Having spent the last two posts offering an overview of how I used to see the Bible – something I hope to expand upon in greater detail down the road – I’d now like to shift to the second major area of struggle in my journey. Namely, how I understood the nature of the Christian life. These two areas – the Bible and the Christian life – were deeply intertwined for me, and it’s difficult to speak of one without, sooner or later, brushing up against the other. But in this post I want to focus on the latter. If my view of the Bible shaped my assumptions about what was true, then my view of the Christian life shaped what I thought it meant to live well in light of that truth – to be a person of faith, a follower of Jesus, a “true” Christian. And if I had to name the most formative and fraught aspect of how I understood what that meant, it would be this: I thought that to have faith was, most centrally, to believe the right things.

At this stage in my journey, faith and belief were so tightly bound together that to question one was to disturb the other. To “have faith” meant, in large part, to affirm a core set of doctrines – typically understood to be literally and factually true. The specific contents of that set might vary depending on your denomination or background, but the logic remained: authentic faith meant affirming certain things about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, and more. Some doctrines were non-negotiable; others were less central, but still important. And all of it, at least in the circles I was most familiar with, pointed back to the Bible – either directly or indirectly – as the source and standard of truth. So when I began to wrestle with how I understood the Bible, I wasn’t just rethinking a book. I was destabilizing the foundation of faith itself, or at least how I had come to define it. I’ve written more extensively about this connection elsewhere – especially in my book – so I won’t linger too long on this aspect for now. But suffice it to say, the link between faith and belief became the single greatest point of deconstruction and eventual renewal for me.

Closely related to that was another core belief that profoundly shaped how I saw the Christian life: its focus on the afterlife. For most of my early life – and honestly, for longer than I’d care to admit – I understood Christianity primarily as a path to heaven. It was about securing my eternal destiny. The logic was simple: believe in Jesus, go to heaven; reject Jesus, go to hell. And so, understandably, the motivation for my faith wasn’t primarily about this life, but about the next. Yes, I believed in transformation in the here and now, but that wasn’t the main point. The ultimate goal was to be saved from eternal punishment and for eternal bliss. If you had somehow convinced me during that time that there was no afterlife, I honestly wouldn’t have known why anyone should be a Christian. Christianity, to me, was about answering the most important question: “Where will you spend eternity?” That question shaped how I read Scripture, how I prayed, how I lived, and how I assessed the spiritual health of myself and others.

In practice, this meant my spiritual life often felt like preparation for a final exam I’d eventually take before God – one where the “correct answers” were the core doctrines I had memorized and defended along the way. Every Bible study and every sermon was framed in terms of eternal stakes, as if life itself were an extended prelude to a single decisive moment beyond death. That urgency gave my faith a certain intensity, but it also created an undercurrent of fear – the constant, gnawing awareness that if I slipped up on one of those core truths, I might miss heaven itself.

Because of that emphasis, I came to see the Christian life as a kind of system – a structure of requirements and rewards. The reward was heaven. The requirements? Well, that was where things got a bit trickier. I assumed, as many do, that heaven couldn’t simply be for everyone. Surely not. There had to be something that determined who got in and who didn’t. And if it wasn’t a matter of divine predestination – a view I had encountered but never fully embraced – then it must be determined by something we do. Or more precisely, something we believe. I knew the Bible said we weren’t saved by works – that had been made clear to me over and over. So if it wasn’t based on behavior, then it must be based on belief. It followed, then, that believing the right things became the requirement for receiving the reward. And that made belief – the act of affirming the correct doctrines – the linchpin of salvation. That logic may have seemed spiritual on the surface, but in hindsight, it functioned like a transactional checklist.

What complicated things further was how quickly I realized that Christians couldn’t even agree on what counted as the “right” beliefs. Some emphasized baptism. Others stressed the sinner’s prayer. Some believed in eternal security; others warned of backsliding. What about communion? What about speaking in tongues? Was evolution compatible with faith? Was hell eternal, or temporary, or something else entirely? For every doctrine I had been taught as essential, I found a sincere, faithful Christian who disagreed – and who could explain why. And many of them were smarter and more Christlike than me. That was disorienting. If salvation depended on believing the right things – and if no one could agree on what those things were – how could anyone be certain they were saved? Early on, I was mostly unaware of this diversity. I lived in a fairly insulated tradition, and in some ways, that ignorance was comforting. But eventually, exposure to different voices shattered my illusion of certainty. It didn’t take long before I was asking: if smart, faithful, Spirit-filled people throughout history have disagreed, why think I had it right?

Still, I held on to the idea that one at least had to be a Christian – whatever that meant. I leaned on the verse that said “Jesus is the only way.” That seemed unambiguous. Only Christians could be saved. But what did it mean to be a Christian? Baptism didn’t seem sufficient – not on its own, anyway. Rituals couldn’t save. So maybe it came down to believing certain truths about Jesus. Things like his divinity, his resurrection, his atoning death. Those became, for me, the essential markers of true faith. Believing in Jesus meant believing specific things about him. And although I still thought one’s life should reflect that belief, the focus was on what resided in the mind. Salvation, I believed, came through faith, and faith was, more or less, mental agreement with doctrinal truths. What mattered most wasn’t how well you loved or how faithfully you lived – it was whether your theology was correct. Or at least correct enough.

That left me with a growing list of theological questions. Although I never felt compelled to believe many of the modern “heresies” often thought incompatible with Christianity – evolution, universal salvation, or seeing the resurrection as a metaphor – I also never felt compelled to deny them either. Similarly, although I never felt compelled to deny many of the beliefs considered essential by many Christians – biblical inerrancy, a literal heaven and hell, or the virgin birth – I found myself less and less compelled to believe them. These questions became less threatening over time and more… open. Not because I wanted to rebel or reshape my faith to fit my preferences, but because I simply didn’t know. Many doctrines didn’t feel true or false – they just felt unresolved. I wasn’t trying to resist them. They simply no longer seemed compelling. That openness brought a kind of freedom. But it also brought fear. I feared what others might think – that I was drifting, backsliding, abandoning the faith. Even more, I feared what God might think. I had internalized the idea that God cared more about the beliefs in my head than the orientation of my heart.

I had seen too many examples of people who lived lives of love and faithfulness, who bore fruit that looked unmistakably like the work of the Spirit – and yet were dismissed or pitied because they didn’t believe the right things. I had been taught that faith without works is dead, yes – but never that works without the right faith could be anything other than condemnation. It didn’t matter if someone reflected Christ in their life; if they didn’t believe in Christ the right way, they were lost. That logic stuck with me even as my beliefs began to shift. And so, as I found myself becoming more agnostic about certain doctrines, I also found myself increasingly afraid. I feared I was disappointing God – not through what I was doing, but through what I wasn’t sure I believed. Grace was still something I affirmed. But the version of grace I had inherited was so entangled with unspoken conditions that I didn’t realize it had ceased to function as grace at all. Grace, I later came to believe, doesn’t carry a checklist of conditions.

Looking back, I can see how the shape of my faith had been molded into a kind of anxious obsession – not with God’s goodness, but with doctrinal precision. I had begun to idolize being “right.” I clung tightly to the idea that God’s favor depended on the correctness of my theology, at least on the big issues. And the more I doubted, the more I feared that I was disqualifying myself. This obsession became most intense around my views of Scripture. I reasoned that if the Bible was God’s Word, then everything else hinged on getting it right. Every doctrine, every practice, every hope for eternity rested on the reliability of that text. So I dug in. I researched. I wrestled. I tried to make it all cohere. But as the cracks widened and my certainty waned, I found myself no longer just doubting doctrines – I was doubting my ability to believe correctly at all. That’s when the despair crept in. I still believed in salvation by grace, at least on paper. But I had come to live as if grace was conditional – and that I wasn’t meeting the conditions.

I’ll unpack more of how that understanding began to change in future posts. But for now, I hope this gives at least a broad overview of how I once saw the Christian life. To summarize as simply as I can: I thought that the Christian life was about believing the right things now for the sake of going to heaven later. Heaven was the reward. Belief was the requirement. And the Bible was the God-authored instruction manual that told us what to believe and how to get there. It’s a view I held sincerely and passionately. But it’s also a view that wouldn’t remain intact for long.

In the next few posts, I’ll begin sharing how my thinking around these things has shifted – how I’ve come to see the heart of the Christian life as less about transaction and more about transformation, less about certitude and more about trust. The journey, as always, is ongoing. But I’m learning that faith isn’t about clinging to all the right answers – it’s about learning how to live honestly in the presence of a God who still holds me, even when I sometimes let go.

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