Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions

by Rachel Held Evans

with real people who have real lives and real names. Pond-scum theology made sense in my head, but it never made sense in my heart. I knew that I was broken, that I was capable of great evil and tragically prone to sin, but deep down, at the very center of my being, I felt as though I still mattered to God. And I needed to know that Zarmina and Anne Frank mattered to him too. I needed to know that every person behind every pair of shoes recovered from every concentration camp mattered, that God had not forgotten them, that he loved them, and that he knew each of their names. I needed to know that God does not make disposable people. Pond-scum theology makes even less sense in the context of the Gospels. To believe that people are inherently worthless to God strips the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of all their meaning and power. It makes Jesus look like a fool for dying for us, and it leaves his followers with little incentive to seek out and celebrate the good in one another. When it came down to it, to believe that the reprobate are created for hell without any hope of salvation required that I ignore my most instinctive and visceral conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and love. I just couldn’t stomach the idea that some people are beyond hope, that God has no intention of ever loving them, and that my compassion for them represented a weakness of faith. What Andy considered mere sentimentality and emotion, I considered the very essence of...