After Doubt

J. Swoboda A.

Description

Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it?Award-winning author, pastor, and professor A. J. Swoboda has witnessed many young people wrestle with their core Christian beliefs. Too often, what begins as a set of critical and important questions turns to resentment and faith abandonment. Unfortunately, the church has largely ignored its task of serving people along their journey of questioning. The local church must walk alongside those who are deconstructing their faith and show them how to reconstruct it.Drawing on his own experience of deconstruction, Swoboda offers tools to help emerging adults navigate their faith in a hostile landscape. Doubt is a part of our natural spiritual journey, says Swoboda, and deconstruction is a legitimate space to encounter the living God.After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them. Foreword by pastor and author John Mark Comer.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 02 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493429592
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Endorsements
“If you have ever experienced doubts about God (and who hasn’t?), After Doubt will both comfort and challenge you. Speaking from two decades of experience ministering in the Pacific Northwest, Swoboda provides biblically sound direction for the doubting among us, filled with practical wisdom on how we can question our faith without losing it!”
—Matthew Sleeth, MD, executive director of Blessed Earth and author of Hope Always
“Doubt often draws us into a spiral of isolation and mental exertion, which themselves can be our undoing. With pastoral insight, Swoboda brings doubt into the open, removing the shame and inviting us into practices that draw us back into our bodies, communities, and tradition. After Doubt builds our capacity and courage for the normal, lifelong process of being formed in the wrestling.”
—Mandy Smith, pastor and author of Unfettered: Imagining Childlike Faith beyond the Baggage of Western Culture and The Vulnerable Pastor
“For many, deconstruction is viewed as a Christian’s unraveling, a dead end to what was once a living faith. A. J. Swoboda makes a beautiful and compelling case for how the journey through doubt can actually lead to a stronger faith in Jesus. Deconstruction does not have to result in deconversion. This exceptional work is required reading for anyone who has ever wondered if it is possible to ask hard questions of our faith and come to deeper and more satisfying conclusions.”
—Terry M. Crist, lead pastor, Hillsong Church
“The church is facing a crisis of faith in our post-Christian world, and the options before us seem grim: to either demonize doubt or wear it as a badge of honor. A. J. Swoboda invites us to go deeper, to join him on the messy but ultimately healing journey to find God on the far side of our brokenness. Warm and confessional, bold and prophetic, heart-stirring and intellectually deep, After Doubt is a book ‘for such a time as this.’”
—Richard Beck, author of Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age
“Many pastors, leaders, and parents wonder what to do as multitudes of younger Christians deconstruct their faith, often losing it in the process. A. J. Swoboda offers a blueprint for the spiritual journey of all those facing real doubt. He weaves faith and hard questions together in a delicate dance while sharing a profoundly personal account of his own journey. The result is an intimate and practical book that’s sorely needed. If you care about the epidemic deconstruction of Christian faith among young people, I recommend you read this book.”
—Randy Remington, president, U.S. Foursquare Church
“‘Not all those who wander are lost’—that was written by Tolkien a couple of generations ago. Swoboda reframes this: Not all those who doubt are faithless. Our questions and doubts can lead to a deeper and richer walk with Jesus. Swoboda brings hope to the cynics, the disillusioned, and even the ‘dones.’ So many disenchanted Christians have been yearning for a book to help point them back to Jesus. After Doubt is that book.”
—Nijay K. Gupta, Northern Seminary
“A. J. has given a guide to one of the most necessary and scary processes Jesus asks his followers to walk through. Thoughtful and honest without pulling punches, A. J. leads you through this critical process like a good friend and a wise counselor. Every person who feels like they no longer fit comfortably inside their faith needs to read this book.”
—Rick McKinley, lead pastor, Imago Dei Community, Portland, Oregon
“ After Doubt is a timely book—an exploration of doubt and deconstruction, written winsomely by one within the faith and from the perspective of spiritual formation. As a campus pastor, a church planter, and now a professor, A. J. has helped people navigate the hardest issues of the faith. Yet what makes this book so valuable and unique is the attention it gives to how we are shaped by these experiences. After Doubt shows there’s a way to reconstruct the faith and return to our ‘first love’ that forms us into more faithful disciples of Jesus.”
—Keas Keasler, Friends University
“Swoboda has quickly become one of the most thoughtful, interesting, and engaging Christian writers of our day. I really could have used this book fifteen years ago.”
—Preston Sprinkle, president of The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender
“Swoboda claims that the community of faith has copious resources for the journey from doubt to faith—but far too few for the journey from faith to doubt and back to faith. I completely concur. Here Swoboda tells his twenty-year tale of ‘walking with people along the paths of doubt and deconstruction’ and offers himself as a companion along the way.”
—Sandra Richter, Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies, Westmont College
“In this elegant and profound book, A. J. Swoboda has taken on the monumental task of addressing the dark side of doubt and disillusionment. It addresses these problems not by solving them but by unmasking them. In the spirit and style of G. K. Chesterton, A. J. reveals how doubt is actually an act of faith, that doubt is based on a firm belief that there is something truer and better and more beautiful than what one has perceived Christianity, or the church, to be.”
—James Bryan Smith, author of The Good and Beautiful God
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2021 by A. J. Swoboda
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2959-2
Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Any italics have been added by the author.
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Scripture quotations labeled NASB are from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedication
For my students
Contents
Cover i
Endorsements ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Foreword by John Mark Comer ix
Preface xi
Part 1: Deconstruction and Doubt 1
1. Deconstruction and Doubt 3
2. The Theological Journey 20
3. The Problem of “Freedom” 42
Part 2: Following Jesus through Deconstruction and Doubt 57
4. Knowing the Whole Self 59
5. Going to Church 74
6. Feeling Everything 91
7. Learning to Tend 109
8. Practicing Being Wrong 125
9. Discerning the Truth 140
10. Embracing the Whole Kingdom 153
11. Trusting the Right Way 167
Postscript 183
Acknowledgments 192
Notes 194
Back Cover 208
Foreword
J OHN M ARK C OMER
“To struggle with one’s faith is often the surest sign we actually have one.”
When I read A. J.’s haunting line, I instantly felt a deep, tuning fork–like resonance in my spirit. It rang true to my felt experience of life as a disciple of Jesus in a secular age.
If he’s right—and I believe he is—I have a lot of faith.
Regardless of your personality type (my Myers-Briggs type is “most likely to be an atheist”), doubt is the ambient air we breathe in the West. Learning to walk through doubt and deconstruction and out the other side into the re construction of an honest, humble, yet deep and robust faith that can flourish with both serenity and power in a chaotic and hostile world— that is no easy jaunt. It’s more like a long, slow spiritual journey through what Eugene Peterson called “the badlands” of spiritual life—seasons of dryness and aridity, as personified by the desert stories of Scripture. A. J.’s newest (and I think best) book, After Doubt , isn’t a flimsy self-help formula or an easy-to-read map with a shortcut around the badlands; it’s more like the literary avatar for his presence and wisdom as a guide through the desert.
For ten years A. J. and I pastored alongside each other in Portland, Oregon, one of the most secular, post-Christian cities in the world. A. J. was more than a friend, he was a partner. His concept of “the New Oregon Trail” that you’re about to read about put language to my experience as a pastor in our city.
But A. J. and I share more in common than the challenge of pastoring in a hypersecular city. We are both, in his language, politically “in exile,” stuck in the crossfire of opposing ideologies that are both at odds with Jesus’s vision of human flourishing. We are both disciples of Jesus of the orthodox, historic variety—an increasingly endangered species in a city like Portland. We both feel the weight of our cultural moment in our soul and just how much is at stake—the future of the American church itself hangs in the balance. Will this generation embrace a courageous fidelity to orthodoxy? Or bow to the idols of our time? Idols that promise life but all too often deliver death? But lest I sound like a harbinger of doom, A. J. and I also share a real and growing hope that in our time, despite secularism’s militant march toward dominance, a remnant will arise to seed renewal across the church. That a small yet fiercely loving and loyal group of resilient, compelling Chri