In my last post, I sketched the outlines of two great turning points in Western history – the Reformation and the Enlightenment – and how they quietly but profoundly reshaped the way faith has been understood ever since. I didn’t wade into the details of either movement; that wasn’t my aim. I was more interested in their long shadows, shadows that still fall across the modern church and, in a very real way, across my own spiritual life. For years I had no idea how much my own assumptions about faith had been shaped by events that happened centuries before I was born. But the more I looked back, the more I began to notice it, and the more unsettling it became to realize that the things I had thought were “just what the Bible says” were actually filtered through the lenses of these changes.

The Reformation, for all the good it brought, had a way of making faith look more and more like belief – belief in the sense of mentally affirming certain doctrinal truths about God and the world. And then the Enlightenment came along, with its insistence on reason and evidence, narrowing the very meaning of truth itself until truth became almost interchangeable with fact – with what could be demonstrated, measured, or proven to have happened. These are broad brushstrokes, and there’s far more complexity to each movement than I’m acknowledging here. But as broad brushstrokes, they were enough to help me see why so much of the faith I inherited was framed the way it was.

When you stack those two strokes together – faith as belief, truth as fact – you end up with a picture of faith that’s centered on intellectual assent to a list of facts about God and the world. And those facts are expected to hold up under the same kind of scrutiny you’d use for a historical claim or a scientific hypothesis. For a while, I didn’t see any problem with that. In fact, it felt reassuring. The more I could defend the facts, the stronger my faith would be.

I can remember the quiet satisfaction I felt when I could answer someone’s question with a ready-made argument I’d memorized from a book or a lecture. It wasn’t just about winning the point; it was about feeling that my faith was unshakable because I had “proof” for it. If I could point to archaeological finds, manuscript evidence, or fulfilled prophecies, I felt as though I’d reinforced my own spiritual foundation. But looking back, I realize those moments were less about trust in God and more about trust in my ability to argue on His behalf. And when the questions came that I couldn’t answer, I didn’t just doubt the argument – I doubted the God I thought the argument was holding up.

But somewhere along the way, I started to see the other side. This fact-centered version of faith can be incredibly fragile. When the questions come, the whole structure can start to wobble. What if the earth wasn’t created in six literal days? What if Jonah’s story wasn’t a videotape of actual events? What if the Gospels don’t all line up perfectly? Suddenly faith feels like it’s on trial, and every discrepancy or doubt is another piece of evidence for the prosecution. There were nights when those unanswered questions kept me awake, not because I didn’t love God, but because I was terrified of what it might mean if one of my “facts” turned out not to be as solid as I’d been told. I didn’t know then that my faith had been built on a kind of scaffolding – a framework that was useful for a time but never meant to hold the whole weight of my trust. It felt like the entire building would crumble if one beam was cracked. What I see now is that my foundation wasn’t God Himself, but a particular way of proving Him, and that’s why it felt so precarious.

And so it’s no wonder, then, that when skepticism gained momentum in the modern world, some people abandoned faith altogether while others doubled down, defending their beliefs with ever-greater intensity. The debates we still see today over evolution, the Big Bang, biblical inerrancy, and historical reliability are, I suspect, echoes of that earlier collision. They’re the children of a marriage arranged long ago – a marriage between faith-as-belief and truth-as-fact – and whether we realize it or not, most of us have grown up in its household. Even those who have since left.

For me, this realization threw new light on why so much energy in the modern church has gone into apologetics. It’s not just about loving truth or wanting to answer honest questions. It’s about preserving a particular framework we’ve inherited – one where faith equals belief, belief requires truth, truth equals fact, and the facts had better stand or faith will crumble. Within that framework, apologetics becomes the work of reinforcing the facts – piling up evidence and arguments in the hope of proving that Christianity is as factually secure as any set of claims can be. When I was younger, I bought into this completely. I loved apologetics. I read books by the armful, memorized arguments, practiced rebuttals. I saw it as a sacred duty – after all, if faith meant believing certain facts, and if getting those facts wrong could mean eternal separation from God, then every argument really did feel like a matter of life and death sometimes. The urgency was real. And in my circles, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Many of us saw ourselves as guardians of truth, or at least defenders of the intellectual walls that kept the truth safe.

But over time, my perspective began to shift. I still believe there’s a factual foundation for Christianity, I’m not throwing that away. What’s changed is my sense of proportion. I’ve come to see that truth and fact aren’t identical after all. That all facts are true, yes, but that not all truths are facts – at least not in the way we tend to think of them. A story can be deeply true without being a literal transcript. A parable can reveal reality more fully than a stack of historical documents. A poem can capture something about God that no photograph or archaeological artifact ever could. And that realization opened a strange new door for me. It made room for a Christianity that could still be true even if not every detail of the Bible was meant as literal history. And it reframed what faith itself could be. Instead of being primarily about affirming the “right” propositions, faith could be about trusting God, aligning my life with His character and purposes, even if I have doubts about the factuality of claims which have been so central for so long.

That said, I should probably say that I haven’t abandoned apologetics. Far from it. I still think it’s valuable – sometimes even life-giving – to show that Christianity isn’t irrational. But my motivation is different now. I’m not trying to prove a list of facts so that people can hold the right set beliefs that are required to have saving faith. Rather, my motivation is in trying to clear away whatever keeps people from seeing the beauty and coherence of the Christian vision. Because I’m convinced that at its core, Christianity offers the most compelling way of understanding reality I’ve ever encountered – a reality in which God exists, in which Jesus reveals God’s heart, and in which the purpose of life is transformation through love. That’s what I want people to see. Not just to nod their heads in agreement with some set of claims, but to actually experience it – to taste it, to let it seep into their bones, and to let it change them.

When I think of apologetics now, that’s what I imagine: not a battle for intellectual supremacy, but the gentle work of removing obstacles so people can meet the living God for themselves. Sometimes those obstacles are intellectual – questions about historical events or scientific claims – and I’m happy to engage those. But more often than I once realized, the real obstacle is the framework itself. If someone thinks faith is nothing more than forcing themselves to believe a checklist of improbable-sounding facts, then of course it’s going to feel impossible. And that’s a tragedy, because it shrinks faith down to the size of a thought in one’s head, when historically it’s been so much more. It’s like realizing you’ve been playing defense on a misshaped field, its slanted boundaries defined by the assumptions that “faith equals belief” and “truth equals fact” – and finally stepping off it to play a better game entirely.

Long before our modern debates, faith was about trust, allegiance, fidelity. People assumed the basic truth of their sacred stories not because they’d weighed them against scientific evidence, but because those stories were woven into the fabric of their lives. The point wasn’t to pass a mental exam; it was to live in harmony with God and neighbor, to follow Jesus’ way. Ironically, it didn’t take much “faith” in our sense to live with deep faith in their sense. Only when skepticism began to challenge the factual claims did belief itself become the primary focus – and the primary struggle. That’s the version of faith I grew up with, the water I swam in, the air I breathed. And for a long time, I didn’t question it. But when I hit my own season of doubt, it wasn’t so much the doubts themselves as it was this modern, belief-centered idea of faith that nearly broke me. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more questions I had. Was God really most concerned with the thoughts in my head? Was faith just a matter of thinking the right things about Him and the world? Could my eternal destiny really hinge on whether my mind could assent to a list of propositions?

At some point, that began to seem absurd. What kind of God would run salvation like a cosmic quiz, rewarding those who could suppress their doubts long enough to tick the right boxes? And yet, for years, I assumed that’s just how it worked, because no one had ever told me otherwise. The breakthrough came when I started to read how Christians in other times and places had understood faith. I discovered that, for much of Christian history, faith wasn’t about mental assent; it was about trust, loyalty, and love. It was primarily something you lived, not primarily something you thought. It could hold questions without fear, walk into mystery without shame, and still be counted as faith.

Although that discovery didn’t solve everything for me overnight, it did something just as important, if not more important: it gave my faith room to breathe again. It showed me that maybe the version of faith I had inherited wasn’t the only one on offer. And so in that space, I slowly began to explore and rebuild – not on the fragile ground of needing to prove every fact, but on the deeper ground of trusting the One who was lovingly and patiently behind it all. And that’s where I want to go next – into those ancient, deeper visions of faith, the ones that see it not as a tightrope of perfect beliefs but as a wide road of trust, love, and transformation. Because if there’s one thing my own journey has taught me, it’s that faith was never meant to be as small and brittle as I once thought it was.

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