Faith and Unbelief

Randy and Kyle get brutally honest about the moment doubt stops feeling like “questions” and starts feeling like unbelief, including what it’s like to say that out loud when you’re a pastor with a church, a family, and a job that takes for granted that you believe in God.

We dig into the philosophy and the lived spirituality behind the words we toss around too easily: belief, disbelief, doubt, and faith. Kyle unpacks the senses in which belief is (and isn't) an attitude toward a proposition, why certainty is basically impossible, and why faith can’t survive if it’s treated like a 100% confidence score. From “faith that” (propositions like the resurrection) to “faith in” (trust, loyalty, relationship), we explore how acceptance, hope, desire, and resilience can carry a Christian faith journey through seasons when your mind won’t cooperate.

We also talk Bible language like pistis as faithfulness, the hiddenness of God, and why the tradition is full of saints and spiritual giants who knew darkness from the inside. Our goal isn’t to shame atheism or glorify doubt, but to make space for honesty and widen the possibilities for understanding what faith can mean.

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Transcript

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Welcome And Podcast Premise

Randy 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle 0:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink at the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy 0:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar.

Why Faith Is Not Belief

Kyle 0:36

So one of the things we talk about a lot on this podcast is faith. We've come back to that theme quite a bit, and every now and then we've um had occasion to mention how faith relates to belief. We've never done a super deep dive on that for various reasons. Occasionally we've mentioned that we think faith is not the same thing as belief, and that maybe there's an important wedge to drive in there a little bit. We've talked about how maybe faith could be thought of as a little more like trust, perhaps, something like that. But we've never gone super deep on that issue, and I think now is a good time because you were recently bringing up that you've been thinking about how faith relates to unbelief in particular. So I'm very intrigued about um how this has come about for you and what it means to you. And this is something I used to think a lot about. Haven't thought about it deeply in several years, but it was a thing that I like thought professionally about for a while, published a paper on. And um, so I have some thoughts, and I'm curious what what how your experiences are interacting with uh my thoughts and where I eventually got to, sort of in the lived version of my own faith.

Randy 1:41

Yeah, yeah. You said you did it professionally, you thought about this stuff a lot. You're gonna you're gonna weigh in here, but I'm interested as to like what about faith and belief and unbelief got you.

Kyle 1:53

Yeah,

Kyle’s Philosophy Origin Story

Kyle 1:54

that's a good question. So it was several experiences that I had. So the reason I went into philosophy originally, like decided to major in it and then decided to go to graduate school to study it full time, was I had questions about God. And those questions, I had no idea what philosophy was when I went to college. I took um, I think it was like a general humanities class where that was taught by a philosopher because in that department, the the the English department and the philosophy department and a couple other like general humanities departments, they were all just shoved together. So you could take a general required humanities course and get any of those professors. Mine was a philosopher who was later became one of my friends. So I got some of it there, and I had already, as a as like an eager high schooler that was very religious, I'd already gotten some into like apologetics. Okay, so you can imagine how that how that worked out when I went to my regular listeners. No Kylan is passed with apologetics. Imagine like a very uh gung-ho version of me that um wouldn't shut up going into a philosophy class for the first time taught by an atheist. That's you can pretty probably guess how that went. Um I had like long email exchanges with this very gracious uh philosophy faculty. Yeah. Anyway, um, so so I I kind of stumbled into philosophy, took some critical thinking, took some logic classes, got hooked, realized, oh, there are people who think about the stuff that I care about full-time, that that's like that literally their job. I didn't know that was a thing. So I'm gonna try to do that if I can. Um and so gradually got better at it, but those questions didn't disappear. They they became more significant. Um, fast forward to most of the way through graduate school, you get to graduate school, you have to pick an area, and the area that you're pressured into by all the you know advisors that you have is gonna be something that might potentially in like some uh unlikely but still possible future get you a job in philosophy.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Yeah, yeah.

Kyle 3:53

Which means you cannot uh specialize in you know the specific questions about God that I was interested in. Okay. Because those jobs don't exist. There's like two of them, and we all know who's gonna get them. You know. Um, so I had to do something else for a long time, several other things actually. But I kind of came back around towards the end of my grad graduate studies to, you know what, I came here to think about this, I'm gonna think about this now, you know. Um, I'm gonna at least publish something about this. And so uh faith was the thing that I landed on um because I had been thinking for a long time about epistemology, what it you know, what it means to know something, how beliefs are formed, and what it what has to happen to a belief to make it knowledge, and how that kind of squares with faith. Um so these ain't really old questions for me, but finally I sat down and was like, I'm I'm doing this. And it turned out part of it was a conference I went to that was a very fascinating conference. I won't go into the details, but I heard the two different speakers of that conference talk about the nature of faith in a non-doxastic way, which means a way that's not wedded to or dependent on or just reducible to what you believe. And in particular, so I'm gonna explain this in a little bit, but there's several ways you can go with that. But a couple of these guys were talking about um how you could still have like a robust cognitive element to your faith, it just ain't belief. And it it's like compatible with a whole range of like cognitive dispositions, um, including doubt and like very weak belief. And so this got me wondering can you actually disbelieve religious propositions and still be said in some rational way to have faith in that? Um and I looked into the literature and it turned out that like five people had talked about this directly, and all of them said no. And I was like, I don't think that's right. Because I think that I've done it. Uh and and so the other part of it was I had some friends that I'd become close to, mostly in graduate school, and then I also had my own experience where it seemed to me that my faith, looking back from that really zealous kid in high school to now um, you know, about to graduate with a philosophy degree, my faith had done it changed, right? Significantly. Um, but it seemed like the same faith, like it seemed continuous, it seemed like it's not that it ended in something, and nothing died, nothing broke irrevocably. It seemed like one experience to me. And it I'd talked with people who had similar experiences, and I knew from the literature and from looking into a few studies that that was that was not very uncommon, you know, people had this kind of experience. It's not the norm, but it's not like unheard of. And so I thought, uh, something wrong about that. It seems to me that I have faith, and and not only do I have faith in like a person or a god or whatever, I have faith that certain things are the case. And I don't think that they are. And uh that sounds understandably contradictory to a lot of folks and to a lot of professional philosophers in that field. Um, and so I wrote that thing trying to make that case. Okay. And then I moved on with my life. But here we are, and this it seems relevant again. So I'm glad to hear that you're thinking about similar things.

Randy’s Walks Into Unbelief

Randy 7:08

Yeah, yeah. And my story is kind of yours is brought about by the classroom and academia. Mine is brought about by, you know, walking and you know, my my own personal spiritual experience. So for me, you know, doubt has been part of of my spiritual vocabulary for a while, for for a good long time. And I'm comfortable with the thought of doubt. I talk about doubt all the time. We talk about doubt. No big deal. I take these walks. I've talked to you and listeners and my church about these walks that I take pretty much every night, kind of religiously. It's um cathartic, it's a way for me to just feel like I'm airing out a little bit and declutter my mind and my inner person. And there are times that most of my walks at some point or another are prayerful, whether it's with just my thoughts, my presence, or my words. And sometimes I will feel a presence, I will feel companionship, I will feel what I'm just gonna call the presence of God. And now I know that's a fraught, very, you know, I could mean a lot of different things by that. I'm not gonna go away into it. But it's just I feel something, right? I feel not alone. Let's let's say that. Yeah, yeah. And there are some nights where I feel alone.

Kyle 8:29

And where I And those nights too are prayerful walking. So like you go into it with the same attitude every time. Yeah, yes, okay.

Randy 8:37

100%. And there are nights when, and it's not as common, I would say, but regularly irregular, where I will be walking prayerfully, thoughtfully, attentively, and I just realize I don't feel a damn thing. I don't sense any presence here. It feels like I'm talking to nothing. And that can be disconcerting, you know, and it's familiar enough that you just keep moving and eventually the feeling passes. And there was one night in particular, I remember right where I was, I remember everything about it, um, where I just realized if someone held a gun to my head, I think I would tell them I don't believe any of this is real. And by this I mean the God of the Bible, Jesus, you know, the whole kit the whole thing. Yeah that I just I don't I think it's probably unlikely.

Kyle 9:37

And what triggered the the thought? Do you remember? Like was there something that happened?

Randy 9:42

I think struggling with the hiddenness of God on that walk, and maybe I don't remember particularly, but maybe it was a couple nights in a row, but I just remember um struggling with that, and then when I had this realization, I I I just I had this feeling of like doubt is familiar, but this is different.

Kyle 10:04

Yeah, like you crossed a threshold.

Randy 10:05

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's just because I let myself go there. You know? Um I I think I was like a a go-kart has a governor on it, right? Like it's it can go way faster than it does, but they'll limit the throttle so that you, you know, not everybody at the family fun park doesn't crash and split their brains open, right? So I feel like I put a governor on myself as to the things that I let myself think and not think, if that makes sense. I'm sure we I think we all do to some extent. And in this regard, I felt like I broke through and was just willing to say, I think I right now just don't believe, instead of doubt, because I would have shrouded that in the conversation of doubt, and I realized doubt this feels different to me than what I've called doubt. This feels a little bit more concrete, um, a little less unbelief sounds scarier than than doubt to me. Unbelief to me means something different than doubt. When I was processing and having this experience and realized that I think there I have crossed that that boundary from doubt into unbelief. And I don't know if it's a clear line. I think it's probably I was staving it off for a long period of time and holding it off, and all of a sudden I let it go, and then all of a sudden I was just staring at this thing that I'll just call unbelief.

Kyle 11:24

Yeah.

Randy 11:24

And it freaked me out a little bit at first. And then I quickly realized as I started processing for myself, and even processing how I'm gonna talk to my wife about this, and how I'm gonna talk to friends about this, how I'm gonna keep my job through this, right? I'm a pastor. Um, I quickly realized as I began, as I was processing, that I think this unbelief isn't like the polar opposite of faith. It might be the opposite of belief, maybe. I don't know. I haven't fleshed that one out so much. You can help me, hopefully. But faith and belief and unbelief are all related, but they're not the same thing to me. And then when I when I was explaining this to my wife, you know, she had lots of questions. I explained it to her and then I walked out. And then I walked back into the room and I was like, I need you to know that all of this, the belief, the unbelief, the doubt, it all fits in the faith box. And when I said it out loud, in that I I could feel it myself, and I could see it trigger something in her where it's like, oh, okay, this all maybe falls under the same, under the same umbrella. This is all in the same box, this is all in the same bucket. And that is that the faith, the journey of faith, I think I've thought about it, and I think we've been given faith in ways, in a way and in ways that are unhelpful. They have their limits. It has its limits, I would say. And we exchange the idea of faith for belief, and like you were saying in the beginning of our conversation, they're not the same thing. But when you if you would ask me a non-philosopher, what's the difference, I'd have a hard time speaking to it. But I just know faith for me is a big, complex, loaded reality that speaks to really a lot of who I am, a lot of like my history, a lot of what I've known, a lot of how I see the world. And also it contains it does contain belief and a number of beliefs. And you know, you could put together a little orthodoxy around it, even though I'm like I said in our conversation with Matt Erickson, orthodoxy is useful as in as much as it moves and motivates us to action into into living out our faith. But I think unbelief fits in the faith box as well. If if it certainly feels like it does for me, as I've been processing this in the months since. Yeah, and I wonder if I'm not alone in having this experience of saying having this realization that like doubt doesn't get at it strong enough for me anymore at times. Doubt is good, and I'm glad I remember 10, 12, 13 years ago talking about doubt in front of my church at this at for the first time. And it was one of those moments as a speaker where you just know what you just said struck a chord in most people that that you're speaking to. When I talked about doubt for the first time, I saw so many light bulbs go off. But I could tell I was connecting, I was striking a chord, I was speaking out something that the people in my church hadn't hadn't heard before.

Kyle 14:25

Yeah.

Randy 14:26

Now we're decade plus beyond that. I just feel like doubt doesn't get at it strong enough anymore for me. Right. And I know that this isn't for everybody, but in my experience, that word unbelief makes a lot more sense. I was actually telling a friend about this recently, and they said, What is unbelief? I don't understand that concept. And that to me was surprising. I was like, Oh yeah. I just feel like I, you know, you have these propositions before you have these this faith to put your trust in, if you will, or your this set of beliefs. And there's just sometimes where I would just say, I am way closer to unbelief than belief in these things. Yeah. Um, so that's that's the experience, and it's kind of it's an ongoing process. I'm in processes as to how I'm thinking about it, um, integrating it into my spirituality, how it fits in. But I will tell you, my faith has felt more robust since I've had these been in in these conversations in my head and even started sharing them with really close friends. And here we are.

Kyle 15:28

Yeah. Have you said this at church?

Randy 15:31

Nope.

Kyle 15:31

Okay. Interesting.

Randy 15:32

Yep.

Kyle 15:33

Curious how that's gonna go. Do you intend to?

Randy 15:35

I mean, it's too late now, but to say, cats out of the box, cats out of the bag out there.

Kyle 15:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. I have several questions.

Randy 15:46

And I haven't shared this with the church because first of all, we're going through a sermon series on the book of Acts. It's really fun, but it hasn't come up. Uh I haven't had a a moment, an appropriate moment to do that. And it feels more like a podcast conversation than than a sermon at this point. Yeah. There you can do different things in a conversation here than I can do from the pulpit. So here we are.

Belief Disbelief And Hiddenness

Kyle 16:09

Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Is my one Bible anything in this conversation? Um, because that unbelief phrase just brings to my mind that verse. In fact, I don't really hear philosophers use that word, and I can't think of ever hearing anyone that's not a good idea.

Randy 16:25

That I do believe Yeah, it's that verse. Help my own belief.

Kyle 16:29

Um Philosophers talk about belief all the time. They talk about disbelief, which is the opposite of belief, which is just um real quickly, a belief, uh one way of cashing out belief is to say there's a thing called a proposition, and a proposition is a thing that can be true or false, very crudely. And to believe it uh is to uh in some way take it to be true, right? That you it's an attitude you have towards that proposition, towards its truth, and to disbelieve it is to have a similar attitude towards its falsehood. Um we could talk more, maybe we will, about how to cash out what belief means, but very crudely, that's one way to put it. And then there's all these in-between states, and doubt would fall somewhere in there, sure, right? So you can think of it as credences, is another word that gets thrown around by philosophers a lot, which is sort of like probability degrees or something. So I don't know if you know anything about probability theory, but like one is full certainty all the way down to nothing, you know, full certainty in the opposite direction. Most of the time, everybody falls somewhere in the middle about most of our beliefs, right? Very few things that I have a credence anywhere close to one about, and most of those are perceptual things that are occurring in my space right now.

Randy 17:37

And that's what I mean. I will say we say that very flippantly, or you say that very flippantly, and I'm like, yeah, duh, of course. But I've had conversation, or let me say, interaction after interaction after interaction with many, many Christians who think that is a very weak faith, or that is um that does not even look like faith to many, many Christians. Because faith to many Christians looks like a one, Michael. Yeah, yeah. 100% case closed, God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Kyle 18:08

Yeah. And I think we've we should be beyond it. We are like I don't want to say beyond in the sense that, oh, we figured it out, and those people, you know, they're all dumb or something. That's not the case. Because I was there in a certain sense of there. I have a hard time taking that seriously as anything other than talking oneself into something for some pragmatic reasons. And I'm not against pragmatic reasons. I think they're very important, I think they might even have a role to play in knowledge. Um we've talked before at length about the problems with certainty, the straightforward impossibility of actual certainty, how it wars against faith, how faith is actually made impossible by certainty. So we have a very different take on faith than that. So if that kind of person is listening to the podcast, I guess I would have to do that.

Randy 18:56

Yeah, I mean, I'm literally having pastoral conversations with someone who's freaking out because I the way I talk about certainty right now.

Kyle 19:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess go back further in the feed if you want to hear more about that. Yeah. Yeah. But no, that's fascinating to me. So I guess my question is, what does that verse mean? I don't know. Or like, does unbelief mean something different to the religious folks who use that phrase than a philosopher might mean by disbelief in the way that I just described it?

Randy 19:25

Yeah, when you first say disbelief, it makes me think it what it what evokes in my mind is I choose to not believe that. Like I'm I disbelief rather than unbelief. Unbelief for me is a it's not even a choice, if that makes sense. Even though I know it kind of is, you know? Yeah. Um it it it sits in front of me and just says like and I look at it and think, I can't believe that right now. Um, even though I want to. I really want to believe the whole thing. Everything that God said, like the Bible says, and the church stands on, the traditions and all that stuff. I want to believe it, but I can't. That feels like unbelief to me. Disbelief feels like something that I'm choosing to walk away from or I'm choosing to not believe anymore. Is that how unaccurate is that? Yeah, I don't know. Or inaccurate.

Kyle 20:16

It does not have to be a choice. I think it rarely is a choice. Okay. Really.

Randy 20:20

Um what's the difference between unbelief and disbelief?

Kyle 20:23

Then there is no, I don't that's what I'm trying to figure out. If there's some kind of like religious layer to this that I was unaware of or something. Maybe they're just the same thing. But it I don't know what that verse means. I believe help my unbelief. Right.

Randy 20:35

Uh other than I want to believe. Yeah, I I deeply identify with that verse.

Kyle 20:42

Yeah.

Randy 20:42

I will say. Always have.

Kyle 20:45

Yeah. Now I could I could interpret so another thing we've talked about before is that um the words this is very nerdy, but like the words that get translated into English in the New Testament as belief or unbelief may not be the best translation, right? There may be better ways to cash that out. So may you know, probably in our context, when we think of this as in a very cognitive way, that's probably not what was going on in the the minds of the writers or the original hearers or whatever. So there's some some things that we could really dig into the weeds of there if we wanted to. Um so when they say, I believe, help my unbelief, they're probably not saying, I believe P, I also disbelieve P. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Forget about that. It's probably something more like I want to follow you, but I can't. I don't know how. Something like that. Yep. Or I want to trust you, but I, you know, I can't quite bring myself to do it. Or I do trust you, but I don't want to do what I think that entails. You know, probably something more like that, but I'm not really sure. But I definitely feel those things occurring together. I understand what it's like to feel like, no, I I I am still a person of faith. I it's not just that my My experience is what it always was. It's also that I still have faith in an important sense that the ideals of Christianity are good and noble, and even if I don't believe them to be true, I want them to be true. You know what I mean? And and some of this uh changes over time, and it feels like a very natural kind of fluctuation. So one of the things that made me want to write that thing was we it's almost like you know, we we view belief and unbelief as this threshold kind of thing where it's on or off, zero sum, you know, you're one or you're one or the other. Um whereas a much it feels much more natural and realistic to think that I can be close to maybe there is a threshold, but I can be really close to that threshold and I can go above and below it kind of very naturally without realizing it sometimes or without it meaning very much. Um and that seems like just a natural part of the faith experience to me to that sometimes, yeah, it will dip below a level that maybe a philosopher would look at and say, You don't believe that. Not only do you not believe that proposition, it's not like you're not taking a position, you don't you think that's false, you know? Yep. Um and and I've been there, I am there, and so I think that's totally right. Uh, but I also understand what it does to the typical notion of faith for someone who came from the kind of evangelical context that we did. But not even just those, probably lots of like mainline and Catholic folks would have a real problem with this too. Because to say that I disbelieve or I'm in unbelief, or however you want to cash it out, is a hard thing to realize and also a hard thing to convince someone else is not a big deal. Yeah. And I don't even want to say that it's not a big deal. It kind of in so in a way it is a big deal, right?

SPEAKER_02 23:46

I think so.

Kyle 23:47

I I remember one of our episodes, I think we were talking about the resurrection, it must have been an Easter thing. I remembered a sh a TV show that I watched, so I've probably relayed this before, but there's a show called Dibs. Have you ever seen this TV show? It's uh it's very good. It's Alex Garland um stars Nick Offerman. Everyone should go watch it's great. It's got some interesting physics that's probably not super accurate, but whatever. Um so there's a scene in it where um these super smart people figure out a machine, essentially, that allows them to view any point in the past as it actually happened. And naturally, where's the writer gonna go with this? The first thing that they tested on is the crucifixion. Uh and so all you see, and they don't show to their credit, the writers aren't really heavy-handed with it, but you can see the people watching Jesus on the cross, and you can kind of see their reactions. And I'm watching it for the first time, wondering where are they gonna go with this, but I instantly knew where I thought it would go. Like if they played it out, you know, and they watched that scene for hours and then for a couple of days. How's it gonna end? I know how it's gonna end, right? And I know what I would expect to see if I was in that room, which is kind of a similar thing, I think, that you're describing, a realization that I don't think that happened. You know, I I think that did not happen. In fact, in this moment, I think that that proposition on which Christianity is based is false.

Randy 25:11

And I I I do want to stress you saying in this moment.

Kyle 25:14

Yes, exactly, because there's other moments where it's I I feel it to be true.

Randy 25:19

For me, in my experience, I will tell you, in this moment, the actual moment that we're talking, this is not my reality. Like I'm not in this moment struggling struggling. I'm not unbelief is not residing inside of me. I don't feel it, I don't sense it, I'm I'm in a I'm in a different place, right? And that's kind of what has made this processing actually more helpful because I had this thought, I had I lingered, it's sat processed for a while, but then I actually moved in out of that place and into a like a yeah, I believe everything. That's right, you know, as much as I can. But still that was real, and I know it's gonna come back.

Kyle 25:53

Exactly. Yes.

Randy 25:54

It's this oscillation, right? It's not linear.

Kyle 25:57

No, it's not, and it's it who knows what it's affected by. But I think this is a real and important part of the religious life that not nearly enough people talk about. So I'm very glad to hear you come to it organically and uh you know confirm that I'm not nuts. There you go.

Randy 26:13

That's what I'm here for, but yeah.

Kyle 26:15

Like there are plenty of folks, and I have no judgment for these folks who, again, viewing it on this sort of spectrum of degrees type thing, live their whole lives firmly in the top half of that spectrum, right? And on their worst days, quote unquote worse, you know, they're somewhere around the 50% mark. Something goes really bad, but then it gets strong again. And some of us, I think, are naturally more predisposed to the middle of that range, yeah, or even the bottom of it.

SPEAKER_02 26:39

Uh-huh.

Kyle 26:39

And I'm one of those people. Um, so faith has to be, if it's gonna be possible for somebody like me, yes, it has to be something other than belief. It can't be grounded, it can't be based on that. It can be connected to it, yeah. Right? It can it can involve it as an entailment, it can involve it maybe even essentially, I don't know. But it can't just be that, it can't be reducible to it. And faith as an experience has to be compatible with a whole range of cognitive states, belief and otherwise. Uh we can get as nerdy about that as you want, because there's lots of other cognitive states that could play the role that belief sometimes plays. Okay.

Faith That Versus Faith In

Randy 27:16

And so let's just get a tiny bit technical. Faith and belief. You said, you know, faith has to if a person like me is gonna have to have faith, it has to live outside of belief. You said something like that, right? Yeah. Okay. So as you know, Kyle Whitaker, philosopher, tell me the the difference between faith and belief. You know, I know what it feels like in me, but I'd like to hear a more technical.

Kyle 27:41

Yeah. Okay, so um, so I don't have like um a view that I'm very sure about as to how all this hangs together. I have some thoughts about what is possible.

Randy 27:55

You just said that in case there's any philosophers listening to public.

Kyle 27:58

Which I know they're not. But just in case. Like there's a whole range of views. It's very controversial what what belief is, there's a whole range of views about what faith is, there's a whole range of views, obviously, about how the two go together. Um the only view I've ever actually defended is that however you cash out the one and however you cash out the other, they are compatible uh along a whole the entirety of the spectrum, essentially. Um so you can you can be fully to, you know, to the you can max out your belief state and you can max out whatever else is involved in a faith state and those are compatible, or you can have any range of other, you know, values that you want to give that and it's still compatible. So I I think and I don't think faith should either be restricted to religious propositions or the religious life. I think you can have faith in a whole range of things. I believe it or not, I think that um sports fans are people of faith. Nice, nice. Like in a very significant sense. I think that lots of folks have faith in their uh political team, uh lots of folks have faith in their family members, their spouses, I have faith that my wife will be faithful, um, and and lots of other areas of life. Like faith is just sort of a natural human attitude, just like I think belief is. It's just bigger. It's bigger than belief. It involves more things, and sometimes it it goes beyond where belief goes. Okay. But that's not to say that one is better than another or it these are just ways that humans approach certain facts in their lives and certain relationships, certain situations they find themselves in. These are phrases that we use to describe those things. And for whatever reason, the faith one has really stuck in the religious category because it kind of makes sense, right? Faith kind of outstrips the evidence in a certain way, the way that we've talked about before. Um, and if you're gonna have a relationship with a being that you can't directly observe, it makes sense that faith would be a large part of the way that you describe that kind of relationship, right? Um so the way I approach the question of what is faith, start there, is I I don't like it when we start with a notion that we derive from our tradition or whatever, we have a definition, and then we try to find the evidence we need to fit the definition, right? And we explain away things that don't seem to fit the definition. We can do that very successfully to a with a great deal of subtlety, but I think it's the exact wrong way to approach the question. Um so I don't think we kind of take a top-down approach where I have a theory and then I'm, you know, finding the data and working out my explanation for how all the data fits into my theory. I'm empirical about it. I think we should build up our notion of things like belief and like faith out of people's actual experiences. And when it came to this faith question, my own experience and the experience of several folks I know, and now yours too, is that uh look, if your definition of faith said that I can't disbelieve those propositions, well, so much the worse for your definition of faith, because here I am doing it. Okay, you know, I think our our notion, our theory of those concepts should account for the plurality of possible experiences. People experience this, like it or not. And if you ask them, they will often tell you that they have a continuous faith experience through that, just like we're describing. I think our theory should be sensitive to that rather than try to explain it away. So I I say that as sort of a meta meta-theoretical, you know, stance of like that's how I approach the question. So I'm gonna be inclined to find ways to account for that experience rather than to explain away that experience, if that makes sense. Um so to get a slightly more nerdy for just a minute, um, philosophers have distinguished between two kinds of faith. Um, and it kind of mirrors a distinction about knowledge, um, and they call it faith that versus faith in, or propositional faith versus non-propositional faith. And so you could think of propositional faith as the kind of traditional I have a belief system, and what I have faith in, or that, is that uh that those those propositions are true. You know, uh God raised Jesus from the dead, yes, um, God is one and three in some significant sense.

Randy 32:13

Um The Bible's the word of God. Exactly.

Kyle 32:15

God, you know, incarnated in the world.

Randy 32:17

This is the kind of faith that I was given.

Kyle 32:18

Exactly. That you know, lots of us were, and and I'm not shitting on that at all. Like it's important. Um and you can still totally believe all of that and still have the kind of robust faith that I think you and I would both recognize as real faith. And I don't, I'm not who am I gonna say anybody doesn't have real faith? Again, everybody's experience counts. Um so faith that would be, you know, uh I take those propositions. Faith in what you just described. I'm calling that faith that. Faith that. Yeah, faith that certain a set of propositions are true. Okay. Call it cognitive if you want to. Okay. Um faith in would be faith in like a person or an ideal, something more fluid, something more relational.

Randy 32:55

Trust. Yeah.

Kyle 32:59

Although you can still have trust in the other kind too, because I can trust that certain things are true in a way that my evidence doesn't uh trust seems more relational to me. It does, yeah. I I understand that totally. Um so you know, you that there's that cleavage.

Randy 33:12

So faith in.

Kyle 33:14

Yeah. And I, you know, if I you can press. Can I can I pause you?

Randy 33:19

Can I ask for a second? Can you go further? I cut you off a little bit and I wish I wouldn't have. Talk a little bit more about the faith in as far as the um little slight difference from faith that.

Kyle 33:31

Yeah. It it's hard, it's the harder one to define because it can go so many ways.

Randy 33:35

But it's the one that resonates deeply with me right now.

Kyle 33:38

Yeah. So um I think the best we can do is probably some kind of analogy, right? I used to back in my evangelical days, uh, when everybody's somebody would ask me what faith was, I would tell a story that I totally stole from my friend HL. Um, a true story about a guy who um used to put up a tightrope across Niagara Falls and walk across it. Have you ever heard of this guy? And he would push wheelbarrows across it. And then he would put stuff in the wheelbarrow and push it across it, right? And then he would ask for a volunteer to somebody to get in the wheelbarrow and put and his like manager would like ride on his shoulders or ride in the wheelbarrow and push him, you know. Um, and so my my friend used to ask, you know, audiences that he was saying this to, uh, how many of you believe that he could do that again? And everybody would raise their hand and say, Well, how many of you would get in the wheelbarrow and like the hands go down, right? So there's a s a significant um aspect of this faith in thing where belief just it it reaches its limit and faith begins at that at that limit. It's something, it's an active thing. I'm actually doing something, or I'm I'm disposed to do something, right? Um it's it's closer to action than it is to anything that's going on in your head. Yes. Um so to have faith in a person is to, as you said, trust that that person will behave in certain ways under certain circumstances, uh, or that that person will um, you know, hold you in a certain regard, regardless of what happens. They'll they'll trust you, you know. If they hear something really terrible about you, they won't instantly believe it. For example, they might assume that they don't have all the information because they know you, you know. Um so there's lots of ways you could cash out that faith in thing that are more relational, more active, more dynamic than how cognitive states function. And any any range of those attitudes, if you want to call them attitudes, could be compatible with any range of cognitive states, I think.

Randy 35:29

Yeah. It reminds me of when I've heard biblical scholars speak of faith, the the word and idea in the scriptures, particularly in the New Testament, pistis, I believe, is the the Greek word. And many, including somebody like N. T. Wright, would say um faith, that word pistis should be translated more clearly as faithfulness rather than faith. Because faith and faithfulness are not the same thing. Faith is something that like I'm I'm putting my trust in. I'm it's a kind of a cognitive exercise, if you will. Faithfulness, though, doesn't require any cognitive exercise or any belief in order to actually stay faithful to that thing, right? Um and I that's always resonated with me. That like I can't tell you, I can't guarantee that I'm always gonna have faith in Jesus the exact way that I did twenty years ago, thirty years ago, forty years ago, and tomorrow. But I can tell you that my faithfulness has been way more consistent than my faith, it feels like, if that makes sense. But I almost don't separate them anymore. That's right. The faithfulness actually almost is taken over from the belief.

Kyle 36:40

Yeah. Yes, I think that that accords with my experience as well. And so there's something as a commitment involved, there's something willful about it. Yeah, right. So it involves not just your belief states or what you take to be true or false. Okay. It involves your will, what you're willing to do, your actual dispositions to action. It also involves what you want to be the case when you think about it. So like your considered judgment. It involves what you desire, which is like more basic than what you want, right? Just sort of what springs up in you as like, uh I'm you know, I'm drawn towards that. Uh philosophers call that a pro-attitude. I consider that and I like it. You know? Um, and and so that's all involved in faith as well. Which you would expect being a natural human disposition, and we're complicated creatures. Yes. And I'll and you'd also expect, I think, for all of this to change according to context. And it does, you know. So I'm also I lean towards a view of knowledge called contextualism, which our friend Keith DeRose is known for, okay. Defending. Uh, and that says, you know, what you what you can really be said to know is kind of dependent on the context that you're in. You know, he gives a funny example of, you know, I might really heartily defend a philosophical proposition when I'm in a debate about it with another philosopher. But if I'm like zapped up into an alien ship and they say, you know, they have their hand hovering over a red button and they say, What do you believe about that issue? And if you get it wrong, I'm gonna push this button and there goes the earth.

SPEAKER_02 38:10

Yes.

Kyle 38:11

Uh suddenly I don't I don't know anymore. A lot less things I really believe in. Yeah. And and it's not just my feeling about that, but whether I should really be said to know it really does depend on context. Okay. And I think something similar is true of faith. Uh, whether I should be said to have faith that whatever proposition is true or false kind of does depend on context. Uh, and that context can involve who I'm talking to, it can involve what just happened in my life, it can involve my emotional states at the time, lots of things, right? And I think it's totally natural and to be expected. Again, if we're building our concept out of people's experience empirically, as I think we shall ought to do. So that's like the one philosophical claim I'm staking here. Let's be empirical about this. So back to that faith, that in distinction.

Acceptance Faithfulness And Living It

Kyle 38:59

So obviously, if you go the faith-in route, things get fuzzy and there's room for lots of possibilities. But I think even so what I was actually doing in that paper was defending that even within the other side, the faith that, the cognitive thing, the propositional thing, that there's still a range of possibilities, even within that. And that you can think that some sort of cognitive attitude is essential to faith. Propositions matter. Whether Jesus really rose from the dead or not, that matters. And you know from our prior conversations that I think that matters. Yeah. And you can even think that's essential to what it means to be a Christian, and still think that belief is kind of irrelevant and that disbelief is compatible with faith in that proposition. And so that's what I'm trying to defend in that thing that I wrote to piss to try to piss as many people off as possible. Um, because there are other things that your brain can do besides belief things. You can do lots of things with propositions besides believe them. For example, you can accept them uh for the sake of some other thing that you care about, or you can assume them, you know? Or what's the difference?

Randy 40:04

Can you briefly say the difference between accepting and believing or assuming that's right?

Kyle 40:08

So one way of caching it out is to say, well, okay, this gets nerdy, but I'll try to make it brief. So, like, what does it really mean to believe that it's raining outside, for example? Well, one thing it might mean is that if you were to ask me if it's raining, I have a tendency to say yes. Right? Uh another thing that it means is that uh if I consider whether it is raining, I will have a tendency to feel like that it is, and I'd be pretty confident about it. Another thing it might mean is that uh if something would follow from it being if from its raining, for example, I would put on a raincoat when I go out the door, I have a tendency to do that if I believe that it's raining outside. You can give a whole list of such, we call these dispositions, things that are likely to be the case both externally and internally, if I take that thing to be true, right? Um and so apply that to something like faith. Uh, well, there's a range of attitudes I can have towards a proposition like God raised Jesus from the dead. Uh I can be disposed to answer in a certain way about questions about it. I can be disposed to certain kinds of activities in my prayer life when I'm alone and considering that proposition, I can be disposed to react to TV shows in certain ways that bring it up. I can be disposed to set speak a certain way about it in front of a group of people who trust me to tell them the truth about God. Uh lots of other dispositions are involved in that. And those change too. And some of them uh would point towards the belief direction and some of them would not. And if you have an array of such dispositions that collectively constitute something that we're going to call a belief, because that's we don't have a better word for it, uh, or let's just call it a cognitive state, then maybe, you know, maybe belief sounds too strong for your actual dispositions at a given moment, and we want something weaker that is still cognitive but plays a different it just fits better with the actual, you know, what's going on with our lives. Um acceptance might be such a thing. You know, I could I could accept that God brings Jesus from the dead. I could affirm it, I could assume it. I could there's lots of options in liturgy.

Randy 42:13

Getting very Rob Belly.

Kyle 42:15

Right. Yeah. And yeah, these sound a little slippery, I understand that, but they're important to start.

Randy 42:20

I like that you brought up slippery when I'm brought up Rob Bell.

Kyle 42:25

Yeah, no offense to Rob, but I understand what you meant. Yeah, they sound like something that you know a guy at a coffee shop in Seattle might. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But but I think this is actually a really important wedge to drive. And uh that's the reason that I was so interested in those papers at that conference, people talking about it, because it accords so much better with my experience, and it makes so much more room for so many more people to be honest, to just tell the truth about what they think and what they're feeling without having to immediately be concerned that they've crossed this uncrossable threshold into not just doubt, but atheism. Yes. Right? Yeah. In a bad sense. Like, I think you can be an atheist, and that's you know, but like there's there's something um maybe morally bad, certainly epistemically bad, and certainly spiritually bad about saying that I've crossed this line that I don't feel like I have a choice about crossing, to get back to your earlier point, right? Another huge debate about belief uh in philosophy is whether you have any control over it or not. And it's you know, it's very hard to change a belief on purpose. You have to do a lot to actually make because it has to seem to you to be the case, and you have to change your habits in order to change your belief to see something differently. And so I'm you know, I'm here whether I want to be here. No, maybe I could take steps to make it different in the future, maybe you did, I don't know. Um, but I mean y it seems weird that I should be forced out.

Randy 43:58

Yeah, no, I mean I Think what I was alluding to a little bit of like I I kind of felt felt like I held it off that unbelief for a while. I do think that's the case. As I reflect back, I would um I felt safer chalking that up to doubt than I did to unbelief because unbelief is a scary word, and unbelief, I I could tell you what it's done to the few people that I've told about this, right? Like it's it's a sh shook shakes people up a little bit, and it startles you, especially when it's coming from a pastor. Yep. Um and so I chose to just chalk it up to doubt. I chose to not go there in my mind. I chose to, and it most of it's out of fear, most of it's out of I don't want to lose my faith. Um, I don't want I it felt like it's a this or that, like you're speaking to. And when I actually gave in to it, I found that it wasn't. It wasn't a zero-sum game.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Yeah.

Randy 44:54

Unbelief has been scary to me. That idea, the concepts, um, the word, admitting it to myself, and so I held it off as long as I could until you know, and this is in regard to you saying it's maybe not even a choice. Yeah. I feel like I did choose to to to believe for a long time, even in moments where I knew that I didn't, because it I was trying to fool myself and I was scared of the outcome of what might be. So that's a complex thing for me to kind of feel my way through if but my belief is a choice or not.

Kyle 45:26

Yeah, yeah, totally. You said that before I don't remember how you put it, but there was like something keeping you from going there, right? Do you think a little self-analysis here? Do you think there's anything like that still? Uh so when you say to your wife, that's all in the faith box, is any aspect of that way of looking at it therapeutic or pragmatic in the sense of to say that it's not might cost some something.

Randy 46:03

That's a good question. I I I couldn't fully honestly answer it right now in the moment. I'd have to think about it a little bit more, but I will just say when I said it, it was one of those things, and then we all have many of these moments where you say something that you hadn't really thought before.

SPEAKER_01 46:18

Yeah.

Randy 46:19

And all of a sudden it's just like, oh, there's the epiphany. It was like that. It just it just deeply resonates to me that this unbelief more holds hands with belief rather than fights against each other. Um it's a it's a continuum, and it just depends on kind of like you're saying, if we're looking at that wave where I am today. Um I can I can completely understand the question, but for me, no.

Kyle 46:43

Yeah.

Randy 46:44

And I think that's awesome.

Kyle 46:46

And I asked that fully accepting, as I hope is clear, that I think you're absolutely correct about the nature of faith and its relationship to belief and non-belief. I could see for me there might still be a need for it to be it's a little convenient that it's all part of the same experience.

Randy 47:02

Yeah, and I will say because of my job, it seems disingenuous. It seems like convenient for me to say, oh, there are days when I don't believe, but it's all faith. Don't worry about it. Exactly.

Kyle 47:11

You know, I get and there's also a little bit if I was in your position, I would want to be careful of how I said it, especially to people in the church, because I know that what I mean by faith is probably a little different from what a lot of what them what they might mean by faith. And so I don't if I just said something simple like, don't worry, it's still faith, that would seem dishonest to me because I know that they're thinking a thing that I'm maybe thinking something else, right? There's some equivocation happening.

Randy 47:39

I understand it, and I think there's probably some of that in me, right? But in what I've been feeling, and as I've been processing this and thinking my way through it and becoming comfortable with with the whole deal, I I can only explain this with like other things that I've done like this, which is when I moved to an affirming stance of how we think about human sexuality, I fought it for a long time. Long time. I mean, you and I have had countless conversations about sexuality and what the Bible says and doesn't say and what we should think about and all that stuff. And um, but what I can tell you is that when I made the jump to say, okay, I'm affirming, yeah. First of all, that was that came after I actually turned affirming, you know. I just I it took me a long time to just say that to myself and then to say it out loud. But once I did that, it felt so comfortable, it felt so natural. Like the way I exp part of the way I explain like why I feel really comfortable saying I'm an affirming I affirm homosexuality as a Christian person, is that for years I struggled with what do I believe about homosexuality? What I b what do I believe about human sexuality? How like I don't want to get this wrong as a pastor. I mean, man, that's the thing that kept me up at night more than anything else. And I think I've said this on this podcast before, but when I went to firming, when I chose to make that step and do it publicly, I haven't had a sl like I haven't had any sleepless nights, I haven't had any of that uh existential wrestling at all. It's all been just like, oh, this feels exactly right, and I wish it would have landed here earlier, but I here I am, you know. It that's what the unbelief belief thing feels like to me, is where I know this fe sounds convenient, I know this sounds kind of woo-woo, gooey, you know, mushy feelings-based.

SPEAKER_01 49:25

Yeah.

Randy 49:26

But it just sits so comfortably within me that I want to say, here's where I am now, is like, how could it be any other way? That's where I am now.

Kyle 49:36

And I don't think it is woo-woo-wee in a bad way. That boy, that's hard to say. Um, I like feelings, you know, big big fan of those, but I there is a there is a rigorous cut defense of the cognitive side of this. Okay. I know because I've read it and written some of it.

Randy 49:49

I'm speaking all to the feelings inside of me.

Kyle 49:51

Yeah, yeah. I just want you to know that don't take that critique seriously. There's a there's a way to justify this. Now, whether or not that way is like real to your experience, as between you and the God that you may or may not believe in, given the context that you're in. Um, but yeah, the yeah, if anybody's thinking, oh, this is all easy and wish you would come at me. Let's let's see how easy you think it is when you look into it more. I realize I never said what I ended up thinking faith was. So I I think it's like a combination of of all of these attitudes, all of which are in flux. And and this is true both in the that sets and the incense, I think. But even just talking about propositions, you really think beliefs matter. You think that uh that certain facts being true or false are important uh religiously, certainly important in the context of Christianity, which is a thoroughly historical religion. It's based on the you know the claim that something very specific happened in a way that um lots of other religions also are, but but but this one has you know very specific historical claims that undergird it. Um so even if you want to hold on to that, uh I think there are several aspects to it that all together kind of constitute what faith is. And so you can have that proposition and you feel a certain way about it, right? You you're very pro that proposition. You think that you not only are disposed to thinking that it's true, but you think it would be good if it were true, right? Um and you want to believe it, right? And you uh find yourself acting in certain ways uh that show your willingness to do things to get yourself to believe it. Yes. Uh there's a certain resilience about your attitude towards that proposition. You you encounter obstacles and your reaction is not, oh well, I guess that's that. You you come at it, you try to figure out ways to overcome those obstacles until you're you know just buried under the weight of evidence. Then you maybe give it up, but you're gonna resist that you know tendency. Yep. But more than that, even, um, and this is what a a lot of uh folks miss about it who think of it purely propositionally, is that it has to play a certain kind of role in your life. Yes. Right? And the role that I think makes the most sense is that it ties together the rest of your experience and makes it a kind of coherent narrative.

Randy 52:16

A worldview almost?

Kyle 52:17

Uh worldview has this connotation of being like um way to make sense of everything. Yeah, you know, and that's not quite what I mean. Okay. Or, you know, the apologists like to talk about worldviews as like those people over there have a different one, and us over here we have this one, and they they can be in competition. That's not what I have in mind because this is very fluid and this is very kind of subjective, the the way I'm thinking of a role. It's like uh this thing, whatever it is, doesn't even have to be religious, it can be sports. It literally literally can. It unifies my life, it it gives me um an identity that allows me to move through the world and be kind of fluid and reactive and responsive to the things that I encounter. And that's why I'm resilient about it. It kind of grounds me. It does, yeah, yeah. And that's why I'm disposed to overcome obstacles to it, because it does play that role in my life. And that's why it's so devastating when I can't hold it anymore, when something like abuse or something like the overwhelming weight of some new experience, whatever it is, disallows me from doing it anymore. Yeah. Now I have to find a new one. And that, you know, that can be almost impossible. Yep. Um, especially if you got it very young. Um, so you can have that kind of faith that plays that kind of role in your life, and you have those attitudes towards about just about anything. It just happens to be very common to have it about God. Um so that's what I ended up thinking faith was. I know it's gonna be very un unsatisfying for for a lot of uh religious folks who want it to be unique, you know, that faith is faith in Jesus is something different than than what we're doing in the rest of our lives, but I don't think necessarily it has to be.

Randy 53:59

I mean the idea of, you know, when we're talking about the difference between faith and belief, that's such a difficult thing to explain in words and even understand cognitively, but this idea that faith is when you have faith in something, it's integrated into your life and it's expressed out and it's kind of roots you to in an identity and a way of seeing the world and a way of seeing everything else fit together, that is very helpful for me in thinking of about the the similarities but also the differences between faith and belief.

Kyle 54:32

Yeah. And I want to be a pluralist about this. I really do think that role can be played by lots of different things, and I think our imagination is not nearly broad enough as to what could play that role, what might play that role in the future. We talk all the time and we hear people all the time decrying the declining of religion, particularly Christianity, but really just all religion, organized religion

Deconstruction And New Centers Of Meaning

Kyle 54:55

in general. Something will replace it. Yeah. And and we won't we can't yet envision what it might be. I don't think. Um you could probably still call that thing religious, it will probably be many things. But it's I think it's just part of human nature to to tell to have that kind of narrative center. Um and yeah, the part of I think the discomfort that many of us feel, and part of the deep reason that we have entered a phase of deconstruction, if you want to call it that, is that a lot of the the modes of forming that center are literally thousands of years old. And we're we're simply outgrowing them. We're we're coming to a place where um we we recognize the importance, the necessity even of the role that they played, but the specific content it just isn't salient anymore. It just isn't live anymore. Um I can force it, but that's eventually forcing it is not gonna play the role, right? It's not gonna do the unifying work that it has to do if it's if it's a pretense. Yes. I will eventually discover that it's a pretense to myself, you know. Um so that will give way, it is giving way.

Randy 56:04

Um probably all sorts of unhealthy ways, too.

Kyle 56:06

Yes, yes, for sure. But some healthy ones, and and so I'm kind of optimistic about the new forms that that might take.

Randy 56:15

So let's bring it back to religion, to faith, unquote unquote, right? What does this imply about religion in general? Like what tell us what your paper says.

Kyle 56:30

No, it's very modest in the conclusion basically that um I think it's I don't know how modest it is really.

Randy 56:37

By the way, can we put put a link to this in the show notes? Sure, if anyone cares.

Kyle 56:41

Um like there's this ancient view, both in religion and out, that what makes humans humans, like what defines human nature is reason, our rationality, our ability to um you know, go through a chain of cognition and like infer things and then use those inferences in a certain way. We knew we built civilization with that, right? We've founded science with that. I mean that's what makes us different from the animals. Um and so if that's kind of the notion that you have, and you kind of have a relatively narrow sense of what it means to be rational, um, then it makes sense. That that old notion of faith fits very nicely with that. It's it's cognitive, it's propositional. We're assenting to propositions. If we have good reason to believe those propositions are true, then we're rational, and that's what it means to be, you know, faithful or whatever. And I think that's giving way. Um, you know, the so w with what happened to the Enlightenment, so similar things, you know, that's all connected. Similar things have happened uh in the faith realm. Uh one kind of stands or falls with the other in a certain sense. And so I don't think it's ten it's whether it's tenable or not, it's not live to most people now uh that faith is simply a rational enterprise. And that that's you know, we don't think we are just that. And we want our faith to be descriptive of a range of experiences that aren't easily described in rational terms. And we might even also think that what it means to be rational is broader than just assenting to certain propositions, the you know, defending the truth or falsity of certain propositions. It might include other things, other kinds of attitudes as we as we described. And so um yeah, I think driving that wedge between that old purely rational notion of faith and or of the belief and you know the sort of lived experience of faith is a very healthy thing to do and a truer thing to do, frankly. So I can't pretend to have figured it all out, but that is uh where I landed.

Randy 58:52

Yeah, good.

Kyle 58:53

And it like speaking as the kind of people that we are, I I literally wouldn't be allowed in anymore if that weren't the case, right? Um so if I'm gonna have a community who accepts me as a member, yeah, someone who uh has as good a claim to faith as anybody, then you have to make room for something like that.

Randy 59:16

Yep. Yep. Yeah, and I want I mean you were asking, have you told this to your church, right? And um the reason why I'm good with having anyone in my church listen to this, Hebrew City, and anyone else, is because the way we've been given faith in that rational concept sets us up for failure when we get to these moments. And I want to just begin having these conversations out in the world that say, um, you can hold unbelief and still hold on to your faith.

SPEAKER_01 59:46

Yeah.

Randy 59:47

And I don't want to say this as if like if you if you say you're an atheist, you're a terrible person, or life in some ways is over, or this is such a tragic reality to live in. Not at all. I have atheist friends who I love, respect, cherish. But I do think that there are many people who experience what we're talking about on a regular basis and live in this place, and they think that if I s if I give in to this, if I give in to this unbelief, kind of how I was holding it off for a long period of time, um, that means that my faith is no more. That means that I've crossed that br bridge, yeah, and faith is back there in my former life, and now I'm living this life without it, and without any religion, and without any it as an atheist. And again, praise the Lord for you, atheists, but um I want to provide space for people to say, faith might look like more than that, and my spiritual journey certainly looks like more than that, and um my lived experience as walking with Christ looks like more than that, and there's tons of mystery to it, and there's some unbelief to it, and there's lots of belief to it, and it depends where I am on a on depends on any given day. Um but I can still be a person of faith, and I can still this is for me talking. I can still be a person of faith, and I can still follow Jesus, and I can still um orient my life around it, and I can still structure my family's lives in some way, uh shape or form around it. I can I can still let that be the story that I hold to to understand all the other stories. I like it still can be as robust, and for me in this moment, it's more robust. Um, it it feels more mature, it feels more settled, it feels more honest, yeah, and it feels more relational. And now I'm getting like this sounds really evangelical, which I'm okay with right now, but it feels more dependent on a person that I want to have a relationship, I want to have influencing and shaping my life, the Jesus of the gospels, in ways that if you ask me if I believe it, believe that Jesus is real or not, I do believe it today. But if you ask if you reduce it down to that question, it cheapens it.

Kyle 1:02:05

Yeah. Yeah.

Randy 1:02:06

And I don't want to do that anymore. And I don't want to.

Kyle 1:02:08

Because I'm not just a belief machine, right? There's more going on there. And and to make my notion of faith as flexible as I am is a is a good thing. Yeah. You know, it it's like putting on a a nicely tailored jacket and realizing that you can move more, actually, you know?

Randy 1:02:25

So when I hear you kicking against the ideas of like maybe I'm not a Christian anymore, or I hear you saying things like, um, I'm kind of an agnostic or whatever, is this kind of what you're getting at that like if your definition of Christian is this, I'm not that?

Kyle 1:02:38

Like Yeah, yeah. And also there, you know, there's a I'm not saying there's no threshold, right? So that that um the way I cashed it out of, you know, it's it's uh plays a unifying role in your life and it's really you know proximal to what you take your you know self-identity to be, and you have all these attitudes towards it, whatever. You can totally eventually cross a threshold where none of where it just doesn't make sense anymore to call yourself a person of faith in that, right? Atheism is real. I'm not saying there are no atheists at all, because it doesn't play that role in their life at all. Something else does, guaranteed, right? Okay, uh, or maybe a plurality of things. But yeah, you can totally cross that threshold. It's just that tailoring is maybe a good analogy. Like uh there's there there are sort of norms of tailoring and how it works for different body types, uh, and yours is gonna look different from mine and it's gonna feel different from mine, and let a thousand flowers bloom, right? Um but this cut works for me, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that it didn't, and to uh try to tell myself that it's more rigid than it is. Uh allowing myself the flexibility to move in the way that I'm disposed to move is just honest. Yes. Uh and who are you to tell me that that's not faith? Essentially, it's kind of that uh yeah, what you know, this is my experience, bro.

Randy 1:03:59

And for me, my walk, my journey with Christ, I want to think of it and hold it in a way that this is um here's the way I see it right now is that it's this is my life. This is my life the way I'm walking it out, the way I'm living it out, the way I'm you know, occupying space as a human. It's very much in tandem. I think and I hope with Jesus, the person of Christ. And I like to look at my life 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road, just down the road, is walking with Jesus. And there's the way I've held faith, the way I've thought about faith and married to belief has kind of caused me to stop anticipating that or stop forecasting that, or even just like that's that's there. I don't know what it's gonna look like, and I tr truly don't. But there's something about like when I when I imagine my life moving forward, it involves my wife. You know, um, I don't know what's the future holds, what this next year or decade holds, if she's gonna die, if she's gonna leave me, if I'm gonna leave her, all that stuff. I don't know. But I know that when I imagine my life moving forward, I imagine it with Sarah, and it's shaped differently because of her, and it's a shaped around her in many ways, and I want it to be that way. And I what I'm trying to say is I think that same way about Jesus and about my faith in Christ and about my my just who I am. When I imagine myself down the road, I don't know what it's gonna look like, I don't know the shape of it, I don't know what the faith, you know, what it's gonna feel like, but I'm I really hope it's gonna be with Jesus, this person who's molded me and shaped me all along the way, and I see is very different than I used to 10, 20, 30 years ago. Yeah. But it's richer, more beautiful, and I hope that continues. And by saying this, I'm I'm not saying I'm holding on to certainty or I need that to look like that in the future, but I'm saying this feels like faith to me to say um it's rooted enough inside of who I am that I know whether belief or unbelief. Belief is winning the day on that certain year wherever I find myself, I'm still gonna be walk I want to be walking with Jesus.

Kyle 1:06:10

Yeah.

Randy 1:06:10

Does any of that make sense or does that sound like No, it makes total sense.

Kyle 1:06:13

Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:14

Yeah.

Randy 1:06:15

You said at the beginning of this conversation that if faith is welcome to a person like me, it's gonna have to be different than um just based on a set of beliefs. Is that uh about accurate to what you said?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:27

Yep.

Randy 1:06:29

What does faith look like for a person like you then Kyle in the mo like what does it look like for you right now?

What Faith Looks Like Right Now

Randy 1:06:37

Give me like really brief what it what Kyle Whittaker as a person of faith or even as a Christian looks like right now.

Kyle 1:06:46

That's a tough question. Sure that's how you want to end it. I'll find out. Um yeah, right right now faith and hope are hard to disentangle. Okay. So I act towards my family and towards the people in my life and towards myself in ways that are grounded in those principles that I used to believe were true and that sometimes I still believe are true. Um and I hope that the world will end up in accordance with those principles. Okay. Yeah. That is extremely unsatisfying, even to me, uh-huh, as I as I'm saying it. Um and that I also have a picture of what faith would be sort of an ideal that I'm reaching for and falling fall short of, far short of all the time, right? I I envision sort of this embodied community where much like Paul describes everybody has a role, it's nobody's role to believe real hard. Yeah, yeah. You know, but if you're experiencing doubt, there's a place for that in that community. And and there are people to to build you up in healthy ways in that community. And there's people too that you can build up, right? And that um there's room to just be yourself and it's lived out in a very honest way with others. Uh that's the part that I'm falling far short of. Got it. Yeah, yeah. But but there's a microcosm of that within my family and my children, you know. And you have the desire for exactly and that's that's that's that willful part of it I was talking about. I want that to be true, you know, and that shapes, even in a minor way, uh the sorts of things that I'm likely to do, the ways that I'm likely to spend my time to bring that ever so slightly closer. It shapes how I talk to my kids, it shapes what I try to do when I'm angry with my kids or try not to do. Um it shapes how, you know, everything. It yeah, it it shapes the kinds of work that I want to do in my life, it shapes everything. And that is how I know that it is still faith. That it's I'm uh it's on that basis that I'm shaping the person that I am headed to be, you know, that I want to be. We talked to Aaron Simmons um a while back, and he talked a lot about your finitude doing doing the thing that you think is worthy of your short time on the earth. I know that I still have faith in this because it's shaping how I approach what is worth my time. I'm still doing this podcast. Why am I still thinking about all this stuff? Um, why do I still want to? Like if I didn't have to work and suddenly had leisure time, well, how would I spend it? I'd spend it thinking about this, um, talking to people about this. It's still important to me. That's how I know it's real. And you might think, well, isn't that just hope? And yeah, I mean faith and hope are tightly tied together, as are, you know, the third one in that trio from Paul. Yeah. Love. Yep. These things are hard to disentangle in your experience for reason. Um, because you hope for what you love and you act in ways that prove that you have faith that that will be the case.

Saints Jesus And Permission To Stay

Randy 1:09:57

And I just want to say just a couple of things as we close. One, this sounds really scary, right? The the reality that a pastor or any Christian could struggle with, not even struggle with, but like sit with and hold unbelief actively and still consider themselves a Christian. It sounds, I mean, I had thoughts of I don't know if I can admit this, I don't know if I can say this out loud, is this going to jeopardize my job, all the things. And then the reality sets in is that this is nothing new. Like Christian leaders and particularly saints who've gone before us, many of them have struggled with unbelief. I mean, we could just off the top of my head is like St. John of the Cross and mystics like Teresa Vavila and Teresa of Lysot, and even more modern people like Pope Francis spoke often about his doubt and unbelief. Even Mother Teresa, right? We can go down the list, Thomas Merton. There's so many who of spiritual giants who have built and constructed this kind of tradition for us, who also had great belief and great faith on one hand, but also in real life, and thank God that they shared this with us and were honest about their their story and their journey, struggle with unbelief at different moments consistently throughout their spiritual journey. That encourages me.

Kyle 1:11:20

Yeah. You could even put Jesus on that list if you take seriously the statement on the cross, which I think you ought to. I was part of a charismatic ministry that liked to explain that away, right? They would say, Well, you know, the more informed of them would say, Well, he's quoting Psalm 22. And if you read that whole psalm, it ends on a triumphal whatever. But you know Jesus didn't quote that part. He's being tortured to death. You know, he's not thinking about how the rest of the psalm goes. Yeah. God forsook him and he asked why. That's that's what happened there. So you're in good good company.

Randy 1:11:52

Yeah, no, absolutely. And the reason that I want to kind of publicly share this, you know, it's not because I have a it's really fun for me to to have people saying that I'm not a real Christian or you're a heretic now or whatever. The reason that I want to share this is because I think my experience and your experience, our experience, is not super unique, you know, not just historically, but also currently. I think there's too many people who have been told that if you have moments of unbelief, if you have moments of doubt and profound doubt, and where you don't believe actually, if that unbelief creeps its way into your faith journey, that means it's over. And we give up. And we think that this is this is all I have left to do. I guess if I have moments of unbelief, I guess I I'm not a true believer. We've been told this from many people in authority that this is what faith looks like, and it looks like pretty close to certainty, like we've talked about all night tonight. But I just want to say, and this is this this throws no shade at my atheist friends because I I think atheism is a legitimate choice to make and a legitimate thing to stand on. And I have people in my life who I love deeply who have moved from Christian to atheist Christianity to atheism, and there's good reasons for that, honestly. But I know that there's friends and listeners who are journeying with us who do struggle with unbelief in in profound ways and doubt maybe that has moved to unbelief, like I've experienced. And we question whether we can stay as part of this faith tradition and this faith journey and and walk this road. And I just want to tell you, I think you can.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:30

Yeah.

Randy 1:13:30

And I think you can with integrity, and I think it has more integrity when we can have these conversations.

Kyle 1:13:35

Agreed. And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

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Randy 1:13:38

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Kyle 1:14:08

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Randy 1:14:16

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Kyle 1:14:24

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