Dealing with Doubt on the Journey of Faith

Perhaps: Reclaiming the Space Between Doubt and Dogmatism by Joshua M. McNall

Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment Can Invite Us into a Deeper Faith by Joshua D. Chatraw 

Kymberli Cook: 

Welcome to The Table Podcast where we discuss issues of God and culture to show the relevance of theology in everyday life. My name is Kymberli Cook and I am the Assistant Director of the Hendricks Center. And I am so thrilled that you have joined us today as we talk about doubt on the journey of faith. We are joined by two qualified gentlemen who've written on this topic and wrestled with many of these questions on their own. First we have Dr. Josh Chatraw, Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism and Cultural Engagement at Beeson Divinity School, and we also have Dr. McNall, Director of the Honors College and an associate professor of pastoral theology at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Thank you gentlemen so much for taking time to sit with us today at The Table. So I would like to let our listener get to know you all a little bit better. So could you first tell us a little bit about yourself, and particularly eventually get to how you ended up thinking so much about doubt? So Dr. Chatraw, let's start with you. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

Yeah, yeah. Well, I live in Birmingham, Alabama. I am from South Georgia, but have been all over the Southeast with school and jobs. I'm married, I have two kids and have been both teaching for a number of years but also have been in positions, like I used to run a center for public Christianity, and with that directed a fellows program of people in their thirties and forties who were dealing with the subject of doubt, as well as when I taught, I used to teach at Liberty and I taught a lot of undergrads from really conservative backgrounds, conservative Christian backgrounds, and they were, for the first time when they got to college, even a very conservative college like Liberty began to really wrestle with doubt. 

And so it was a combination of wanting to write on this subject, was dealing with people in their late teens and early twenties who were wrestling with this. And then also people in their twenties and thirties who were coming to me as a PhD, as a theologian, and as a kind of pastoral figure to deal with their own doubts. And then of course, I've had my own doubts, so it's both a ministry to others and also kind of wrestling with the Lord and wrestling with my own doubts. So, that's why I ended up writing the book. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Awesome. All right. And Dr. McNall what about you? 

Josh McNall: 

I mean, I guess I could just say same on all of that minus the places that we live and work. I teach college students and I train people who are going into ministry, but also teach students that are not going into ministry. And college is a time where you start to ask the big questions and you start to ask whether or not you actually believe what your parents believe. And it's a great place to explore those kind of questions in the setting I'm in as a Christian university, so it has convictions, theological convictions, but not everybody who's coming here as a student shares those. 

And also over the years, as I've had more and more students graduate and go out into ministry, and in some cases even in the midst of ministry as full-time pastors start to question their faith, start to wrestle with trauma and church hurt and questions of science and sexuality and politics, and all of those become kind of drivers for doubt. It's been a privilege to get to walk with some of those students and former students and try to wrestle with those big questions. Pastors have them too, even if they don't voice them from the pulpit. And so, that's kind of my entrance to this subject as well. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, honestly, I think if most Christians were honest and were ready to actually say many of the things that they've thought or wondered, I would be shocked if it wasn't that every Christian hasn't at some point dealt with doubt. And I think other people, it's a burden that they carry and they carry long-term. At least that's the case for me. I started asking these questions when I was 14. I know it's going to date me and it's going to tell you how old I am, but it was when September 11th happened, and I remember seeing for the first time a Muslim boy about my age on television, and they were… I think he was doing his prayers and I remember thinking, "What makes me right and him wrong? Why do I sit here and think that I'm the right one, who's to say that?" I'm a fourteen-year-old in rural Kansas asking myself these questions and there weren't a lot of resources for me, but praise God, at least for me, I didn't meet anybody who shamed me for asking those questions. 

They just kind of said, "I'm not really sure, but keep going, keep asking." And so eventually, of course that took me to seminary because why not? But so doubt for me, even I've had these questions and these thoughts all along and there's seasons where they roar back to life and then other seasons where it's calmer waters. And so, I think that that's the case for believers. And I'm so passionate about the idea of trying to strip away the power of darkness with regard to doubt. I think the more we talk about it, the more helpful it can be. Sorry, as far as keeping doubt in the dark and having these thoughts in a way that we don't actually voice them or we voice them, we kind of whisper them or tell it only to one person as a secret that we're not really sure or we feel unsafe as we're talking about it. 

I think the more we talk about it, the more the power of it can be stripped away and it can just be potentially helpful, as you both talk about it in your books. So let's get started with the actual topic. So the title of the podcast is Doubt on the Journey of Faith, which might seem odd to some or to our listener, hearing the phrase mixing doubt and faith together. And we'll get there, but first I do want us to talk about what we mean when we say doubt. What are we talking about and who does doubt? Just what are we talking about when we're saying, "Yeah, this doubt, this thing called doubt exists." So, Dr. Chatraw, do you want to start with that? 

Joshua Chatraw: 

Yeah, I mean I maybe want to say doubt is not… Maybe start with what it isn't. It's not the same thing as unbelief. And so that's one thing I like to clear up. So the opposite of faith would be unbelief. Doubt is a kind of, particularly when we come to God or questions of Christianity, doubt is something that it doesn't necessarily directly oppose faith, but it is a kind of filling the contestability and even being unsure and having these kind of questions that you brought up. So one way I try to get at this at least is not wanting to say, Hey, doubt is the exact opposite of faith. They can actually coexist, which I think is what you were pointing to. I don't have a formal definition, that may be bad. 

Kymberli Cook: 

That's okay. You don't have to. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

I'll let the other Josh, give a formal. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Dr. McNall, what would you say about what doubt is when you're thinking in this area? What is it that you have in mind? 

Josh McNall: 

Yeah, I think to kind of build on that, a lot of times I think what we mean by the word doubt is not what the New Testament means by the word doubt. When we see that word in our English language Bibles, I don't need to go into all the Greek and stuff like that, but I think oftentimes in the New Testament it's talking about a person with divided allegiances or divided loyalties, or a person who is what the New Testament calls a two-souled person. They're the kind of committed to opposite sides or sitting on the fence when it comes to giving their allegiance to Jesus over and against the various other lords or priorities that you could have out there. And I think that's pretty different from a person who just has honest questions. I think when we use the word doubt, we sometimes just mean uncertainty or a person who has big questions. 

And I think in most cases, that's not what the New Testament is talking about. It obviously matters a lot what you do with your questions and who you take those questions to. I've talked to students that actually, I don't think Google is the best place to take those questions or YouTube, just because the algorithm doesn't always have your best interests at heart. But that's the one thing I would say in terms of a definition is that colloquially, I think we mean uncertainty or having these big questions. And oftentimes the New Testament is not talking about quite the same thing when it talks about somebody with a divided loyalty or allegiances or who's trying to perpetually sit on the fence and not have to make a commitment to Jesus or to the way of the kingdom. And those are just two different postures and sometimes the way we define it in distinction from the New Testament causes us some problems. 

Kymberli Cook: 

No, I really love that. I love both of those nuances. So this idea of doubting is just questioning and thinking through something and trying to consider the possibilities and what may or may not be worth the commitment and that kind of thing. But it doesn't mean uncommitted and it doesn't mean an unwillingness to believe and it doesn't, like you were saying, Dr.Chatraw, it doesn't mean an unbelief. It's none of those things. It's just the posture of questioning and trying to think through things. And on some levels, again, we'll get into when doubts can be destructive and we'll get into that a little bit later, but on some levels for a lot of people, I think it's because they're actually taking their faith quite seriously and they're taking the faith, the Christian faith very seriously and want to see if it can hold up to some questions or need to know if it can hold up to these questions. 

So that's what we're talking about when we're covering doubt. And we've talked about the fact that there is this relationship between doubt and faith, and it's possible for them to happen at the same time. So in y'all's survey of doubt and these conversations as you were working on your books, did you ever find other well-respected Christians throughout church history who may have found themselves in a similar type situation? Dr. McNall, we can start with you. 

Josh McNall: 

Yeah. One of the stories I talk about in my book is the story of Martin Luther and when he visits Rome, and this is back, he's a Catholic monk, finally gets to visit Rome, goes to visit the Santa Scala, the sacred steps, and he says prayers as he's going up those steps on his knees. And the belief was that if you do that, then a loved one who's in purgatory can be released from purgatory and he's going all the way up the sacred steps saying these prayers, and he gets all the way to the top and he famously says, "Who knows if any of it's true?" And that's a guy who's super important in the history of Christianity, regardless of whether you're Lutheran or not. And he's basically saying, "I don't even know if this is true." He's being honest about his doubts about that particular church tradition. And I think that's a great example of someone who's honest with his questions. 

But what Luther does next is also super important. I mean, he talks about at that time all of the… He was really upset by all of the immorality in Rome and the brothels and everything. In the midst of that question, he doesn't descend the steps and then go visit a brothel and take his questions as a license to sin and to just throw himself to the winds of his passions. He takes his doubts to scripture and he takes his doubts to trusted friends, and he begins to wrestle with this particular tradition of the sacred steps and purgatory and things like that. And regardless of what your views are on those particular traditions, I think that's a great example of what to do with doubt. He is praying his way through doubt. He is going to the scriptures, he's wrestling with the claims of the Christian faith. 

He's not using his uncertainty as an excuse to just do whatever selfish or immoral thing that he might've wanted to do anyway. So that's one person from church history. We could name a lot of others, but that's one person I interact with a bit in the book. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I love that and I love the idea of thinking through what is it? It's even comforting, and if anybody listening, if our listener is in a state of doubt or has in a season of doubt, and you say, "You're in good company. Martin Luther also that doubted and had questions and here's how he handled it." I love that idea of taking it to the scripture. What about you, Dr. Chatraw? Who are some others that you would say, "Yep. Again, you're in good company, these people as well." 

Joshua Chatraw: 

I think Augustine of Hippo from the fourth and fifth century is really helpful when we think about doubt. One of the reasons is that when you go to that period, Christianity is growing in prominence, but you still have other live options and that's the kind of environment that Augustine was growing up in. So his dad was not a believer, was a pagan, and his mom was a Christian. And so he's growing up in this kind of mixed home. He ends up going to church with his mom, but eventually walks away and walks away and is really on this journey for what we would today call a spiritual quest because he wasn't convinced by Christianity. And then he joins a sect, which is called the Manichaeans, and he thinks really attracted to them because they kind of have this, they some weird things that wouldn't map on to probably most of our views today, but they had this kind of posture that said, "We just use reason. We're not like those Christians that use faith." 

And that really attracted to him a kind of pseudo rationality. And so he really spent several years with them before he realizes, "Oh my goodness, that's not how humans work." And these people who are claiming just to use reason are actually using faith and reason, faith and reason actually go together and you need faith to understand. And so he was disenchanted with this other group and eventually goes into a time of skepticism, but then he meets a pastor who really two things, it was Bishop Ambrose and Ambrose did two things. One is he gave Christianity some intellectual credibility. He was a thinker and he hadn't really met a pastor quite like that. And he says he was kind to him, and it was both this kindness and this kind of intellectual, more intellectually robust version of Christianity that made him kind of begin to rethink maybe there's something here. 

And then in his story he actually says he's still not convinced. So he goes into the church, and this is maybe where some of the lessons we can learn from this, from what Josh said previously is he goes into the church and says, "I'm going to kind of go inside and see from the inside if this is possibly true," and he knows he has to spend some more time there to reflect. So I think it's instructive of the empty promises outside of the church and then also really to really dive deeper into the church and for the people who are both kind and compassionate towards doubt and people who are at the same time not burying their head in the sand and willing to look and think deeply about faith. 

Kymberli Cook: 

What I really love about both of your examples is that I think it kind of demonstrates multiple kinds of people who are walking this path and walking this journey or at least have a season of questions. One of them are people who grow up in situations where the Christian faith is assumed and it's something that is in the air and water where they are and they find themselves all of a sudden, sort of similar to my story turning around and saying, "I don'…, is this true? Maybe it's even not. I'm note even sure what to do if it's not, but I guess there's that possibility." So you have people asking themselves that, but you also have those who maybe grow up a little bit more outside the church. 

And I understand he also, Augustine was a little bit in the church outside, but you also have those who are very concerned about the intellectual credibility of the faith and want to have assurances and want to know that there are people in the Christian faith who have asked the really difficult questions and they don't want a gotcha religion where they can look at it and be like, "We just weren't even paying attention or thinking that kind of thing." I love both of those examples. Those are, I guess even some people, the kinds of people who find themselves in these seasons. So in your books, both of your books, you kind of walk… It seems to me that you're both helping people walk through these seasons and walk through the points at which they start asking these questions. 

So I'd like us to essentially turn our conversation there and talk about how we work our way through doubt when we do find ourselves there. And I think maybe first digging into that, I'd love y'all's opinions on when do you find doubts helpful, when are they a good thing or a constructive, enriching thing that can happen in the life of a believer or an unbeliever on their way to faith? Dr. McNall, let's start with you. 

Josh McNall: 

Yeah, I think going back to that Luther thing where he's questioning his belief in purgatory and the sacred steps and all this stuff, I think doubt can be helpful when we're wrong. The first step in changing your mind when you're wrong about something is to ask those questions and to wrestle with whether or not what you've believed is actually true. And I've been wrong about a lot of things. And so, if repentance is having this kind of change of mind, metanoia, this change of posture and thinking, then doubt can be the first step in changing course on something that you're like, "Oh, I guess I don't think the Bible really teaches that. I believed it because somebody told me that." And so doubt can be helpful when you're wrong because you have to be willing to consider that you're wrong. That's one thing. And I think another way it can be helpful is passing through a season of doubt is one way to be kind of refined by fire. 

And that season of testing can be something that God uses to mature us, but we have to sometimes pass through those seasons of wrestling with doctrinal claims, claims of Scripture, the meaning of suffering, all these different things. And we can actually come through that process stronger than we would've been otherwise in a way maybe analogous to when you break a bone and it heals back stronger because of that experience of trauma. It doesn't mean the breaking of that bone is fun or easy, it doesn't even mean you'd want to go through it again. It just means that those seasons can be something that God uses to mature us and to grow us. And then maybe a third thing is that it can be a good thing because it helps us to empathize and understand and relate to and minister people who are similarly passing through those seasons of tortured questions and uncertainty. It gives us a newfound point of contact with those people because we've passed through those seasons as well. So those are just maybe three ways that doubt can be something that is positive within the life of faith. 

Kymberli Cook: 

I love, especially when you were talking about the second one with the idea of the refining. And there's so many times in the places that I teach and the people that I'm interacting with where we're having these conversations and I am trying to encourage them that God is big enough and the Christian faith is deep enough to handle these questions. You're not going to throw something at them and at this faith that it hasn't seen before, probably. Well, technology and all of that and different developments is a different conversation, but for the most part, the questions that you're asking, there is a long rich history of people who have put a lot of rigorous thought toward this and God himself can stand up to it, I promise. But is there anything that you would add, Dr. Chatraw? 

Joshua Chatraw: 

I mean, I think all of those are great, Josh. I mean, I affirm all of what you said there and I think one of the things is I talk about how doubt can cause us to depend more on God, and that's not turning our brain off, but there can be a way where we approach our faith, Christianity, as if it's some kind of math problem for us to solve. And once I get all these things lined up and I have complete control and control by a kind of rational processing of any question that, and then me giving this kind of two plus two answer, then I'm mature in the faith. And I think that that for a lot of reasons is not reality, not how Christianity works. And so to see a kind of dependence on God and then also learning, as you guys have both said, with the thinking with the church over the past 2000 years about some of these questions, and I think that gives us a kind of different posture. 

Christianity is yes, offering true doctrines, but the doctrines are meant to point to a way of life. And I think sometimes for those who struggle with doubt, we're so stuck in our head that we miss that following Jesus is a way of life, not just answer all my questions. So again, I hope that the listeners see the balance here. It's both deeply intellectual and reflective, but if we're just approaching to Christianity, answer all my questions, God, answer all my questions in the way I want them, then that's kind of doing it wrong. Even though, yeah, we want to explore, but as we explore, we're also exploring what the Christian claim is, and there's a reason why in Acts it was called The Way because it's offering us more than just proposition. It's offering us a way of life. And I think to kind of get the confidence that people are looking for, it has to be a both and, it has to be thinking, but also adopting certain practices, putting your life on the line through certain practices. 

And so, that's maybe one of the kind of differences in the way that we're approaching it in Surprised By Doubt is to say it's about thinking, but it's more than thinking, it's about adopting these ways of life. And I think doubt can get us there and help us actually, in God's mysterious providence, actually, he can use something that's not good. Doubt, well, I'm not celebrating doubt, but He uses that in a way that we trust more in Him and we actually put our life on the line in the way that I think He calls us to. 

Kymberli Cook: 

So those are some of the ways that it can be incredibly helpful and incredibly… I like what you said about maybe even not necessarily calling it good in and of itself, but it is used by God in really helpful and beautiful ways for the shaping of His followers and those in His creation. When does it become destructive in y'all's opinion? Dr. Chatraw, do you want to start? 

Joshua Chatraw: 

Yeah, I think one of the ways that I've seen this, one of the things that we do in the book, if I can give a little bit of the metaphor we use in Surprised By Doubt, which is that what happens sometimes is for people grow up in an evangelical culture, they begin to have these kinds of doubts or they go through disillusionment with the church because of the kind of scandal that we see all around us in the church. They have some questions and they begin to question the intellectual maturity of the church, and they begin to grow pre disillusioned, and they get ready to actually jump out of what I would say the Christian house to what's beyond. And they feel like, "Okay, there's not really a foundation here. I've got to go live somewhere else." I think often what's happening though is they're actually, yes, they're in the Christian House as C.S Lewis famously wrote, but what we would add to it, they actually have grown up in a kind of attic space and that attic. 

And I'm not saying all of evangelicalism by any means is that attic space, but there's a kind of space that was built in reaction to certain things going on in modernism. And those things are things like a kind of can we match the hard rationalism like we talked about with Augustine with our own Christian version of hard rationalism, or there's a moral decadence in culture, and so we'll respond with a kind of purity culture that has some problems in it. And so, we're reacting and they're actually, if you grow up in some of these spaces, it can get pretty claustrophobic. We're afraid of science, so we don't go there, and it leads us to some kind of narrow spaces intellectually. And so they get ready to jump. And I think what doubt should do is say, "Hang on, what's beneath the attic? What's beneath the space?" And I think that's helpful, doubt could be helpful in that way, but I think sometimes it just leads to jumping out of the house entirely. 

And what we were calling for in the book is come downstairs to the main foundation, which is Jesus Christ, let's look at Jesus. Let's look at the wisdom of the church over the last 2000 years so we're not so reactionary to everything going on now. And I think there's some real wisdom and ways to navigate doubt, but often the destructive part isn't just that we're saying, "Hey, actually science is good. Now let's have a conversation about science in the Bible and how this works." But people just maybe too quickly jump out without wrestling with some of those deeper assumptions that they're making or some of the kinds of disillusionment. Maybe they should be disillusioned with what they've experienced, maybe that's a right thing, but let's go downstairs to the main pillars of the house rather than jump out. And I think that's where it becomes destructive. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Just the default knee-jerk reaction is just a leave as a response to the doubts and to not keep digging a little bit more and see if they actually find something more stable that really is there, but you just go a little too fast. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

Just one example with that if I can, is that in our book, we talk about one prominent deconversion story, and really the person who deconverts, and all I mean by that is someone claimed to be a Christian and then they no longer are claiming to be a Christian, they're not in the church. Maybe on this Zoom, we disagree theologically about what's going on, and we don't really address that. I'm just dealing with the kind of what's there in front of us, what we see happen when they walk away. In this person's situation, what they said is, "I could no longer answer the problem of evil, and so I walked away, I just couldn't answer it." 

And one of the things we do in the book is we put up Alvin Plantinga. Alvin Plantinga is probably the most significant 20th century philosopher or Christian philosopher. And as a Christian, he says, "I can't solve the problem of evil." So you have these two thinkers and both of them are saying the same thing. One of them doesn't actually think that's a problem, that he can't fully answer it, the other thinks he does. So what's the difference? Well, there's some key assumptions about how Christianity works that are at play, and it's those assumptions that need to be evaluated because they're in some ways saying, well, neither one of them can fully answer that question, but one of them thinks it's okay, and the other thinks that, that's a major problem worth actually leaving the faith for. 

So I think some of those assumptions might be… I think coming downstairs helps you reevaluate how does Christianity work? If I can't answer this question, does this mean this is all wrong? Or does it just mean that we don't have enough information to answer this question? But if you step outside of the house, well then the problem of evil actually might get even worse because we don't have the resources to actually deal with the kind of evil and suffering in the world, and then we don't have any kind of transcendent moral fabric to say, actually, this is wrong and this is right. So that's just one example to say, sometimes what we're looking at is assumptions about how Christianity works rather than simply the actual evidence in front of us and how that actually will go. I hope that's clarifying. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Yeah, no, that definitely was. Dr. McNall, what other ways would you add that you can see, or that we see doubt being destructive? 

Josh McNall: 

Yeah, I mean agree with everything Josh just said. One of the things I do in my book is I talk about reclaiming this sacred middle ground between a certain kind of doubt and then what I call dogmatism. So those are the two extremes, doubt and dogmatism. And I think to build on what Josh said, when we equate faith with certitude or faith with omniscience, then that actually creates this misnomer and this misconception that if I have doubts, I need to deconvert because I don't understand the problem of evil. And like you said, it's like, well, no, you don't understand the problem of evil, not God. You're human, and so you're never going to fully be able to wrap your mind around certain things. But in addition to that maybe problematic aspect of doubt, I would say sometimes we just use doubt as an excuse for disobedience and an excuse to just do what we want to do anyway, even though it causes us and our family members or those around us a lot of pain. 

And so, you see folks who are wrestling with maybe doubts, faith doubts, and the next move is then to engage in behaviors that are incredibly destructive to themselves or to their family members. And sometimes I think we have to be honest that we kind of have a vested interest in some of our faith questions. Namely, if I want to behave in a certain way that's selfish or that's abusive or that is narcissistic, then sometimes I think doubt becomes a tool we use to excuse patterns of behavior that are destructive, and that is a destructive form of doubt because it causes pain and just wreckage in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones. I think a third one would be that it's a kind of doubt that is destructive or problematic where we just want to perpetually sit on the fence and never actually commit because we're constantly waiting for more evidence to come in. And to build on Augustine, Augustine has this beautiful idea that's taken up by Anselm and others of, I believe in order to understand, and Anselm builds on that we have faith that's seeking understanding. 

But some forms of understanding, or you could say assurance, can only come the inside of the house to build on what Josh just said. They can't come from simply reading Reddit forums about the house or taking architecture courses at the local university about how to build houses. There's a way of knowing that can only come through immersion in giving yourself over, giving your allegiance over to Jesus. So I could take classes on what it means to be a diver, a high diver. I could watch the Olympic high diving competition, but there's a certain sense in which me knowing if I'm a diver is I'm going to have to jump in the pool. And so, there is an immersion that's required, and I think that's a form of something I've told students. I had a student several years ago who was just wrestling with big questions and he was a thinker and he was analytical and all the things you love in a student. 

And I said, "These are great questions. I would challenge you at this point, I don't know that there's going to be some magical bit of data that's going to come in. Somebody's going to find some artifact in the holy land that's going to put you over the line of faith." I said, "I would encourage you to, even in the midst of those uncertainties and questions, to commit to certain habits," like Josh said earlier, certain practices that can allow faith to flourish in our lives, habits of prayer and service and obedience and worship. And then, I would invite you to give your allegiance to Jesus in the midst of those questions and not see faith as synonymous with intellectual certainty because it's just not what the word means. That's not what faith is within the scriptures. It's not synonymous with this sort of rational certitude. And so, those would be a couple other ways in which doubt can maybe be problematic within the life of faith. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

Can I build up on that? 

Kymberli Cook: 

Oh, please. Yes, go for it. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

I love that. And I think that a reply that's sometimes given to what Josh and I are saying is, "Well, won't that muddy the waters?" In other words, I want to deal with an objection that somebody might be thinking here. In other words, they're imagining the way to kind of deal with Christianity or deal with their doubt is to have this what C.S. Lewis would call looking at. So we're to stand in this kind of neutral space and look at, and I think there's a sense where, yeah, okay, we need to look at Christianity, but if we're looking at Christianity, we're always looking from a certain vantage point. We're standing somewhere. And so with that, you say, once I started… Someone might say, "Once I started actually adopting some of these practices, won't I be biased, or that kind of color the lens I view Christianity by?" And the answer is yes, but here's the problem, and this is what it means to be human. You're already biased. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Something's already coloring how you're seeing it. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

In other words, we already have habits. And so one of the things that's going on in the last 200 years in the West is it's like more and more, this is what the philosopher of Charles Taylor calls the eminent frame. Everything in the world says, this is all there is. From all the billboards we see every day to we grab our phone first thing in the morning, all of these habits teach us, even if we say there is a God, even if you're a Christian on this, all of these various things say, "No, this is reality. This is all there is. This is what's most important." And so you've already adopted certain practices that are screening out what could be other realities, and as Christians, I would say as a Christian, I would say are other realities. So we don't get to opt out of practices, we're going to do that anyway. 

And we're already doing that because we're human. And so what I'm suggesting is yes, we need to look at Christianity, but if it's true, then we also need to actually, and this is what Lewis says, we need to look along the light of Christianity and we need to step into that light. And in order to kind of see if it works, we're going to have to do more than just think about it. We're going to actually have to get the kind of confidence that people are after, that Christians are after, we have to actually step into it. And this is in some sense also building upon Pascal in his wager to actually step into the practices of Christianity. So again, it's not anti-intellectual, actually thinking more about how rationality works and comparing that with, okay, well, how are the practices now that I have actually maybe undercutting the reality that could be there. And so that's trying to deal with maybe an objection if you're tracking with our logic here. 

Kymberli Cook: 

Well, I would love to keep chatting, but our time is actually up, gentlemen. And I just want to surface real quick. I love the pictures even of engagement that you're painting. And I want to point out just a couple things that I think in the way that you all have been talking through, rebuttals to thoughts that people might have and that kind of thing. I think the way that we can shape our environments, the Christian environments specifically for people who are in these seasons, is giving them an open space to be having the questions. The questions need to be safe. We need to allow the questions to be asked free of judgment, and actually even stepping into the intellectual rigor of it and having people who are around who can step into that with people who need answers, need to be thinking through those things. 

But I love the idea of at the same time, encouraging a commitment to the practice. And I think both of you are essentially saying the same thing. Dr. Chatraw, you're saying stay in the house, or at least look at the rest of the house before you leave. And I think Dr. McNall, you're saying something comparable, which is like, do the practices, step in. Don't just stay on the sidelines. And we as a community are going to encourage you not to just stay on the sidelines, not because we're trying to brainwash you, not because we're trying to indoctrinate you, but because this is part of how it works. And quite frankly, this is part of how any rational approach to a worldview works. This is just reality. And so, I love the idea of the open space, but at the same time, an encouragement not to necessarily push away immediately. 

And if you do end up pushing away, doing so, having gone about it the right way, which I think Dr. Chatraw, you talk about in your book specifically, and if you walk out the door, at least walk out the front door and having done it the right way. So I would just want to thank you, both Dr. Joshs' for being here. It's been a lovely conversation and thank you again for the work that you've put in. We really appreciate as the church, we appreciate the books that you've written and the thought that you've put into this. Thank you for being here. 

Josh McNall: 

Yeah, thank you. 

Joshua Chatraw: 

Thank you. 

Kymberli Cook: 

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