After Doubt: How to Question Your Faith without Losing It

In the end, it is easier to try to change God and the Bible than to change our lives. Usually we go for the more convenient option. It is always going to be easier to bend the ways of God around our lives than to bend our lives around the ways of God.

Faith is a gift; beliefs are not. Forming beliefs takes time and often hard work.

the first murder in the Bible is religiously motivated.

faith crisis” is really just our doing something that does not align with God’s ways.

dogmatism. The journey toward humility comes by honestly knowing our history. Chuck Klosterman’s excellent little book But What If We’re Wrong? details the endless ways societies have been utterly wrong.7 We were wrong about gravity, philosophy, worldview, Pluto, slavery, the earth-centered universe. Time and again, we were wrong. Everything that we now believe to be “true” at some point we were utterly wrong about. Klosterman’s work raises a big question: What are we wrong about right now? The goal of this thought experiment is humility. Klosterman even invites us to “think about the present as if it were the distant past.”8 What do we hold dearly to today that in three hundred years will be found to be entirely wrong? It is a mark of humanity to think that we are right at this very moment. We are full of pride. We assume our progressive, secular values of today can’t be wrong. How could they be? We believe them to be true. But we do not want to confront the ways in which we might be wrong.

captures the other side of following Jesus: After Doubt. Doubt and deconstruction, I will show, play important roles in our journey of following Jesus. They can be exhilarating experiences. But also oppressive and hopeless. Though both have their dark sides, I will show that they can play a vital role in how we follow Jesus. This book is largely the result of countless requests from pastors, friends, and colleagues who’ve personally