Lately I’ve been observing what I’ve come to call the phenomena of ‘brittle faith’. It’s kinda like a China vase, it appears beautiful and well put together but when it takes a heavy blow it shatters in a million pieces – rarely – if ever to be reconstructed.

It’s what we see in people ditching faith when it doesn’t work out as they thought it would, or when questions arise that do not get resolved easily within their theological paradigm. Typically we see this in the more ‘fundamentalist’ folks of both evangelical and pentecostal origin – those for whom a very neat and tidy theological paradigm must order their world – those who have an answer for every objection – those who seem almost afraid at times of being wrong. I’ve come across people in the creation science movement who will dismiss as illegitimate, the faith of someone who does not adhere to a literal 6 day creation. They have managed to link creation and gospel message in such a way that rejection of their creation narrative means an inability to ever find faith in Jesus. Now that’s a hard line!

And it’s also a paradigm just waiting to be smashed into a million pieces. What happens when you come across other Christians living faithful lives, but who do not share your view? I remember growing up in a cessationist environment, where it was crystal clear that God did not work in ‘those ways’ today and those who pursued speaking in tongues and other more miraculous gifts had their faith questioned and maligned. I remember shifting from that position early in the piece as I came across many, many good people who spoke in tongues and didn’t seem to be that different to me.

As a natural questioner and thinker I was intrigued by ‘why’ we held the views we did and I was naturally curious about why other people saw the world differently. I rejected the demonising of other denominations and the various ‘moves of God’, like the Toronto Blessing. I knew pretty early that my tribe were very critical of the Toronto blessing and all of the ‘nonsense’ that went with it. (God was a God of ‘order’ – and all things incredibly boring.) But the tone of those around me was definitely more fear driven than anything else.

I went to Bible College in 1990 for one year. It wasn’t a highly academic college and as a result we were fed a fairly predictable conservative evangelical theological line. We were taught ‘what’ to think. It never inspired me – in fact it bored me – because I knew the familiar paradigm and I had lived there all my life. I wanted to explore other frameworks and understand how other people read the Bible and understood the world. About 4 years later I signed up at the Baptist Theological College to do a Bachelor of Divinity. For some BTC was a controversial institution because a) they wouldn’t fully endorse the idea of biblical inerrancy. Our denomination had a big bun fight over this topic – as you do… b) They had aligned with Murdoch university so that the final degree was conferred by this institution rather than BTC itself (now Morling College). Again many were afraid that the more liberal theological perspectives of the Murdoch lecturers would corrupt and confuse the minds of good Christian men and women. There was genuine angst that people would possibly go rogue (liberal) and or lose their faith by this alliance with Murdoch.

That kind of fear only comes from those with a brittle worldview, a paradigm that relies on ticking all of the boxes for your faith to be valid. I watched one or two of my classmates lose their way in faith over their time at Murdoch, but I sensed that what happened was simply a speeding up of the inevitable.

When I come across brittle faith – narrow, sharp and locked up so tight it can never be tampered with – I fear for the person holding that faith – because I know sooner or later something has to give… and when it does it can then unravel completely and leave the person utterly lost and also very angry.

We fertilise brittle faith with statements of absolute certainty about issues on which there is often differing perspectives. When we deny people the space to consider a different way of being in relationship to God then we are seeking to control and lock them into one tight theological framework. It was my time at BTC/Murdoch, then Vose and now Morling that gave me the tools and the permission to critique my own long held faith convictions. And this was further fanned into flame by the emergence of the ’emerging church’, a movement that took many iterations and varied greatly from country to country. One dimension of the Emerging Church I valued was the space to connect with a group of people who were questioning everything, but with the hope of finding better ways of living our faith in this world.

Before my son Sam died, I loved that we could have rigorous conversations around what really mattered to God and even who God was. Even at 21, he was doing some deconstructing of the faith we had handed on to him, but I didn’t fear him losing his way because he knew he had freedom to explore and I trusted that he was seeking to follow Jesus in it all. Moreso I was looking forward to hearing and engaging with his own take on how discipleship could form up in this time.

How do you know if your faith is rugged or brittle?

A few giveaways:

• you have a list of core beliefs that go well beyond the regular orthodox creeds. eg you must hold a pre-millenial view of the second coming.
• you often criticise others inability to see the world as clearly as you do and you do it with a certain degree of pride.
• you fear being exposed to what you call ‘liberal ideas’, (perhaps in case they make better sense than the ideas you currently subscribe to)
• you are sometimes militant in your way of seeing the world.

I’m sure there are other ‘tells’ that I have missed, but I write this to simply encourage you to think and explore beyond your familiar theological understandings. Allow your views to be challenged and even exposed as wrong… But in the process build a faith that centres on Jesus and the things that mattered to him, rather than constructing a theological masterpiece that could never be tampered with. Because sooner or later someone or something will take a hammer to your certainty and splinter your ideas all over the place.

Then what?…