Bryan N. Smith's Blog

It’s strange to look back and realize how much the Bible has changed for me. Not in its content, of course, but in the way I see it. Both the way I’ve carried it and the way it’s carried me. For years it was the solid, immovable center of everything, a kind of divine codebook waiting to be unlocked. It was a set of timeless truths, arranged like gemstones in a crown, each one to be mined, polished, and fitted into a systematic whole. I believed if I could just collect them all — doctrine...

Welcome back, friends — it’s been a while!

It’s hard to believe that more than five years have passed since I first shared my story and started this blog. An honest space where I could put words to the personal side of my faith journey, the same journey that fueled much of what I explored in my book a few years earlier. A blog I launched without the faintest idea where (if anywhere) it might wander. And, apparently, a blog that drifted quietly into semi-retirement without bothering to...

Welcome back, friends — it’s been a while!

It’s hard to believe that more than five years have passed since I first shared my story and started this blog. An honest space where I could put words to the personal side of my faith journey, the same journey that fueled much of what I explored in my book a few years earlier. A blog I launched without the faintest idea where (if anywhere) it might wander. And, apparently, a blog that drifted quietly into semi-retirement without bothering to put...

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Having been exploring the nature of faith and belief this past year with the hope explaining how my views have shifted on the matter over the last several years, in this post I’d like to offer some final thoughts of sorts, summarizing much that has been outlined previously and, for all intents and purposes, drawing the first major “chapter” of my blog to a close. Although I hope to start a second “chapter” and explore how my views have evolved on other issues as well (especially how I’ve come to...

In my last post, I began to trace the ways my understanding of belief has shifted over the years. I focused especially on how I now see the relationship between belief and the will. For a long time, I assumed belief was something I could simply decide to have, as if it were a tool I could pick up and set down at will. I pictured faith as something I could manufacture on command, provided I applied the right mental effort. But I’ve come to see belief less as something I choose and more as somethi...

In my last post I touched a bit on how my views on the nature of belief have shifted over the past several years, giving particular attention to how I have come to see the relationship between my beliefs and my will. In doing so, I briefly explained why I no longer find it helpful to think of beliefs as things that I choose to have so much as things that I find myself with (whether based on reason, reflection, experience, etc.). Yet this revelation not only had a major impact on how I came to se...

Given everything I have explored so far, and the recurring theme of my earlier struggles with belief that runs through it all, a natural question arises. Why was it, and in some ways still is, so difficult for me to believe certain core elements of my faith? I have asked myself this countless times, and I imagine others who have followed my story may be asking it as well. It’s an honest question, and one worth sitting with for a while. In my own reflections, I have found that while I did wrestle...

Given everything I’ve explored thus far and the recurring theme of my previous struggles with belief that lay behind it all, some may be wondering, “why is/was it so difficult for you to believe certain tenets of your faith?” This is a great question, and one which I’ve thought about quite a lot. As I mentioned in my story, although I did struggle with some particular beliefs related to my faith (especially when it comes to the nature of the Bible, which I hope to get to in more detail very soon...