Christians often talk about a faith journey. It has been a staple of Christian group interactions for one person to speak about how they were raised in the church and the various phases of faith and belief they went through. These ‘witnessings’ are understandably often quite emotional and powerful for both the person testifying and the audience, as one’s core beliefs about religion and spirituality are inextricably bound to one’s self-image, self-worth and deep longing for meaning.
I have had a journey too, but I would characterize it as a combination of faith, reason and logic, with doubt as a driving force. I went through an early childhood of Episcopal church attendance, which ended in the middle of my 6th grade year as my family moved to California and we ceased going to church. My interest in matters of church and spirituality was minimal throughout high school and college, though I had short involvements with Young Life, a Christian youth movement that recruited high school students, and with a soccer teammate in college who attempted to ‘bring me to Christ’.
After my short Naval career ended and I went to grad school, I began to visit church again on my own in Boston and I ultimately became very intrigued by Christian theology. When I married my wife, Karen, who had grown up as a Methodist Minister’s daughter and was totally committed to Christian social justice, my infatuation with Christianity accelerated. We became very involved in our church and I read widely in Christian literature. I even spent a long weekend at a Christian retreat known as Walk to Emmaus (named for the walk Jesus took post-resurrection, revealing himself to several disciples) and wrote a long essay proclaiming my beliefs.
This period of my life was very exciting and passionate as I explored my ‘faith’ within communities of very avid Christians. I was almost totally convinced that this faith in Christ and the tenets of Christian theology were the ultimate truth about our existence and purpose. Karen and I left our careers to join a Christian ministry, Habitat for Humanity, and immersed ourselves totally in this world.
But even in the midst of this most passionate embrace of Christianity, there were questions that I posed to myself that slowly began to undermine the fervor of my belief. These were questions about the exclusive nature of Christianity – “I am the way the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me”, and the obvious contradiction of a loving God and the eternal damnation of non-Christians.
I was able to reconcile my ardent faith with these apparent inconsistencies by use of the oft-employed explanation that ‘in God all things are possible’ and that how He judges the world is a mystery that we will neither solve nor understand. We must have faith. This seemed reasonable at the time.
But then, as my experience in the world and my knowledge of people, power and history expanded, other doubts began to nibble at the edges of my belief. Closer readings of the New Testament identified multiple inconsistencies that only a blind acceptance of the text being directly God-given and inerrant could explain. I read several scholarly analyses of biblical history that explained how Christian doctrine had been established and how the texts were copied hundreds of times over the centuries.
The mere fact that the gospels and letters were written multiple decades after events occurred and were clearly written with specific audiences and goals in mind calls into question their accuracy. The biblical rehash of themes that had already occurred in multiple other religions and mythologies (virgin birth, sacrifice, resurrection, etc.) seemed to be more in line with the long history of human desire to understand our existence and the tendency for humans to appropriate this desire to create structures for obedience and control than a revelation of divine truth.
But the most difficult thing for me to ignore was the long list of illogical aspects of religious belief. The paradox of creation versus evolution; the incongruence of ‘God’s plan’ and free will (not to mention the sheer leap of faith necessary to imagine a God listening to prayers, deciding where and when to act, allowing huge injustices to occur, etc.); the idea of souls being inserted into humans who sometimes die after a few days, months or years – before they are even cognitive beings; the idea of heaven and how our eternal reward will juggle family, friends across our lives and sustain us for eternity in a blissful state; the occurrence of miraculous events over two thousand years ago in an age of ignorance and superstition versus the lack of religious miracles today.
These questions and doubts made it much more difficult for me to fully envelop myself in Christian faith. I loved the sense of community and the emotional highs that spiritual liturgy and music provided, but found my own beliefs becoming ever more abstract and uncertain. I felt like a hypocrite and a charlatan as I mouthed the doxology and articles of faith.
Religion recognizes doubts and questions, but it insists that one can overcome them with faith, that ‘substance of things hoped for, evidence of things unseen’. Yet things hoped for and unseen can take almost any form. How can one choose to have a very specific faith when so much evidence contradicts that faith and so much uncertainty and mystery enshrouds all matters outside our physical and material experience? Even our physical world continues to defy full understanding as quantum physics and cosmology evolve.
It is tempting to disparage religious belief as simplistic and many intellectuals, scientists and atheists energetically ridicule religion. Humans can be very arrogant and vicious, and there is a lot of ego and vanity at play in the battle between so-called believers and non-believers. It is a sad testament to the inevitable potential for conflict in all human affairs.
My own journey continues. I have accepted the doubt, the mystery and the uncertainty, though I cannot say I am at peace with it. I claim neither belief nor disbelief. I search for insights without expecting resolution. I continue to love the idea of a soul or spirit, the hope of existing beyond my physical death, the vague image of some sort of loving force in the universe, whether pantheistic or deistic. But I will not pretend to know or even to have ‘faith’. This is not a comfortable state of mind, but it is an honest one and I cannot imagine any other way to live.
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