Bryan N. Smith's Blog, page 2

Envisioning the World as a Gift

It took a long time to admit, but the way I once imagined faith was far too narrow for the kind of life it was meant to hold. For so long, I thought faith was about belief — about collecting the right ideas, stacking up the correct answers, nodding in agreement to the doctrines that drew the boundary lines of who was in and who was out. It felt like building a fortress of thought, stone upon stone, hoping it would be strong enough to withstand every question, every doubt, every whisper that mayb...

Seeing Faith as Life

Having previously highlighted the view of faith I held for many years and which in many ways contributed to my eventual crisis of faith (i.e. faith as belief) – as well as two alternative ways of seeing faith which I later came to discover and which have had a tremendous impact on me ever since (i.e. faith as trust and faith as love), in this post I’d like to touch on one final way of seeing faith that has been incredibly instrumental in reshaping my approach to the Christian faith ever since. A...

Love That Transcends Conviction

In my last post, I began exploring other ways of seeing faith besides the familiar lens of belief. These alternative perspectives were not only crucial in helping me endure my own crisis of faith, they have continued to reshape how I view nearly everything that touches my spiritual life. To compare these different ways of seeing, I suggested looking at each not only in its positive expression but also through its opposite. The currently dominant approach tends to define the opposite of faith as ...

Seeing Faith as Love

In my last post I began exploring some other ways of seeing faith (aside from seeing faith as belief) which were not only instrumental in helping me through my own crisis of faith, but which have radically impacted how I have come to see things since. In doing so, I mentioned that one helpful way I found to compare these different ways of seeing faith was to look, not only at how each is understood in a positive sense, but also at how each is understood in a negative sense as well (by examining ...

Seeing Faith as Love

In my last post I began exploring some of the other ways of seeing faith (aside from belief), all of which are much older and which were not only instrumental in helping me through my own crisis of faith, but which have radically impacted how I have come to see things since. In doing so, I mentioned that one helpful way I found to compare these different ways of seeing faith was to look, not only at how each is understood in a positive sense, but also at how each is understood in a negative sens...

Trusting What I Can’t See

Having spent much of my focus so far describing how I once understood the nature of faith — primarily as “believing the right things” — and exploring some of the historical insights I’ve since learned about that framework, I now want to turn in a different direction. My earlier reflections noted how this belief-centered definition is not as ancient as I once assumed, but is a relatively recent development in Christian thought, shaped in large part by the intellectual and cultural currents of the...

Seeing Faith as Trust

Having up to this point been focused primarily on how I used to see the nature of faith (i.e. as emphasizing “believing the right things”), as well as on some of the things I learned about that way of seeing (i.e. it’s fairly recent origins in Christian thought, resulting primarily from the impact of the Reformation and the Enlightenment), what I’d like to now turn my focus towards is some of the other ways of seeing faith, all of which (in many respects) are much older, all of which were instru...

Playing Defense on a Misshaped Field

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 abo...

Playing Defense on a Mishaped Field

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 f...

Faith, Belief, and Apologetics

In my last post I briefly outlined two prominent historical events (the Reformation and the Enlightenment) which, as I came to discover, had a rather significant impact on how the nature of faith has come to be understood ever since. In particular how, on the one hand, the Reformation began to understand faith primarily in terms of belief and, on the other hand, how the Enlightenment began to understand truth primarily in terms of fact (both overly broad generalizations, to be sure, but both...