When it comes to the supernatural, I’m a pretty big skeptic … and yet, I’m a committed Christian (try as I might to shake it off).
I’ve always had an intense interest in science and an intense interest in the Christian faith that was taught to me by my parents and church. As a teenage evangelical, that led me to be obsessed with “proving” religion: could we discover Noah’s ark? Could archeology confirm the great events of the Bible?
As a newly out queer college student, the intersections of my interests in faith and science led me in the opposite direction: was any of this really true? How much of the Bible had been changed over the years? Has there ever been a documented miracle?
For most of us, how we understand our relationship to the divine, to our chosen religion, and to the world around us is a bit of hodgepodge. Part what we were taught in childhood, part what we picked up from friends and the society around us, part what we explored and studied and questioned on our own, part what feels comforting and familiar, part what feels helpful and inspiring.
My point here isn’t to say that you have to believe any which way about the Bible, miracles, the nature of God, or anything else. Instead, it’s to offer how I understand my Christian faith, as a person who is full of questions and doubts, because I believe that you can be a Christian and a skeptic, a Christian and a questioner, a Christian and a doubter, a Christian and even an atheist.
That something compelling is to be found in the Hebrew and Christian writings, that “Jesus Is Lord” is a true claim in 33 AD and 2018 AD, and that following in the way of the good news of Jesus is worth it.
Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll be sharing a short exploration on a number of topics and themes related to faith, Jesus, and Christianity that have been hangups for me and folks that I’ve worked with through Queer Theology.
If you want to receive them, let me know and I’ll send them your way.
Here’s what we’ll be covering:
- Jesus’s purpose
- the creed “Jesus is Lord”
- the nature of God
- prayer
- miracles
- resurrection
- sin
- salvation