Bryan N. Smith's Blog, page 3

The History That Shaped My Faith

Although I’ve already explained in broad terms how I once understood faith, I think it’s worth spending more time looking at it in detail. I don’t just want to describe the basic form it took in my life but also examine where that form came from. When I look back, it’s clear that my view of faith wasn’t something I pieced together carefully over time. It arrived already defined, already explained, already packaged. I grew up assuming this was the way Christians had always understood faith, and I...

When Faith Became Belief

Although Ive already highlighted in previous posts some of the key features of the view I once held when it comes to the nature of faith, in this post Id like to unpack things a bit more, giving particular attention to a few things I came to discover about its origins. Discoveries which helped me not only understand why it became so pervasive but also why I (like many others) ended up more or less absorbing it growing up. As Ive indicated previously, perhaps the best term to characterize this...

Seeing Faith as Belief

As Ive 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 that 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. Although Ive already given the gist of how I used to see the nature of faith and how Ive come to see it now, Id like to spend a little more time...

Seeing Christianity Now: An Overview

In my last post I touched on the vast amount of diversity within the Christian tradition that I came to discover (something I hope to describe in more detail later on), and how that led me to realize that much of what I had thought of growing up as traditional Christianity was actually one very particular (and quite recent) expression of Christianity among many. Of course, none of that makes such an expression wrong or in any way inferior. Indeed, although I no longer identify with that way...

From Then to Now: A Light Bulb Moment

Having given a bit of background on how I used to see things before my subsequent crisis of faith, as well as an overview of the two particular areas that I came to struggle with the most (the nature of the Bible and the nature of the Christian life), what I’d like to do next is give a brief overview of how my thinking has changed since then and how I tend to see things now. However, before I do so I think it might be helpful to first touch a bit on something I discovered about the way I used...

Believing Now for Heaven Later

Having given a bit of background and overview in my last two posts on some of my prior beliefs about the nature of the Bible (beliefs that later served as one of the two major areas of struggle for me and that, in part, eventually led to my crisis of faith), in this post I’d like to focus on doing something similar with the other major area of struggle along my journey thus far; namely, how I understood the nature of the Christian life.

Perhaps the most crucial aspect in how I viewed the...

Reading the Bible Literally

In my last post I outlined how growing up I had come to view the Bible as more or less a divine product that carried divine authority and a divine guarantee to be true (a view that I not only held for many years, but which I later took great effort to learn how to defend with significant intellectual rigor). Yet, although believing that the Bible was a divine product no doubt influenced the way I approached it in a major way, the other component of the way I viewed the Bible that probably had...

Seeing the Bible as a Divine Product

As I mentioned in my last post, before diving too deep into exploring the two major areas of struggle along my journey thus far (the nature of the Bible and the nature of faith), what I’d like to do first is to help set the stage a bit by giving a high level overview in the next few posts that will hopefully highlight the gist of how I used to see things and how I see things now. My aim in doing so is to help provide a general outline of sorts that I can then fill in with more detail as I...

Rethinking Faith: A Theological Memoir 

With a new year already upon us, I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and go through with something that has been on my mind for quite awhile now – namely, start a blog!

For a bit of background, this time last year I wrote and shared a story of God’s faithfulness in my life over the past few years, a story that captured the gist of my recent crisis of faith, the ways in which God met me in the midst of it, and the life-changing things I learned and experienced along the way. If you haven’t...