"Choosing Your Faith" by Mark Mittelburg

an excerpt from "Choosing Your Faith" by Mark Mittelberg:

When I got to college, I came to the painful realization that I'd grown into my particular version of faith rather passively. I'd been raised believing in God, trusting in the Bible, and having faith that the church was the carrier of God's truth. And I had an unsubstantiated and naive confidence in the truth of all this.

Then I signed up for some philosophy classes. One of my professors, who was a religious man of a different stripe, seemed to delight in dismantling the simplistic beliefs of many of his Christian students-- and I felt like I was a favorite target. He skillfully pointed out problems with the Bible, with what he called "traditional views about God," and with most of the things I'd been taught to believe. His intellectual onslaught woke me up and made me face the fact that I'd bought into a belief system that I barely understood and had never critically analyzed.

I hardly knew how to respond, and I have to admit that my attempts to get better answers from some of the leaders at my church were generally disheartening. For example, I told one of my teachers that my faith was being assailed in school and that I needed a deeper understanding not only of what we believed, but also of why we thought it was correct.

"How do we know that the Bible is really true and that it is actually God's Word?" I asked. I'll never forget his reply: "Oh that's easy, it says right here in the New Testament that 'all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness."

"Yes, but how do we know that what that says is true?" I replied.

"Because it says it is," he answered, "and it's God's Word."

"But that's the very question we're trying to answer," I shot back. "If all you do is appeal to the Bible's claims to prove that the Bible is true, then you're guilty of circular reasoning, and you've proved nothing."

He looked at me like he was certain I was rapidly sinking into the quicksands of liberalism or skepticism-or had already become an actual infidel- and then, with a deep breath, took another run at it: "But you need to realize that there's no higher authority than God's revelation. If God says it's true, then you can bank your life on it."

"Okay," I replied wearily, "but how do you know that God's really the one talking here? Lots of religious books claim to be God talking- and you don't believe those other books."

"That's because," he said triumphantly, "those other books are not the Word of God!"

At this point, I was frustrated enough to wish I could imitate Indiana Jones in that scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where he finally gets fed up with his sword-wielding opponent's antics and just pulls out his pistol and shoots the guy. Of course I'm only kidding (at least now I am). But it was becoming abundantly clear to me that logic was not going to get me any further in that conversation, so I finally just had to let it go-although I was left with the same questions churning in my mind.

Subsequently, I found some people and books that were a lot more helpful. I'll come back to my story later, but this exasperating interchange, and others like it along the way, helped me realize that lots of religious people hold firmly to all kinds of religious ideas-whether right or wrong-for all kinds of weak and apparently unfounded, or at least unexamined, reasons. I determined then and there that whether I ended up agreeing with the faith of my upbringing or choosing a completely different point of view, my conclusion would have to be based on more solid criteria than what some of my teachers and leaders were apparently clinging to.