That picture appeared in this Sunday’s edition of PostSecret. For those unfamiliar with PostSecret, the concept behind it is that you can send in a postcard with anything on it, and they select a few dozen each week to print on their website. These postcards range from funny to bizarre to inappropriate to depressing (with most of them being depressing). Most postcards contain some sort of bizarre confession. Personally I don’t follow PostSecret just because the whole concept weirds me out, but I have a few friends who are fascinated by it.
Needless to say when I saw the picture above (having heard about it on Twitter) I was struck by it. I was struck by it for reasons that go far beyond the fact that the sign this person is sitting on is the very sign that I walked by on my way to my office this morning.
I can’t claim to know why the person felt the way that postcard indicates they felt, but the card itself raises a number of issues.
The first relates to seminary itself.
Perhaps this will sound arrogant, but the truth is, if you’ve never been to seminary you probably don’t know what it’s like. It certainly doesn’t live up to your stereotypes, I can promise you that. Just as I don’t fully understand medical school or law school and yet I have my stereotypes I choose to believe, the stereotypes held about seminary are similarly inaccurate.
It turns out we don’t sit around and pray all day. Whether you’re a Christian or not, I think you’d be surprised by what you experienced if you spent some time here.
The second relates to fear.
I suspect that there are thousands, if not millions, of Christians that are afraid for their faith. In other words, they are afraid that if they learn enough about science, or enough about people, or enough about the way the world works, or enough about who actually wrote the Bible and what the circumstances of that authorship was, that they will lose their faith in God. This leads to a sort of purposeful ignorance maintained for the purpose of keeping oneself secure in one’s faith.
That is silly.
And yet it is, I suspect, shockingly prevalent.
And I believe this happens because of our tendency to build what I have long called “A House of Cards Faith” where we build our faith upon a narrow set of ideas that may or may not be biblical, and when those ideas are called into question, our faith collapses.
Some examples:
The earth is 6,000 years old. Uh oh.
Everything that the Bible talks about happened literally exactly as it says it happened (this, by the way, is a misunderstanding of inerrancy and authority, and a misunderstanding of the Bible). Uh oh.
You can’t be a Christian and believe in Evolution. Uh oh.
All Christians are Republicans. Uh oh.
There is such a thing as a Christian nation. Uh oh.
God will fix everything all the time just how I want it. Uh oh.
And the list goes on.
If your faith is built upon the truth of ideas like that, yes, seminary, at least a seminary like Fuller, will indeed destroy your belief in God. It will make you wonder why no one ever told you x, y, or z in church.
But the truth is, Christians do not need to be afraid of new knowledge. They don’t need to be afraid of science, they don’t need to be afraid of philosophy, they don’t need to be afraid of Richard Dawkins/Sam Harris/Christopher Hitchens (heck, their books are used as seminary textbooks, so that should tell you something),and they certainly don’t need to be afraid of critical study of the Bible and its origins. See, the beauty of seminary, at least at a place like Fuller, is that while it will blast your house of cards to pieces, it replaces those cards with a firm foundation if you are willing to do the hard work of seeking to understand. It will give you, if you will let it, a foundation for your faith that, at least for me, is rational and reasonable, yet also transcends debates about God’s existence.
Another beautiful thing about seminary is that it affords you the opportunity to sit under people that have entered into the study of the complex issues of faith and life and science more deeply than any of us ever will and have lived to tell the tale.
I will admit, I think differently about God than I did when I first started seminary. I love the Scriptures more than I did when I started seminary, but I think differently about them. I think even more differently about those things than I did when I was 18 or 19. A lot of what I believed then I now know to be wrong. But my faith isn’t a house of cards, so I can let go of certain beliefs without my faith collapsing.
The point of all of this, especially for those that will never shell out the zillions of dollars for a seminary education, is that you don’t need to fear. You don’t need to fear the next best-selling book on atheism. You don’t need to fear new knowledge that contradicts what you’ve learned in the past. You don’t need to worry that the more you learn the more likely it is that you will lose your faith.
Yes, as you grow and mature and engage with God seriously your faith will change. Your understanding of what it means to be a Christian will change. You will become frustrated at some of the simplistic ideas that you have encountered in church. But if you are willing to let the “cards” fall, and build your faith upon a solid foundation, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
Question for you to answer: What was your initial reaction to that postcard?
Question for you to think about: In terms of your faith, are you afraid? And, if so, of what? What is the source of that fear?



That quote is from an article called
Check out this excerpt from an interview with