Re-evaluating

February 1, 2023 | Jonathan Pierre SY ‘25

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I’ve found a growing sense of unrest recently with believing things to be true merely because they’ve been handed to me as such. This isn’t the way anyone should accept things to be true in faith, in the same way that answering “It’s always been done this way” is an insufficient response to “Why are things done like this?” in business. As someone who grew up in the church, I’m realizing how many surface-level truths I’ve been conditioned to accept with little scrutiny. Questions like “Why did Jesus have to die for our sins? Couldn’t God have just changed the rules?” and “Why are we born sinners? Isn’t that unfair?” have laid in my blindspots, underneath assumptions that I didn’t deliberately take up.

I believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. I’m realizing, though, that just knowing the end destination doesn’t satisfy me. I desire to know all the lines of reasoning that point to Jesus as Lord. I want to know for myself why what I believe is true. As an analogy, I don’t want to just know the street address but the directions for how to get there. I want to ‘reconstruct’ my faith from the ground up. 

I have vivid memories of laying on the floor of my sophomore dorm room, frustrated by the logic of faith and overwhelmed by questions that felt too much to contain. I felt a disconnect between the zealous high schooler I was when I first came to faith and the person I had become—a college student drowning in an entropic web of doubt, afraid of what I might find if I dared to ask the questions.

I’ve since learned that there’s merit in doing this kind of investigating of my faith. If I believe that Jesus is Lord, I shouldn’t be afraid to peer behind the curtain. If I want to live a life of long devotion to God, at some point along the way, I’m going to be faced with doubts that force me to critically examine what I believe.

The risk I find in building my faith on a foundation of merely subjective experience is that when I face the suffering that every Christian is promised to face (2 Timothy 3:12, ESV) and the doubts come rushing in, my faith is prone to come tumbling down like Jenga blocks. When things get tough in life, I’m going to need a tried and tested, objective truth to lean on. One that posits that God is real, good, and faithful.

I’m inspired by the story of the Berean Jews in Acts who, in receiving the message of the Gospel, “examined the scriptures daily to see if these things were so” and then “therefore believed” (Acts 17:11-12, ESV). They took the message that they were handed and worked out their faith with reason, in order to establish for themselves the truth of what they heard.

For those who have committed to following Jesus, building this foundation of reason for why we believe what we believe equips us to better defend our faith. As  Jesus’s disciple Peter instructs in 1 Peter 3:15: “always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (ESV). What Peter doesn’t say is that it’s tough to defend something that we haven’t thoroughly defined for ourselves yet. At the same time, questions we get that we don’t know the answers to reveal our blindspots. This is why I feel a sense of urgency to do this “reconstructing” while I’m still at Yale. Never again will I be surrounded by this many intellectuals, both Christians and non-Christians alike. Being here is an opportunity to define, scrutinize and sharpen our beliefs.

I’m confident that intellectually engaging with our faith like this honors God. This semester, I’ve found myself meditating on the part of Hebrews 11:6 that says that God “rewards those who seek Him” (ESV). The Greek word for seek, ekzeteo, means “to seek out, investigate diligently, scrutinize.” [1] Another translation says “to seek out for one's self.” God takes pleasure in us working out for ourselves why we believe what we believe and, in doing so, building a personal faith in Him that has fullness and depth.

Jesus tells us to “love the Lord your God…with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37, ESV). What would fully loving God with our minds be if we put aside our faculty of reason when it came to matters of faith? If living for Jesus is the most important thing, then isn’t it logical to devote our minds, with all of their capabilities, to our pursuit of Him? I believe it’s an act of faith to even engage in this questioning and bring our frustrations to the smartest person there is. God is faithful to give answers. And we can have peace in asking the hard questions because we know that Jesus is Lord.

The caveat to doing this kind of questioning in a way that glorifies God is to maintain intellectual humility. It’s foolish to rely absolutely on our own wisdom. If God is the same God that created all things both seen and unseen, wouldn’t it be a bit underwhelming if we could understand all of it? The apostle Paul writes that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:25 ESV). God’s existence, sovereignty or goodness shouldn’t be dismissed because of our finite understanding. This necessary humility before God is why the psalmist writes: “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me” (Psalms 131:1, ESV).

Whether you’re a believer in Jesus, a skeptic, or somewhere lost in the middle this is a nudge to not be afraid to ask the tough questions. Faith doesn’t have to be anti-intellectual—there are answers to the questions you have. Explore the doubts instead of letting them fester. Put on intellectual humility. Engage in hard conversations. I expect that this process of reevaluating, relearning, reconstructing—whatever you want to call it—is a lifelong one. One that, like our lives, will have mountains and valleys. Many questions we ask might never be answered. But, of course, that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth asking.

[1] Thayer Joseph Henry et al. Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament : Coded with the Numbering System from Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Hendrickson 1996.