Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment Can Invite Us into a Deeper Faith

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Josh Chatraw
My name is Josh Chatraw. I am the chair of evangelism and cultural engagement at Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Stanford University as of about two months ago. To not this morning, we’re going to talk about doubt, obviously, deconstruction and disillusionment. And we hope that you will actually not end with more doubt and deconstruction, disillusionment, but that we give you some pathways to hope. But you’re probably here, because your friends or your loved ones, have either gone through this process of deconstruction or serious doubts. Maybe they’ve already walked away from the church. They’re part of the statistics that Michael Graham and has been talking to us about some of this this week, and the great churching or maybe you yourself are experiencing deconstruction and doubt. And you’ve you’ve come and in hope of getting some actual hope. And if any of that applies to you, I’m guessing it’s most of you, in some way or another, then you know, this is a complex topic. This is a hard topic. This is a gut wrenching topic. For each of us as personally, we’ve had friends walk away, we’ve had students walk away from the church. So the first thing we need to do is pray and pray for the Spirits help. And then I’ll introduce my good friend in just a second. So let’s go to the Lord.

Father, we ask that You would give us faith, a deeper faith, a stronger faith. Lord, help us in our weakness, help us in our unbelief. Or bring us back again and again to the truth of the gospel to the goodness of Christ, to the beauty of His death and resurrection. Lord, make us be makers, people who both can empathize with those who are in the agony of doubt, and disillusionment, and also those who can boldly invite them back or invite them to paths of faith, and hope. Be with us this morning. In Christ’s name, Amen. So my co author, my former student, and most importantly, my friend is about to come up. And Jack is certainly has the brains to help us on this topic. But more importantly, Jack has a pastor’s heart. And that will come out in just a minute. If you, when you when you start teaching, as I did about 10 years ago, you don’t know who you’re teaching, right? You have, for me, it was undergrads and you have a group of my first semester, I have a group of 19 year olds, and we’re going through theology together and a student keeps coming to me after class, wanting to talk more and, and that was Jack. And I watched him over the last 10 years grow not only as a as a theologian, but as a father and as one of my closest friends. So it was a privilege to write this book with him. And it’s a privilege to introduce him to you this morning, Would you welcome him.

Jack Carson
Philosopher Charles Taylor is famous in TGC circles for writing this little book, a secular age. This book has been so influential, at least in part, because what Taylor does, and it is he, he draws us into the feeling of living in a world in which faith is fraught with all kinds of complications and unbelief is always pressing down upon us. He shows us what it’s like to feel a secular age. And Taylor draws his readers into the anxiety this new world creates, his conclusions are certainly helpful. But what makes his conclusion so powerful is the feeling his readers have, where they in their own lives can relate to this pressure. And so, so my job today in the spirit of Taylor, is to help all of you feel the experience of deconstruction. And as much as I can, I’m going to do this through the perspective of those who are deconstructing? I’m going to do this first through someone’s story, and share what it looks like for them personally to walk through this process. And second, I’m going to use a bit of a metaphor to draw all of the experiences we’ve heard together and some sort of way that we can understand. This may at moments make you feel anxious or uncomfortable. Because I’m gonna be packaging together a variety of critiques in a way that may hit close to home, I know it hits close to home for me. And to a certain extent, I feel anxious even sharing some of these critiques. But if you were in the D churching session on Monday, you heard the statistic that there are 40 million people who, over recent years no longer attend church. And out of that number 10 million of them would no longer even call themselves Christians. And so this is a mission field that desperately needs workers. And it’s a mission field full of complicated and painful experiences. And I won’t be offering many solutions during my talk today. Because I’m going to leave those to Josh, I’m gonna set up lots of problems and he will solve them. Bring all the solutions if you leave feeling more anxious than when you came. It’s not my fault. It’s his you can send him all the strongly worded emails about that anxiety. And a lot of discussions about deconstruction and deconversion sort of get stuck on the question about whether people can lose their salvation. And it’s a super important question. I hold the perseverance of the saints really strongly. But it’s not the question we’re asking. In this session. We’re sort of doing something in phenomenology. We’re engaging the phenomenon that some people think they are Christians, and are deeply committed and later on, walk away from the house of faith, as we’ll call it. And that’s what we’re looking at that phenomenon. And so what does it feel like? to deconstruct? Well, you may have heard of the YouTube personality and co host of Good Mythical Morning Rhett McLaughlin. Around three years ago, Rhett shared his deconstruction and deconversion story online. And it has been wildly popular drawing over 3 million views with many of those viewing it leaving comments behind about how their deconstruction experiences almost exactly like Rhett’s red frames his entire deconstruction story is a coming of age narrative where his eyes are slowly open to the problems in his childhood faith. He expresses in a number of ways throughout his account that he did not want to leave Christianity, but rather as one doubt led to another doubt. He desperately tries to grab a hold of anything that can give him a sure foundation and his faith. Because of this, retin narrates his entire deconstruction account, alongside his engagement with Christian apologetics. He kept as he would encounter a doubt turn to Christian apologist to solve that doubt. But turning to these sources did not always give right what he was looking for, for example, like, like many young people ret went off to college and began asking questions about Christianity’s relationship to modern science. He kept hearing different arguments from different Christian leaders, with one claiming that their view with each one claiming that their view is biblical. Some of these leaders would point at the other Christians and say, don’t follow them. Because they’re compromising on Scripture. Those same Christian leaders will respond back and say no, no, my view is perfectly consistent with Scripture but but ret Don’t, don’t follow them because they’re just against science. Read, desperately wanted to know who to trust. And no matter who he listened to, at least one of the smart Christian leaders was going to have good reasons to think he was wrong. And he’s right moved from one belief to another, trying to find some position that was totally free of doubt. His anxiety just kept growing. Each time he would switch to some new view, he would find more arguments hiding behind Reddit threads, and YouTube videos and online communities full of doubt. There was so much information out there, and he thought he was sure if he could just dig deep enough. Through the information that exists, he could find that answer and the position he could be certain. This pattern of doubt leading to new beliefs, leading to yet new doubts based on those beliefs continues throughout Rhett’s entire deconstruction, and it spreads into a variety of areas where read begins questioning God’s actions in the Old Testament. The archaeological evidence for the biblical account the problem of evil and textual reliability. Each time he runs into a doubt, he turns to the apologist trying to find an answer to banish this doubt. But with each successive question that leads to at least a slightly unsatisfying answer. His anxiety grows and grows and grows. And that anxiety of course, just fueled his need for an answer. And so read eventually does give up on this anxiety driven search for so certainty. And he becomes convinced that Christian apologist, apologetic arguments are unhelpful, and at the very least, cannot give him what he really wants. They can’t give him certainty in his faith. And so he writes in his journal at the time, my faith is still weak, but it is not gone. From an intellectual standpoint, I may never have certainty about my faith, or the so that pursuit may be fruitless. It’s becoming clear to me that the significance of my faith, or the so called Proof of Christianity is not found in a well reasoned argument. Rather, it rings true the way a musical note would. It hits my resonant frequency. Sort of experiential reality that Rhett is gesturing towards? Here’s something I’m sure all of us can relate to. There’s certainly a sense in which the musical note that is Christianity resonates deep in my soul, and I draw comfort from that. And while I actually think well reasoned, arguments are super helpful in the Christian life. It’s wise of REBT, to recognize at this point, that a sort of frantic search for rigid proof and certainty through apologetic arguments is an unhelpful journey. No matter how effective any given argument is, it can ultimately banish every form of doubt. You see, right was measuring his faith against certainty, but certainty can just, it can mean different things. As John Calvin explains in the institute’s surely while we teach that faith ought to be certain and assured, we cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt, or any assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety. Believers are in perpetual conflict with their own unbelief. Even in the midst of Christendom where everyone around Calvin believes in Jesus Christ, he still feels the pressures of unbelief, and the reality that it was within him. And so Brett was right to recognize that this drive for proof was unhelpful. But sadly, REBT was unable to rest in a posture that didn’t have certainty. Because it didn’t fit the Christianity. Red had known it didn’t fit what Christianity claimed to be Tourette giving up on certain certainty seem to be cowardly. In fact, shortly after this, and his account, rep calls this a cowardly face, to simply accept that he wouldn’t be able to solve all these issues felt like a cop out. Like he’s just trying to hold on to something he’s emotionally connected to, but it’s already given up on intellectually. And so he asked the question, sort of at the climax of his deconversion. If I don’t have to believe I don’t have to believe in a God who would send people to hell. Why would I? This is a gut wrenching account. I mean, he has now around four hours online detailing his walk away from Christianity. And he was so committed, but when ret decided he didn’t have to believe in God anymore. He just did. Some may want to argue that reds deconstruction demonstrates the need for more apologetic arguments, and more rigid standards surrounding Christian belief. After all, if REBT had never begun to doubt, or think about which model best helped Christianity fit with modern science, maybe he never would have gotten to the point where he thought they were incompatible.

But I think there’s a bit of a problem with this approach. We’ve never had more apologetic resources available than we do today. And deconstruction only seems to be speeding up in recent years. I certainly don’t blame the apologetic material. I think it’s awesome. And I don’t blame the apologist for disagreeing with each other on various issues. What Brett discovered, I think, our ability to disagree and sharpen each other is a strength of Christianity, iron sharpens iron. Instead, I want to suggest that the posture rep received while growing up is at least a large part of why he was unable to rest and have faith that did not give him certainty. In addition to the increased external pressures brought about by secularism and modernity, and the ever present epistemic pluralism that is beamed into our phones every single day by the Internet exposing us to every single belief in the world. At least part of the reason why REBT wasn’t comfortable as the way the church has responded to these external pressures. You see, right emphasize multiple times throughout his account that he had been told growing up that Christians have the truth and the way he He interpreted this idea is that he, as a Christian had to follow a specific path of rationality. To find a clear answer, he wanted to treat truth finding, like some sort of machine where you sort of pour in the objective data, and then you churn out this clear and objective answer. That way, you don’t have to worry about who disagrees with you. The evidence is clear, there’s no reason to question. So this posture, made it to where every issue that remained at least a little unanswered, or little uncertain, actually operated as an evidence against Christianity, where he wasn’t able to believe it, because it couldn’t prove itself. And he had tried, but he just couldn’t find his way to that solid and elusive proof. And even if he did, the positions he was starting to hold were not the positions that his childhood church held. And so what what would they think they certainly thought they had the truth. And so what was supposed to do was his church wrong. They were the ones who told him about Jesus. What says they weren’t wrong about Jesus as well. They promised they had the truth, but read eventually saw that is a promise they couldn’t deliver on. And so rather than doubling down on throwing as much apologetic material as possible, on people going through deconstruction, let’s take a look at why REBT may not have received that apologetic material well. And I think CS Lewis can actually help us a little bit here. CS Lewis famously portrayed Christianity as a house with many rooms. These rooms represent sort of unique combinations of denominations, cultures and eras. And as an apologist, his invitation was for people to step through the front door of the house into the hallway of faith, a space that he called Mere Christianity. Some were united by the shared beliefs of the entire house, but not yet divided by the intra Christian disputes that mark out the various rooms of the house. This analogy rests on a specific claim that there is a unity amidst the diversity of Christianity. See, those deconstructing often grew up in a specific room of this house, they experienced a certain way to be Christian, but since this way, is the only Christianity they have ever known, it seems to them, as if, when they’re deconstructing, they’re rejecting the entire house. And as I’ve talked to those who are deconstructing this reality plays out before my eyes repeatedly, a student will come in and have some issue that seems as if it should be easy to help them resolve. And it proves to be incredibly difficult. They don’t want to be anti intellectual. And I can show them how Christianity offers them the resources to see 2000 years of intellectual development throughout the church and how it’s been a bastion of intellectual development throughout the world. They don’t want to be tied to partisan politics and be driven there. And I can show them how Christianity is spoken prophetically to all kinds of political regimes all throughout its history. They don’t want to be tied to a specific reading of Genesis, and I can show them how the church fathers were open to a variety of readings on Genesis. They don’t want to be sexist or racist or xenophobic, and I can show them that Christianity gave us the very resources to call those things evil. But I quickly discovered that my deconstructing students thought I was simply patching a sinking ship that I was covering up for real Christianity. That what I was explaining, well, it’s existing up here in the world of words, while their experience was real Christianity. And this is when we begin to realize that those who are deconstructing don’t only need a path forward in their faith, but they also need a way to understand their own history with Christianity. If their local church growing up was tinged with an anti intellectualism that now feels oppressive to them. They need a way to understand that the Christianity they’ve experienced is not simply baseline Christianity. So while listening to the accounts of those who have deconstructed, we came to reflect on Louis’s analogy of a house in a new way. We introduced them to a room in the house that they may have grown up in this room is what we call the attic of the house. This attic was built by well meaning people who wanted to protect the faith of those inside. It was placed as far away from the door as possible, and it was built with tight and strong, rigid walls that offer protection from the ever changing world outside the house. The attic is a room in the house of faith that does not present itself as a room among many rooms. In in the house, it has rigid, rigid epistemic standards that do not simply reflect the historical standards of the church has practices designed to enforce those rigid standards and operates in an us versus them paradigm along boundaries that shift as the context surrounding the attic shifts. So you may be perfectly fine to run up into an attic every once in a while to grab an old yearbook, or to grab your Christmas decorations and come on down and prepare for the holidays. But imagine with me for a second what it might be like to grow up in an attic. Think about how tight the walls are around you. I mean, you’ve gotten used to it in some sense, because it’s the whole way you’ve grown up, the walls have always been tight around you. But still, it does feel tight. As you’re moving around this attic, there are these sort of low hanging rafters that you’re having to duck under. And you started to get a hunched over posture, where your back is actually bent from dodging these rafters. You know, the, it’s hot and dusty up there, and the floors creaky. And one day as you’re moving around the attic, you catch a glimpse out the window. And out there, there are no walls. It looks like there’s fresh air. And you begin to question whether or not this attic is really as good of a place to live, as you’ve always been told. You know, your claustrophobia really starts to kick in. Because of these tight walls. And you think it’s probably best to just jump out the window and get to freedom. This is what deconstruction feels like. But the thing is, for those who are about to jump out of the attic, their posture has already been shaped by these low hanging rafters. And if they jump out without looking at how that posture is affecting them, it’s going to stay with them the rest of their life. And so, what are these rafters and how do they affect our posture. The first one someone growing up in this space runs into is the imperative to make up your own mind. Identifying this command as a rafter of this attic may seem really surprising to you at first glance. After all, taking responsibility for your own beliefs is a healthy and integral part of growing up. But you see, attic Christianity takes this wise advice to an unhealthy extreme. In the attic. Each person is tasked with charting their own path through the many controversies of the faith. And there are two parts to this command. Right? There’s a clear individualism in the life of the mind president this command, but there’s also a drive towards the kind of decisiveness. Not only do you need to be the lone captain of your beliefs, but you also need to chart a course. You can’t be comfortable and uncertainty or mystery because Christians have the truth. This mental individualism means that the writings of theologians and church fathers are relegated to simple good advice, essentially equivalent to any other Christian who’s reading their bible and reflecting on it as well. This creates a bit of a problem for those experiencing doubt though, who can they trust? Who can guide them as they are working through their doubts? Everyone is shouting opinions at them and many of those opinions are seemingly being drawn from the Bible. And amidst all of these swirling opinions, the attic dweller is tasked with deciding who is right. After all, each believer is their own priest and no one can give them their faith. They’re told it’s fine to read other Christians, but you certainly can’t rely on their expertise. There are a lot of experts after all, and they’re all arguing for different things.

And so with a wide scope of intellectual and emotional challenges posed to Christianity Today, this posture requires people to assume investigative expertise in far ranging areas from biology to geology, textual criticism to mental health. And you might you might think it’d be possible to just quickly duck under this rafter make up your own mind and move on. But right on the other side of this command is another seemingly contradictory instinct rafter one might tell people to make up your own mind but rafter to demand that they do it in the right way. Well at Christianity tells people that they can decide for themselves what to believe the leaders in any particular space, certainly do expect their followers to choose the right beliefs. Think for yourself is what is said. But then in 1000 little ways an important addendum is communicated as long as you are thinking in the right way. Find the truth through an investigation of the text but if you come to a different conclusion, you probably read the text wrong. Leaders in the attic have too often assumed as Mark No writes in the scandal of the evangelical ma In a lack of self consciousness characteristic of 19th century sciences confidence in submitting science 19 centuries confidence in science. See 19th century science was incredibly confident in human ability to solve any problem. If humans were tasked with answering a question, all they had to do was perform the right experiments and follow the right processes. And if they were careful enough and worked long enough, they would be able to answer any question with a clear and objective answer. But treating theology like an objective science, based on some over realized idea of human capacity leads to minimizing at least three things that have been super important in the life of the Christian mind over the past few 1000 years. First, if each question can generate a sure and obvious answer, mystery is minimized as a vital part of Christian thought. Second, if each person can attain these clear and obvious answers on their own, then humility in our conclusions seems, at the very least irrelevant. The logic goes something like this. The common sense reading of the Bible clearly says

that the earth is 6000 years old, or that women should stay home, or when and how Jesus is coming back. You don’t need to be humble, because it’s just the plain reading of the Bible.

Third, if someone rejects that clear and obvious answer that you have found, generosity is no longer an ideal that constrains you. Anyone rejecting that clear and obvious reading is either ill informed, Ill intended or just one step away from destroying the whole house of faith. ducking under this sort of quasi scientific approach to theology as you’re avoiding this rafter, those in the attic are pressured to search for an objective answer. They could think they could just prove it if they just read one more book. If they just read one more article or watch one more video, they might find that proof. And this is when they run right into the third rafter. See, you gotta make up your own mind in the right way, on every question. If an objective and clear rationality can guide the theological process, then any deviation from that clear rationality might become a gospel issue. And its implications. After all, if a clear and obvious answer can always be found in the Bible, and you further believe that Scripture speaks to every area of life, then every question in life should have a clear and obvious biblical answer. And if you deny that answer, you must be denying either the Bible sufficiency or its authority. To be a faithful Christian, then it feels like you have to have the right view on everything from vaccines to Harry Potter science to beer, national politics to yoga. And the fourth rafter that they bumped their head into next makes it clear that they don’t only need the right view but they have to live that view in the right way. So rafter for do all of those things while staying between our lines. The entire house of faith has always been concerned with morality. And it is obviously important that there are lines we should stay between in the Christian life just like rafter for rough just like your after one rafter fours based on clear good ideas. But attic Christianity has an unfortunate habit of weaponizing morality in service of identity formation almost entirely as a reaction to the world outside the house. These weaponized moral guardrails work to separate those in the attic. From what the sociologist Christian Smith calls negative reference groups, which serve in the attic dwellers mind as models for what they do not believe. What they do not want to become and how they do not want to act. Depending on the section of the attic that a doubter grew up in atheists, agnostics, liberals may all serve as this negative reference group. And since leaders create these guardrails, in response to the changing cultural pressures being put upon Christianity, the guard rails are buying necessity changing over time. And so this feels like for someone growing up in the attic, who isn’t paying attention to all the reasons the leaders have for changing these guardrails. This feels like morality is changing. At least least at least what the attic leaders really care about, seems to keep changing. At one moment, and may seem like all the focus is on abstaining from non Christian movies and music. And then a decade later, no one really seems to care quite as much about that. When I was growing up teaching young people not to date for fear of purity concerns was really popular. Some portions of the attic emphasize this through all kinds of rituals and ways of enforcing it, but it’s far less popular now. During the COVID pandemic, some portions of the attic saw the rejection of masks or vaccines as a test of Christian faithfulness. Over the next year, doubters may be scrolling Twitter and see a Christian leader tell them that Christian morality demands they vote for a certain presidential candidate. And if they scroll just a little bit more, another respected leader may show up who tells them that Christian morality makes it impossible for them to vote for that candidate. For obvious reasons, the shifting standards make growing up in the attic stressful, particularly when you’re trying to make up your own mind in the right way, about more and more issues. And worse yet, these negative reference groups become more confusing as you grow up. Because once you go and you meet them, you realize a lot of times they’re kind, generous people. And you wonder why Christianity taught you to view them as malevolence. And then, as the moral failures within the attic began to pile up, abuses of power and sexual immorality, the disillusionment really starts setting in and you wonder, was any of it ever real. Those going through deconstruction often want to remain Christian. But they’re beginning to despair that the certainty they once had is gone forever. They’re tired of trying to find that elusive proof. And they feel as if every concession they make is a little retreat, and a little failure of the belief that they once held so dear. They’re wondering if it might be easier to simply let go of faith entirely. And at this point, a coming of age narrative can begin to form in their mind, just like so many others who grew up and walked away from their faith, perhaps they too are simply leaving behind the reductive beliefs of their childhood. One argument is that the attic has set people up with a posture that can lead to this. Redhead content continued to hold this posture throughout his entire deconstruction. And it’s why he could never find peace in a faith that did not give him a rigid certainty. Perhaps our job today is to find those who have jumped out of the house, jump right out of the attic, and now live outside entirely and tell them in a fresh way about Jesus. They think they know him. They think they know about him, and they’ve rejected him, but they don’t. Maybe by helping them understand that their view of Christianity was limited that their view of Jesus was limited, we can invite them into the great procession of saints who have for 2000 years proclaim the name of Jesus Christ and taken great comfort in him. Maybe if we help them realize that the attic isn’t the whole house, we can invite them back through the front door into a Mere Christianity from which they can explore the house. And Josh, of course, we’ll talk about how to do this next. But first, let me introduce him. To all of you. Joshua Chateau is the beast in Divinity School, Billy Graham chair for evangelism and cultural engagement. His recent books include the Augustine way surprised by doubt and telling a better story. He serves as a fellow with both the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics and the Center for pasture theologians. And Josh has been my friend and mentor for a long time, and has helped me walk through dark nights of my soul where I was struggling with intense doubt. And he did this for me by modeling a kind of life that has this generous, committed robust orthodoxy filled with a love of Jesus. He’s the husband of Tracy, the father of Addison and Hudson, and now he gets to fix the many problems that I have created for all of you.

Josh Chatraw
Jack’s done a great service for us even though it doesn’t feel like it in the Moment by helping us understand a bit more of what it feels like to have the rafters pressing in on you. I think you’ve Yeah, I think you maybe did too good of a job and left me too little time. So we’ll talk about that later. So my job is to offer some hope. My job is to give you some ways that you might release some of the pressure. We might refocus people on Jesus on the gospel, you might help help them work through Yes, use apologetics. But do it with a different posture. And so that’s what I’ll talk about in the next few minutes. Of course, the best way to leave any attic is simply walk down stairs. And so that’s our invitation, or a ladder, whatever you want to use, but just we’ll just go down the old fashioned way, there’s no reason to jump. as uncomfortable as it might be. For some of us, we needed what Jack just gave us we needed we need to hear rich stories, to help us understand the present challenges. But we also need we can’t stop there we we need to look on the main floor of Christianity, to hear the stories that can guide us through doubt and help us guide others through doubt. So if you know anything about me, you know we’re about to go here. 1600 years ago, Augustine of Hippo grew up in the backwaters of the Roman Empire. He was raised in the kind of Bible Belt of late antiquity. His mom was a devout Christian Monica who diligently took him to church. And it was something like late antiquities version of attic Christianity. Authoritarian Bishop’s an anti intellectual streak at times, a rigid moral code and literal interpretations of well just about everything. And at the same time pushing in from outside there was a strong pagan influence and it was very close by his teachers, and his school and even his own dad. From his early years, Augustine was absorbed in ancient versions of the achievement narrative, they were beckoning him to climb up the ladder of Roman society. This isn’t so far different from the American achievement stories that we’re all swimming in today. He increasingly saw Christian the Christianity as he kind of climbed the ladder He saw Christianity, particularly the Christianity that he was raised in as naive and even embarrassing. He believed he had found in a set called masochism, what his quaint childhood faith can never provide certainty based on reason alone. Until one day, Agustin discovered that this was actually a childish coming of age story that he and his friends like to tell each other to feel superior. He came to discover that it wasn’t Chris, it wasn’t just Christianity that required faith, everyone, in some sense, live by faith. This is why I guess he’s known for believing to understand. But he’s not quite there yet. This isn’t Augustine, the theologian that we know today he, at this point he, he had given up the idea that he could to plus to his way to the big questions of life, there were no absolute proofs that would render God the certain result of a logical equation or you can’t pump them out of a machine. As as as Jack was illustrating, so disillusioned and jaded, he entered a period of skepticism. The great theologian Agustin in his period of skepticism, skepticism, but one day, having climbed the ranks as a successful re tour, and now living amongst the cultural power plays in Milan, he found himself drawn in by the preaching, yes, the preaching, the preaching of the famous Bishop Ambrose. He didn’t go if you know anything about the story, he doesn’t go because he thinks, Okay, I’m still in the search for truth, and I’m gonna find it in a church. Now he goes, because well, he’s a writer, and he’s heard about the preaching skills. By analogy, you can imagine a cosmopolitan New Yorker showing up in the early 2000s at this Redeemer place, because they’ve heard about this guy named Keller and they want to just hear how he speaks. But then very quickly, they get more than they bargained for ambrosus ambrosus preaching presented to Augustine, a very different space than the attic version of Christianity that Augustine hadn’t grown up and now through the Christians in Milan, he was invited to come downstairs and look again at the faith he thought he had grown out of and so by the time we get to Augustine at the end of book five confessions, you have books instead of chapters. It’s weird, I know. But in book five, this is what he says, are resolved there for to live as a catechumen. So he was going to receive instruction in the Catholic Church Universal church until some kind of certainty Dawn by which I might direct my steps or right, so catch this. At this point, Augustine is still very unsure, very uncertain, not a Christian, but he’s willing to step into Christianity again and try it on. This time, however, he’s not trying to discover the proof of Christianity in a way that he might solve a mathematical equation. In fact, he says that and confessions, he says he gave up on that. Instead, he adopts a more what I would call rational view of rationality. We need to be all about rationality, we need to be so rational that we have a rational view about it. Augustine has been humbled. He’s begun to adopt a new posture. He’s tried on the rationalism of the Mana keys, he’s traveled away of meritocracy and hopes of achieving Roman glory. And he’s restless. He’s tried on a kind of skepticism. There’s nothing there for him. For a short time, he dabbled with Neo Platonism. And I’m not going to go through that. But with each he saw not only intellectual problems, yes, but he saw existential problems that something was off. In today’s pluralistic world, we will often need to imaginatively do the same with those who are trying to help. We shouldn’t let them jump out of the attic. Imagining that they’re going to land in this kind of neutral nowhere. Everyone has to live somewhere. To be human is to assign value and live towards them. And to be human is to be a social and moral creature to be human is then habit, some kind of story about the world. We all intuitively do that. The question for someone considering leaving Christianity that I would encourage you to ask is Where will you live? What story will you inhabit? We have to learn to come alongside the doubters and the disillusioned and ask what story is most rational, what space because you’re going to live somewhere what space is going to allow us to flourish with others. And in a world that’s unstable and harsh and we feel the anxiousness because of the world we’re living in right now. What practices are going to bring us peace and joy, grit and stability. In the book, we cover four spaces outside the house, new Atheism, what we call happy skepticism, open spirituality and mythic truth. Without going into the details of those things. Here’s what I want to say. We need to teach people to be or at least ask doubters. Ask our friends, ask your family members to be just as critical with these spaces that they’re about to jump into or that they’ve already inhabited as they are with a Christian house. Now, this isn’t in some sense, this isn’t new, thoughtful Christian teachers have been doing this for a long time. Let me point to one, Dostoyevsky. Now, if you haven’t read Dostoevsky, after you read surprised by doubt, go pick that up and budget the year okay. Brothers Karamazov is a book I’m particularly referring to and through the character character Alyosha. Dostoevsky asked asked questions of a skeptical brother Ivan. Now, Ivan in the story is, is this picture of skepticism any he says at different points, even if there is a God? Even if there is a God Ivan says he rejects him because of the suffering in the world. He hands it back his ticket as he famously says Alyosha doesn’t so much take him head home. Because the thing about Alyosha is, although he’s pious he can’t keep pace with with his brother intellectually, he knows that. But he does know how to ask questions. Really good questions. One of the questions he asks is, he says, but the little sticky leaves and the precious tombs and the blue sky and the woman you love? How will you live? How will you love them? And that’s the question that will haunt Ivan throughout the novel. It’s often best not to take route to take the rooms that I’m that I’m talking about outside of the house head on, but rather learn to come in from the side door and ask these types of questions. To do that to do so you need to do some reflecting. How does Christ haunt the space that this person is about to step into? Or is already in? What questions might move this person to take a more critical stance about this room they’re about to jump into this kind of engagement with spaces outside of the house is meant to serve as a kind of an forgive me for mixing metaphors that kind of smelling salt

so that the person you’re trying to get care for will wake up, and they might reconsider what they’re doing might reconsider Christine Unity, so that they might actually consider coming downstairs and looking around. But in order to do this, they are going to need a different posture. And again, at this point I want to turn to Luis to give us some advice. This is from his essay meditation in a tool shed, he says this, I was standing today, in the dark tool shed, the sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door, there came a sun beam, from where I stood that beam of light with the specks of dust floating in it was the most striking thing in the place, everything else was almost pitch black, I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it. Then I moved so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool shed and above all, no beam. Instead, I saw framed and the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves me moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that 90 odd million miles away the sun, looking along the beam and looking at the beam are very different experiences to look at Christianity is to look at the core truth of the faith and examine it that we need to do this. We need to walk people through this as means coming back again and again. And looking at the historical claim, Jesus died and he rose again. So this is what I say. If you can believe the resurrection, you should stay in the house, you should hang in there. Stay with it. It doesn’t mean that all these objections are going to be answered especially not right away. For some of them for some of the questions you have there likely never be answered. It doesn’t mean that all your doubt will magically vanish. But as we’ve already heard, Calvin didn’t think that was going to happen. So I say stay with it. Ask the person to look again at the evidence, whether it be into writes below book on the resurrection, or some lay level summaries, which will most likely be where you want to go at first Keller’s reason for God, those chapters are still wonderful in summarizing rights arguments, or we’ve tried our hand at this at surprised by doubt. And so go through one of those, just say, Hey, would you read this? Can we discuss it, weigh it together. But also, and here’s the here’s the big point on this. Don’t overplay your hand. There are strong, evidential reasons for the resurrection. But more is always going on with us humans than simply the evidence. historical arguments are never going, as Jack has already argued, is never going to give, give us 100% rationalistic certainty. That’s just not how history works. The question isn’t, can the resurrection be proven? The question is what makes best sense? Is it a rational wager, to bet on the resurrection? In some sense? Sometimes I describe the Christian life like it’s every morning, I get up and I wager on the resurrection. I repent and I raised her and I wager on the resurrection, think Luther was right, repentance is essential, a daily activity in the Christian life. But for me in this kind of secular frame, I get up and I wager again, and I live in light of that. Next, when we’re looking at Christianity, I want to help people refocus on the person of Jesus, our thoughts about Jesus, are going to be colored by the people who introduced him to us. This is inescapable part of our of us as social beings as relational beings. If someone has grown cynical through the years because of the failings in their religious community, it can be also easy to view Jesus through those lenses. But disillusionment with the attic or with a particular religious community doesn’t have to leave them with a jaundiced view of Jesus, we have to be patient. Ask them to read the gospels together with you. The goal is to recalibrate their faith not an abstract ideas. But first level, the story, the person of Jesus that we see coming to us in the pages of the Gospels, and Jesus, we find what love and true greatness look like. And Jesus, we see the one who prayed for those who were crucifying him. Even at the end of his life, Jesus was turning the tables, the just dying for the unjust, the guiltless, taking on our guilt, evil, defeated by good the king, laying down his life for his people. I also at this point, as you’re reading through the Gospels focused on Jesus’s claims, you know, as much as I love my friends, as much as I love my family and my wife, I could never, ever think one of them were God. I know them too. Well. I’m sure they would say the same thing about me their sins, my sins or shortcomings, but in Jesus is This is remarkable. In Jesus’s case, quite shockingly, not only did he make this radical claim in various different ways to be God, the people who were close to this closest to him, began to somehow believe he actually was. And Jesus, we see the truth and beauty of and goodness have a life that has invited worship, that invited worship of the earliest disciples, and they did worship Him. And His life has been inviting worship for the last 2000 years. We’re all worshipping beings, we’re going to worship something. If not Jesus, it’s going to be something. Looking at the light of Christianity will also sometimes mean learning to distinguish between the load bearing walls holding up the entire house, and the walls that divide the different rooms Jack was getting at this. This is not about the person coming to a position on every debated topic that’s plaguing them. This is about again, helping them adopt a posture that allows for mystery and prevents an existential crisis over everything we aren’t sure about. But this all raises the question if you’re thinking along with me, well, yeah, but what what are the load bearing walls of the Christian house and this is well, where we as evangelicals as Protestants, we need church history to help us here, the early Creed’s act as a kind of structural blueprint for the house marking out the load bearing walls. Many in the midst of deconstruction have paid the price of inheriting a type of Christianity that’s disconnected from the collective wisdom of the past, particularly the early creedal consensus we have without a historical confessional tradition, what is really essential can begin to feel and Jack was was illustrating this, it can begin to feel like whatever your senior pastor or whatever your parents or whatever your particular ministry on campus wants to talk most about. And when a person begins to doubt the authority of say, their senior pastor or their particular community due to scandal or just plain incompetence, that they begin to doubt the entire house, but the Creed’s help us keep focused on the essential they help say what are the walls that have always been in place? They keep our eyes focused on Jesus. But they also help us look through the light. Which brings me to Louis’s second point looking through to look through. And now I’m going to grab we’ve gone to Louis, we’ve gone to Augusta now I’m going to bring Blaise Pascal is 17th century philosopher in this conversation to look through, we need to learn to wager wisely. Pascal believed that questions about God and basic scientific questions should be answered in different ways. For Pascal the heart is essential to the human quest for discovering meaning and purpose in life. Pascal call this the logic of the heart. Now this is a this is a logic according to Pascal that’s deeply ingrained in each of us. It includes instinctive first principles like belief and reliability of space and motion and numbers, but also it includes love and morality. It’s these first principles of the heart that cannot be proven with any kind of scientific method cannot be reached with a kind of enlightenment certainty. In a one way one might proves a math problem, but they are nevertheless deep realities we assume and reason from Pascal was not saying that the logic of the heart was irrational, he was happy and he does. He throughout Ponce’s is his most famous kind of work. He gives reasons to believe in Christianity. However, he believed that the logic of the heart operated in dimensions that narrow accounts of rationality can never reach. Pascal offers a more expansive account of human rationality, precisely because he understood the limits of the kind of reason that was gaining influence in his day. So here’s, here’s the upshot. Again, I’m getting want to give you practical things under each of these points. stop and consider whether a narrow view of rationality or a more expansive view is more reasonable to wager on can you prove that humans should love one another? The moral responsibility to love one another, to love other humans and to treat them with dignity is self evident to so many of us in society. But it isn’t a truth that basic logic gives us just just read history.

It’s a deep moral conviction, but it can’t be proven. Can we prove that humans should possess rights and be treated with universal dignity that women should have the same rights as men? We can’t prove these things. But does that mean they’re not true? In the Hope of answering questions about God and eternity and eternity should we attempt to escape our drive for the good and the beautiful and whittle down our rationality to brutal logic. Pascal said that would be the foolish bet. If an individual or a society attempts to live with this type of rationality, consensus consistently, the result is a growing cynicism towards the very things that make us human. CS Lewis wrote another great book all about this abolition of man. So our past Galleon proposal is that our best wager is to take all aspects of human nature and our experience into account. This is the being more rational about rationality. Everything we know about humans in our world should be left on the table, especially features of personhood, that seem universal, we have a deep desire to believe what is actually true, not simply what we want to be true. We humans can’t escape our visions of love, beauty, meaning hope, Justice goodness, and we can’t escape that they’re tied to how we think how we reason. And each of these features of personhood is connected to the deeper experience of our search for true joy. By observing our human nature and a realistic view of rationality, and putting those together, we see that trying to answer and fulfill life’s most fundamental questions about God requires that we give credence, actually to our deepest longings to the search for joy. As Lewis put it, anything else would be a bad bet. And here’s what I want you to see and be able to help others see, Christianity provides a window that makes sense of these deeply held intuitions. The secular frame of our world today certainly has its own explanations for these intuitions. But as Charles Taylor puts it, the secular frames leave us with a certain unease. Secular accounts have tended either to shrink back from the logical out workings of their position, or to move forward to reduce those sources, to mere accidents or temporary illusion. So we have this famous quote from Bertrand Russell. Stay with me just for for the last few minutes here. Russell says this, that man is the product of causes, which had no provision of the end they were achieving that his origin his growth, his hopes and fears his loves. His beliefs are the outcome of accidental call it collocations of Adams that no fire no heroism, no intensity of thought and filling can preserve an individual life beyond the grade that all the labors of the age, all the devotion, all the inspiration all the new date, noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole tempo of man’s achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, or are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects him can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truth only on the firm foundation of unyielding spirit can the souls habitation hence first to be safely built? That’s a downer for all souls, right? And by the way, these kinds of questions are really helpful in conversations. What if? What if Russell is right? And this universe is vast, cold and pointless? Then we are left with few options except to despair or to cobble together meaning for ourselves. But then at this point, some more questions are in order. If you wager on making webs of meaning for yourself, some questions remain how meaningful is made up meaning. What do we make of our individual meanings in the face of our own deaths and an inevitable death of the universe? And then I’d add this, even if you attempted to dismiss the rays of light and follow role, Russell’s logic of despair, you probably actually won’t shield yourself from the light entirely. Reformed theologians call this common grace. Light has a way of shining through we intuitively live like our lives really matter. We search for beauty, we want to love and we want to be loved. And ever since Jesus came into the world, it has radically changed the Western world. So it’s hard for us to deny these deeply held aspirations of human rights and universal benevolence. We desire justice and we we sense that each person’s life is sacred, grounded in historical claim and centered on the person of Jesus. The Christian story affirms explains and provides motivation for to act on these deepest of human ideals. Where else can we find a story that does all that? I know of no other story? It’s the true myth, as Lewis called it. Finally, we need to challenge others. As the theologian I’m wrapping up the theologian that Sarah the theologian Sarah Coakley puts it like this we have to challenge others to put their life on the line through certain practices. This means we invite the doubters and the disillusion to actually step into the light doctrines are so important. I don’t have to convince a crowd like this, that doctrine is important you wouldn’t be here. But as important as doctrines are, they aren’t the goal of the Christian life. Too often, however, Christian living is reduced simply to ideas. But Christine any offers a way to commune with God, it is a way of life. Where we know God and we make Him known. We flourish in a broken world. We need to think about the problem of doubt. But that’s not all we, we we have to do. We have to pay better attention. So my questions to the disillusion and doubters at this point goes something like this, what if God is present, but we’ve inherited a way of seeing the world and all of our busyness and all of our hustle and bustle that, that he’s there, but we’re blind to him. Stepping into the light means adopting certain practices, obviously, I don’t have time to go into these. But they they’re they’re around some basic things, but we need to hear it again. We have to slow down. We have to learn to pray again. We have to call on others to pray with us. Even in their doubt. We have to pray the Psalms we have to learn to not just do inductive Bible study, but Amen to a men’s deductive Bible study. But we have to also learn to meditate on the scriptures to lament, to spend time in nature, to attend to our relationships, to attend to the sacred. to minister to the disillusion and the doubting we need to walk beside them, and keep pointing them to Jesus, we need to help them look through Jesus to see the world and our deepest ideals and intuitions. And we need to challenge him once again to step into the ways of Christ. And this is my last point. And I want to say it again, but we have to pray. After Agustin had walked away from the church and was hanging out with Amanda keys. His mother Monica ever the helicopter mom, which as many of us are right I mean, I’m a helicopter dad, of course. But I mean, I’m, I’m working on this, but we want to control and Monica is that picture. And she’s quite distraught because her son has left the faith. And so she does. You know, she doesn’t many of us do. She goes to find a smart pastor who used to be a mannequin, probably the pastor that you see what didn’t used to be a monkey. But so and she finds him and says, Well, you’ve convinced him, will you work on him? And he looks at the situation he hears about Augustine. She says, No, I won’t. He says I won’t because he knew Agustin was not ready. He didn’t have the right posture. So this is what he said. He said, It is impossible that the son of such tears will perish. Now, it’s probably a bit of hyperbole. But I think there’s something in the spirit of those words we need to hear. As we close up. There is no sure method to bring someone back home to God. I am not in control, and neither are you. Yet the strongest thing we have isn’t an argument all but rather the peripheral tears of the faithful. Monica never gave up. She stayed in Augustus life she continued to pray. May we do likewise. For God is still going after his lost sheep. He’s still welcoming the protocols home. He’s still answering prayers.