As I’ve mentioned a few times already in some of my previous posts, although there were several areas I once struggled with and which eventually led up to my crisis of faith, the one area I struggled with more than any other by far, and which has almost single-handedly revolutionized my spiritual life since, has to do with the nature of faith. Even when other issues were pressing – questions about the Bible’s reliability, the problem of suffering, the mysteries of prayer, the tension between science and Scripture – this one area seemed to keep reappearing, quietly shaping the way I experienced all the others. Although I’ve already given the gist of how I used to see the nature of faith and how I’ve come to see it now, I’d like to spend more time unpacking this particular area. It played such a major role in my story and has had such a major impact on my own spiritual life. It is also the one area along my journey that I probably get asked about the most, especially by those who find out that I wrote a book on the topic.

Looking back, I realize that even when I thought I was wrestling with other issues – say, whether the Bible could be trusted historically or how God’s goodness fit with the suffering I saw in the world – my responses to those questions were always being filtered through the kind of faith I believed I needed to have. If faith meant having convictions about a list of doctrines, then every doubt became a threat, every question a potential crack in the foundation. It wasn’t just that I feared losing a belief here or there; it was that I feared losing God altogether if my beliefs began to slip. That’s why this area has always felt so central for me: it’s not a side issue that sits alongside other theological questions, but a lens that shapes how every other question is seen. Change the lens, and the whole landscape shifts.

And yet it can be surprisingly difficult for me to explain, and probably for others to understand, if not given the time or space to lay it all out. You can tell someone in a single sentence that you no longer see faith as “believing the right things,” but if they’ve spent their whole life inside that framework, such a sentence might sound nonsensical, even dangerous. Without unpacking it, the words can be misunderstood. And so my aim throughout the rest of this series is to do precisely that. To give more detail and clarity on the topic than I’ve yet been able to. To retrace my steps both backward into the faith I inherited and forward into the faith I’ve come to embrace.

Like most people growing up, my understanding of what it meant to have faith wasn’t the result of deliberate theological reflection or serious study. I didn’t sit down with a Bible concordance and search every occurrence of the word. I didn’t read Augustine or Luther or Wesley to see how they defined it. My views on faith were more or less uncritically absorbed from the environment around me – my family, my church, and the broader evangelical culture that saturated my world. This meant my early definition of faith was shaped less by thoughtful exegesis or historical consensus and more by the air I breathed in the Bible Belt of late twentieth-century American evangelicalism.

As a result, the way I once understood faith is probably similar in many respects to how most people around me understood it, and perhaps still do. In summary, this way of understanding sees faith as holding a certain set of beliefs, believing a certain set of statements to be true (usually doctrinal statements). It was a way of thinking about faith that could be summed up in phrases like “sound doctrine,” “true belief,” or “orthodoxy.” I took it for granted that having faith – the kind of faith one needed to be “saved” – essentially meant believing a given set of doctrines to be true.

This set of doctrines in some cases could be fairly short, consisting of simply believing that there is a God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that Jesus died for our sins. In other cases, the list could be longer, such as believing that the Bible is the literal and inerrant Word of God, believing in a literal Adam and Eve, a literal worldwide flood, and a Jesus who was literally born of a virgin, walked on water, raised from the dead, and who will literally return again someday. In still other cases, depending on which church, denomination, or theological camp you belonged to, the list could be even longer: believing that the world is less than 10,000 years old, that evolution is false, that all true Christians will be “raptured” in the near future, that God will one day destroy the world, and that those who don’t believe the right things in the end will ultimately suffer for eternity in hell.

I remember often being involved in debates and discussions with other Christians about which particular beliefs belonged in the list of “essential beliefs” and which ones didn’t – a critically important question when understanding faith as “believing the right things.” If your eternal destiny hangs on belief, then getting the list right is not a matter of curiosity; it’s literally a matter of life and death. But however long or short the list was, the main point was that faith required believing at least some set of doctrines to be true. To put it more sharply from my own experience, it wasn’t enough to simply commit one’s life to following Jesus out of a genuine desire to love God and others while remaining open and curious in one’s beliefs. It was considered absolutely essential to be in wholehearted agreement with a given list of dogmatic pronouncements – the eternal state of one’s soul hung in the balance, after all. This way of thinking was so central that I, and many others I knew, would often use the word “believer” as a synonym for “Christian,” as if being a Christian or following Jesus was fundamentally determined by what one believed.

As a result, although it never really dawned on me until years later in my journey, this way of thinking about faith had a significant effect on me. It ultimately turned my understanding of faith into a “head matter.” To have faith meant, essentially, to have a certain set of beliefs in my head. Of course, it meant more than that, such as living a certain way, but believing was its core foundation. And as odd as it seems to me now, I held to this for many years without giving it much thought. It wasn’t until I started realizing that my beliefs, to a large degree, weren’t so much the result of active mental choices as they were the result of passive reflections of whatever happened to seem true to me. A “seeming” which itself didn’t always seem(!) to be under my control. It was then that I really began to think about it.

And this realization came slowly. I didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and say, “Wait, I can’t control what I believe.” It began with small cracks in the wall, moments when I wanted to believe something but couldn’t, or when I found myself believing something I didn’t particularly want to. If belief was largely an involuntary mental state, then how could God make my eternal destiny depend on whether the right set of things happened to seem true to me? In short, since I believed that faith was required in order to “go to heaven when I die,” that faith meant “believing certain things to be true,” and that “believing” involved having these seemings that were more or less outside of my control – it began to seem strange to me that God cared so much about what I believed. So much, in fact, that he was willing to condemn me for eternity simply because I didn’t “get it right,” because the “right things” didn’t happen to seem true.

Why would God care so much about what beliefs were in my head? Why would the divine verdict hinge on my mental assent to a list of propositions rather than on the orientation of my life, my loves, or my loyalties? It was a question that bothered me for years, especially when certain beliefs began slipping away by no longer seeming true (despite my protest). I would pray things like, “God, I want to believe – help me to believe, grant me conviction…” but no amount of willpower or pleading would change the fact that whatever claim was in question simply didn’t ring true anymore. It was a question for which I could never find a compelling answer, and even today it still feels bizarre.

Thankfully, my search for an answer eventually led me to discover that the way I had come to view the nature of faith was just one particular view – one of many ways faith has been understood throughout history. And, as it turns out, a particularly modern view. It was much different, and became much less sensible to me, than many of the other ways faith has been understood over the centuries. As I touched on in an earlier post, and as I hope to explain in more detail later, I discovered that, prior to the Enlightenment, the most common way of seeing the nature of faith had less to do with the “head” and more to do with the “heart” – where the “heart” was seen as a metaphor for the deepest level of a person. I discovered that, for most of Christian history, faith was primarily the way of the heart, not the head.

Of course, this didn’t mean that beliefs were irrelevant or that doctrine didn’t matter. Rather, it meant that belief was not the core aspect of faith. Faith was primarily about trust, fidelity, loyalty – the deep, relational orientation of a person toward God – whereas belief, while important, flowed out of that deeper posture rather than serving as its foundation. Although it may sound simple, this discovery turned my world upside down. Especially given the weight I had placed on seeing faith as a head matter and the spiritual struggle that came from that. Learning about the various ways faith has been understood historically not only showed me how limited my earlier view had been, but also breathed new life into my own faith by helping me see its nature in a much older and much richer light.

Over the next few posts, I hope to dive deeper into some of these older ways of seeing faith. But before I do that, I want to first give a fuller picture of the way I used to see faith, echoing some of what I’ve already said while also sharing some of the history behind it. To share what I learned about how this modern approach to faith became so prominent in the last few hundred years, and how it continues to shape the way many people think about faith today. That background, I’ve found, is essential. Without it, the shift from “faith as belief” to “faith as trust” can feel like a leap into vagueness, as though one were trading certainty for sentiment. But when I saw how such a view first arose, how it was shaped by cultural forces, theological debates, and philosophical shifts, I realized it wasn’t timeless or unchangeable. It was just one chapter in a much longer and more varied story. And so that’s where I want to go next.

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