the first naiveté—tried as hard as I could to ignore the bad theology and contradictions of dispensationalism whenever they reared their ugly head. I tried to take the blue pill, but it was too late. It took many bitter months—years, actually—to accept the truth when I saw it and to forgive both those who taught me the wrong things and myself for believing them. Again, those folks had not intentionally led me astray, so they didn’t need my forgiveness for that. I needed to forgive them in the sense of letting go of the idea that they had tried to trick me, in the sense of letting go of the belief that there was some secret cabal that had colluded to embarrass me in college. Even though I knew, intellectually, that they were good, well-meaning people who were simply trying to teach me what they believed to be true, accepting that simple truth in my soul took a long time.

It took even longer for me to forgive myself. I’d always prided myself on being the smartest guy in the room. I still do—even though I’m now keenly aware of how rarely, if ever, that is true. But pride is a difficult thing to overcome. They say pride cometh before the fall, and it did. But it also came along with me for the ride. Even as the pieces of my faith eventually began to be put back together, the pain and embarrassment of realizing just how arrogant I had been in my youth lingered. It still does. It was years before I could even talk about my previous devotion to the end times without embarrassment-induced rage building up inside me.

Second naiveté

Thankfully, the anger eventually subsided. It has to if you’re going to move on to the third and final stage of understanding. You need a healthy dose of humility to move on to what Ricœur calls the second naiveté. You need it because the second naiveté requires you to accept what you don’t know along with the mysteries you can’t figure out. It’s not a return to willful ignorance but rather an embrace of the fact that you don’t have everything figured out and that’s okay. That doesn’t mean you stop trying to pursue knowledge and understanding. Rather, you learn to drop the need to know everything, to learn every fact and decipher every mystery.

This is where a healthy faith lives: in a place of critical reflection that pursues the greatest depths of knowledge, accepts the things found there, and keeps diving deeper, but without the delusion of ever thinking we have it all figured out. The delusion is replaced with humility—a humility that recognizes our own limits and ignorance and sees the limits and ignorance of others not as a chance to embarrass them but as an opportunity to show them the same sort of grace and understanding that others have extended to us.

If you’ve found yourself in this stage of life, hopefully that humility is something you’re willing to share. I hope you’re not shy about talking about what you’ve gone through, no matter how humbling the learning process might have been. The church is in desperate need of your story of humility and growth because it’s also in desperate need of people who, unlike me, don’t hate admitting that they’re wrong about things. Most people are like that, but I’ve made thinking I’m right into something of an art form. Don’t get me wrong: my “rightness” complex is not something I’m particularly proud of. I’d like to think I’ve become more comfortable with admitting when I’m wrong, but you’d have to ask my wife to know how true that actually is.

Admitting I was wrong

The conservative evangelicalism I grew up in was, and still is, a world of certainty. If something was wrong, it was wrong all the time. Murky areas were for squishy heathen liberals—moral relativists who couldn’t make up their minds about anything because they were too committed to being nice to speak the truth.

“The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!” was my mantra. I had verses for everything, proof texts to prove why I was right and why you were living in sin. The idea that I could have been misunderstanding any of those verses, or taking any of them out of context, never entered my mind. I considered myself a biblical interpretations savant at the age of fourteen. Right and wrong beliefs were so obvious! If Christianity was about having all the right answers, it wasn’t because you needed to search for them. It was because you just needed to accept them. Believe in the right things and you, too, would have all the right answers and would go to heaven. The answers were right there in the Bible or a sermon or a Sunday school lesson. It was my job as a Christian to tell the rest of the world why they were wrong and why being wrong had them on a one-way trip to hell.

When you grow up thinking the Christian life is about knowing all the right answers, dispensationalism seems all the more appealing. It offered answers to things I wasn’t supposed to be able to have answers to: the end of the world and the timing of Jesus’ return.

I don’t have to tell you all the problems that come with a worldview that thinks it has all the answers. Arrogance, of course, is chief among them. Faith becomes a point of pride, because in this paradigm faith isn’t trust in God; it’s having all the right answers. Faith becomes superiority over the ignorant and the lost, and humility is transformed from a Christlike virtue to a deadly sin. To acknowledge the possibility of being wrong is to open up a breach in the well-constructed defenses of doctrinal surety.

Not only did the words “I might be wrong” never enter my mind; to have said those words would have felt like a sin. Which makes a sort of perverse sense. If right answers and right belief are the path to salvation, being wrong is a sin that paves the path to hell. Not just literally. At times, actual hell would have been preferable to the hell of personal embarrassment whenever I was exposed as being wrong in front of others. That’s exactly what I went through when I came face-to-face with the truth about the rapture: it felt like my own personal hell of embarrassment and self-doubt. This wasn’t my professor’s fault. It was mine for being so arrogant as to think not only that I had all the right answers but that I couldn’t possibly be wrong.

That’s why it took me so long to emerge from that hell. Any sort of life-altering self-realization takes a while to work through, of course. But I was coming out of a world­view that treated even the consideration of other points of view—at least about large theological issues—and the potential doubt that consideration might cause, to be nothing short of sinful. So if I was told by a person in authority that Muslims, LGBT people, alcohol, or rock music were sinful and here’s a Bible verse to prove it, I never thought to question it. If ever there was a moment when I did, I felt guilty for doubting the truth.

It’s this certainty—that we already have everything figured out and never need to consider the possibility that we might have been wrong about something or somebody—that stands as one of the greatest challenges the church faces today, particularly in light of globalization. As the world shrinks, we’re forced to come face-to-face with people who are different from us and on whose anonymity we could previously project all our prejudices. As science comes alongside globalization, its insights and revelations about how the world works can pour water on the fire of our conviction of who is dangerous and what is unnatural. So we have a choice to make. We can either break bread with our new neighbors and listen to what they have to say or we can continue to find reasons to hate them for being different from us. We can open ourselves up to the idea that not only could we have been wrong, but maybe the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives the way the Spirit was with Peter and his vision of the sheet filled with unclean food that he was commanded to eat (Acts 10:9-16). Or we can further entrench ourselves in our preconceived notions about the world and the people in it. We could consider that perhaps the Spirit is opening our eyes, as she did with Peter, to deeper truths about the world. Or we can reject that possibility, double down on our beliefs, and seek out proof texts to prove we were right all along.

Far too many of us have chosen to do the latter—to willfully live in the first naiveté. Admitting that we’re wrong either is too painful or is seen as sinful. And so arrogance becomes the sinew of our faith. It’s this elemental arrogance that has the church mired in a reputation of bigotry, hatefulness, and ignorance. For too long we’ve refused to make space for even the possibility that we might be wrong about anything. In the name of God, we’ve refused to make space for the people Jesus went out of his way to invite to the table of God. It’s this sort of sanctified arrogance that leads to an us-versus-them mentality that sees the world as a battlefield instead of a home. Our neighbors become our enemies. We dehumanize them simply because they don’t think or talk or believe or act exactly the way we do.

Learning to say “I don’t know”

As Paul reminds us in the timeless hymn of Philippians 2, we are called to imitate Christ’s humility, to have in us the sort of Christlike humility that values others above ourselves, so that we are looking not to our own interests but rather to the interests of others. We’re called to love people more than we love being right, but being right theologically rather than being in right relationship with our neighbor has become the defining identity of the church.

Sometimes that call to Christlike humility means acknowledging we’re wrong, but other times it’s as simple as saying “I don’t know.” Unfortunately, we don’t make much room in the church for “I don’t know” either, especially when it comes to our leaders. We expect them to have all the answers, all the time, and to give them to us whenever we ask, like they are some sort of theological Google-made-flesh. When right belief is the key to salvation, there is simply no space for not knowing.

Even after years of wandering in the spiritual wilderness, graduating from college, doing a graduate degree in theology that humbled me even more, and spending years of ministry with teenagers that humbled me still more—even after all that, I was still terrified of three little words: I don’t know.

As a minister, I had to be prepared to proclaim the gospel “in season and out,” as Paul commanded in 2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV). I thought I couldn’t do that without having all the answers, because that’s what the gospel was about to me: the right answers. So I had to have an answer ready at all times—or else make up something that sounded good. The idea of admitting I didn’t know was horrifying, a mini hell of embarrassment and shame. As a youth pastor, the fear was even more crippling. I was tasked with teaching teenagers the faith. In my mind, that meant I had to give them the answers and direction they needed to be good disciples. How could I do that if I didn’t have the answer to every question they asked?

When I finally found the courage to admit that even as a pastor, I didn’t know everything, and that I even had doubts about some of the things I said I believed, it felt like a giant burden was lifted off my shoulders. My admission also opened the floodgates, as friends and strangers alike began sharing their own questions, insecurities, and doubts.

It turned out I wasn’t alone. And not only was I not alone, I was probably in the majority. Most people in the church struggle with doubt and uncertainty at some point in their lives. Little did I know how many people sitting in the pews next to me at church were wrestling with the same doubts and questions that I was—including many standing behind the pulpit. We just didn’t want to admit it, let alone talk about it.

Sadly, we don’t make a lot of space for folks with questions. We silently shame them if they don’t have the right answers, ask too many questions, or refuse to join the right side on cultural or theological debates. Many mainline denominations and progressive traditions have made embracing doubters a kind of calling card. But in the sort of conservative, fundamentalist Christianity I grew up in, having all the right answers and never wavering in your faith were the marks of a true Christian. (Well, that and never having a beer.)

Holy doubt

We have forgotten the long and sacred history of doubt and struggle with faith in the church, going back long before there was something called the church.

The Old Testament is filled with stories of people who struggled with their faith. Abraham doubted God’s faithfulness to give him a promised heir. Moses doubted God would provide for the people in the wilderness. Elijah doubted God’s faithfulness. So did Job. When we get to the New Testament, we find twelve doubting disciples—including their leader, Peter, who doubted Jesus when he called him out to walk on the water. On the cross, Jesus took on the cry of the psalmist and doubters everywhere when he cried out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; cf. Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:1). After the crucifixion, the disciples hid in fear with no hope that things were going to get better. Even after the resurrection, Thomas doubted it was true until Jesus invited him to put his fingers in the holes of his hands.

But the spiritual struggles of the faithful didn’t stop with the Bible. After it became apparent that Jesus wasn’t coming back as soon as people expected, many in the early church had doubts about whether he was going to come back at all—so much so that the book of Revelation became something of an embarrassment to many Christians. In the Middle Ages, Saint John of the Cross endured what he called the “dark night of the soul.” In the modern era, that great pillar of faith Mother Teresa confessed, in her posthumously released diary, that she experienced tremendous doubts, including going some fifty years without feeling the presence of God in her life. Read that last line again. Mother Teresa—the person whose name has become synonymous with faithful Christianity—struggled with crippling doubt for fifty years. Half a century. Most of her adult life.

But in many corners of Christianity today, particularly within fundamentalism where dispensationalism thrives, doubt is treated as a sin. To doubt is to call into question both God and the authority of the church. The former is treated as blasphemy and the latter as an intolerable threat to the established order (or, more specifically, the people leading that established order). The Christian faith may have a long history of doubters, and the writers of the Bible may have gone out of their way to note doubt’s often-unavoidable place in our spiritual journey. But in many corners of the church today, doubt is treated as a betrayal of God’s love. If we really loved God, the logic goes, then we would never doubt God’s presence, God’s faithfulness, or the people who tell us they’ve been called by God to lead us.

When doubt becomes a scarlet letter in the church, one of three things results: 1) people are lost to their arrogance; 2) people live in agony, tormented in the shadows; or 3) people simply leave the church. The first and second—people living in arrogance, on the one hand, and others living in shame because of their doubts—have been going on forever. But we’re starting to see the third—people leaving the church—pick up steam each year. In the past decade alone, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, lost a million members.² Of course, not everyone is leaving because of doubts and questions. Some people have the space to ask questions in church and still leave, for myriad reasons. But in the information age, when people quite literally carry around the totality of human knowledge in their pocket, we in the church can’t afford to pretend we know everything. We can no longer claim we have everything figured out all the time.

We need to remember the example of Jesus. He didn’t chase Thomas away or chastise him for his doubt. He embraced him. When Peter faltered on the sea, Jesus didn’t let him drown. He reached out, picked him up, and carried him back to the boat, where he wasn’t greeted by shame but by fellow disciples whose own doubts were far stronger than his own—so strong, in fact, that they didn’t even have enough faith to get out of the boat. And when Jesus ascended into heaven, leaving his disciples behind with the great commission to go and make disciples of all the nations on earth, some still doubted. But Jesus didn’t excommunicate them. He gave them the same authority as the rest of the disciples to be his agents of grace in the world (Matthew 28:16-20).

The story of God’s people is the story of people who struggle with their faith, yet aren’t pushed away or chastised by God. Instead, we are given the grace to keep going, to keep doing the work of bringing the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven. Unfortunately, instead of embracing doubts, we often draw ideological lines in the sand and demand allegiance to our theological convictions. That approach might rally our base in the beginning. But silencing doubt and shaming people for asking too many questions—labeling them as “creating disunity”—ultimately ends up driving people away, often permanently.

The church’s intolerance of doubt almost drove me away. When I lost my faith in the rapture, I thought that I had lost my faith altogether. For a long time I thought that there was no room for me in the Christian faith if I didn’t have everything figured out or know all the right answers. That sense of spiritual homelessness spurred so much of my anger and embarrassment. I wasn’t just embarrassed because I had made a fool of myself in front of a professor I respected. I was angry because I thought that, in having all those answers taken away, I’d had my faith taken away from me as well. If Christianity was all about belief and if I didn’t have the right beliefs, who was I? What else was there left worth believing in?

The church has inflicted far too much pain on people by not making space for their questions and doubt. However, making space for people who doubt and wrestle with their faith isn’t about keeping people on the membership rolls and maintaining church attendance figures. Making space for people who doubt and wrestle with their faith is critical to the life of the church because faith is found in doubt. Without doubt, faith wouldn’t be faith. It would simply be knowledge. Knowledge may sound more appealing and powerful—it sure did to me when I was in love with the rapture. But Jesus said blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believe, not blessed are those who already have it all figured out (see John 20:29).

We seem to have forgotten that we see in a mirror dimly. One day we will see clearly, but that day is not today. And that’s okay, because we’re called to faith, not expertise. If we had all the answers it wouldn’t be faith; it would be something more akin to science. As wonderful as science is, we have to resist the urge to turn the Christian faith into a scientific system. We need to let science be science and faith be faith. Learning and understanding are in no way bad; in fact, they are a gift of the Holy Spirit. But when we try to force the round peg of faith into the square hole of science, not only do we strip faith of its mystery but, more importantly, we strip it of its boundless beauty.

The beauty of Christianity isn’t in its theological systems and dogmatic rules. It’s in the ability of faith as small as a tiny mustard seed to move mountains, love the unlovable, and bring heaven to earth. When we try to bind the Christian faith to the affirmation of ideology and dogma, we strip it of its life-giving, creation-transforming power. Faith is about transformation, not affirmation. It’s about believing that no matter how flawed we are, how riddled with doubt we might be, how broken and sinful our lives may have become, God loves us anyway. Faith is believing that God is working through us to do a new and wonderful thing in the world, not just for our sake but for all of creation.

Doubt isn’t something in need of fixing. It’s not a disease the church needs to cure. It’s a part of faith. It’s a step in all our journeys, much like Ricœur’s critical thinking stage. Doubt may even be a constant lifelong companion for some of us, just as it has been for so many saints throughout the history of the Christian faith. As the church, we must resist the urge to fight doubt with answers. We certainly must stop shaming people, whether overtly or covertly, for asking questions and having doubts about what they believe. Certainty is not the key to salvation. As Anne Lamott famously says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.”³

To those words of wisdom I would only add this: that walk is one we do together, because faith is something we do together. Faith is a way of living together, not a moment of individual intellectual assent. That’s why there’s room for doubt. If any of us struggle to stand up in the chaotic waters of faith and life, the rest of us carry them until they can stand on their own again. The way we do that—the way we carry each other and find the strength to keep going—isn’t with answers, certainty, or dogma. It’s through hope. Hope that things are going to get better. Hope that God is at work in the world. Hope that we live out each and every day until our faith becomes sight.

That’s what makes the Christian faith good news.

And that’s the story of Revelation.