Intellectualizing My Faith

I was talking to a professor recently, who told me that she had been a devout Catholic as a youth, but when she took a class about existentialism in university, it was over.

I thought it was interesting, because I had a crisis of faith in my early university days, but in the end, it made my faith stronger instead of undermining it.

It happened in first year. I was taking a course called "Literature and Theory: An Introduction." The reading that did it was about Marxist theory. The author pointed out that religion, Christianity included, was used as a means to control people. And he brought up many concrete examples of how just that had happened. I think he was right, too. Christianity had been used for centuries as a way to control people.

And, all of a sudden, my faith felt empty and broken.

Was I just being controlled?

But then a crucial thing happened. I didn't run away from these feelings. I did not topple under the pressure. Instead, I worked through them. In fact, I made it the topic of my final essay for that course.

Why did I choose to do that? Well:

• I had been trained, growing up, to think for myself, and to think critically. 
• I had been trained, specifically, to not take what I was taught for granted---both within and outside the church:
  "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves." (Matthew 7:15)
  "Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good." (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21)
• I knew the Bible well; I had memorized a lot of Bible verses from Bible quizzing. Like, several hundred. Perhaps even close to a thousand. And something didn't jive. 

So I wrote that essay. And hey, why not, you can read it here.

I think that last point, though, is actually kind of important. The professor wrote, in his comments: "You poured over the Bible in a very careful way, so as to bring in the best, clearest, and most useful citations, given your argument." When I first read that, I thought, Ha! Joke's on him! I just used verses I already knew! Of the 31 passages referenced in the essay, 22 were from passages that we covered in Bible quizzing in high school.* And I think this means something! I didn't comb through the Bible finding the passages that supported my view. Rather, I knew these passages, already, and this is the view that came up, out of them, organically. It was a thread that tied Scripture all together, that became apparent as you studied it. 

I think that everyone who grows up in a Christian home who stays in the Church has a crisis of faith of some kind at least once where it really becomes their own. This was one of mine (but not the first; that happened when I was 12). I think I'm going through another one now, based mostly around gender roles. I will likely write about that here in the coming weeks.

*To put that into perspective, we only covered 7 books of the Bible---out of 66---in my high school quizzing days: John when I was in grade 9, Hebrews and 1&2 Peter in grade 10, Matthew in grade 11, and Romans and James in grade 12.

Note: I also wrote about this experience in first year almost exactly a year ago here! What a coincidence!