Faith and Skepticism

Today I'm pondering my last post and noticing that it was a lot different in tone from my previous posts, which were written two or more years ago. This is partly a matter of audience -- it was originally written to a Christian online forum of which I am a part, and I think I've directed other posts to a somewhat more diverse group of readers.

But I'm also thinking about how much I've "settled in" to my faith in the past several years. And that this isn't a bad thing.

When I decided to come back to Christianity after having had a bit of a tiff with the Christian God and His people, it was because I'd figured out I can't do spirituality any other way. I need the Christian story and I need my faith to be Jesus-centered and I need for Jesus to be the God-Man, who was interested enough in relationships with people that He'd come in a form we can understand.

So as much as I had come to admire aspects of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Neo-Paganism and other faiths, I realized that I had to have Jesus as God or I'd be miserable.

I've said before that the faith of my youth had an enormous emphasis on prooving itself to skeptics. Since I grew up with a skeptic, it seemed very important to me to prove that Christianity was rational, factual and ultimately impervious to argument.

But when I came back to faith, I did so with the realization that I can't prove any of this stuff -- I just need it. So I more-or-less "special-ordered" my faith:

• God is Mystery (check)


• God is "everywhere present and fills all things" (check)


• God loves and is a befriending God (check)


• God came in the flesh to save us from death (check)


• Jesus, who is God Incarnate, died and then came back to life (check)


• We are never, at any time, without hope (check)

But a funny thing happened on the way to the altar. The first few years, I was more a skeptic-with-hope; now I seem not to need the skepticism anymore. And this is a strange realization -- that skepticism was as much a need for me as faith was. Skepticism was my safety-net, just in case I ended up being a fool. If, at the end of all things, my beliefs about Jesus turned out to be a fantasy, I wanted to be able to say, "Yeah, but I wasn't absolutely sure. I wasn't operating on blind faith. I STILL HAVE A BRAIN, ya know."

Of course, I wasn't sure who it was I'd be saying this to, because if the atheists are right, I won't exist anymore, anyway.

Am I simply more psychologically invested in my faith? Yes, definitely. But it's more than that. It's a kind of caution-to-the-wind thing -- a lack of concern over whether others find me foolish. And what happens now is that I encounter God more frequently, now that I don't hold back. There's a freedom in this -- in being able to light the candles in the chapel and not second-guess myself in the middle of the night, but to simply know that Christ is present with me. It is, I think, something like the stages of falling in love. At first, we are unsure of the beloved -- we don't know whether we can trust him, even though we are attracted and he seems attracted back. But after some time goes by, the relationship develops a surety. I've noticed this in 26 years of marriage. And I notice it in my faith.

So I find I am at a new phase now. One that fills me with wonder.