Bart Ehrman (b. 1955) is a recently retired professor of religion at the University of North Carolina and a prolific author on the New Testament and early church history. He has had six books on the NYT best seller list and his book Misquoting Jesus has over 3,000 starred reviews on Amazon. He is also a popular blogger and public speaker.

Recently on the anniversary of his blog, Ehrman has been reposting a few of his past popular posts and this one got my attention: “Active Pastors Who Have Lost Their Faith.” Much of it is autobiographical, as he relates his experience of leaving his evangelical belief system. After attending Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College, he decided he wanted to become a theology professor and went on to Princeton Seminary to get his Ph.D. During that time, he felt his “faith” ebbing away. Eventually he stopped calling himself a Christian but remained fascinated with the Bible and the early church, leading to a long and celebrated academic career.

I put the word “faith” above in quotes because I don’t think “losing faith” is actually what this is about. It’s easy to find lots of stories like Ehrman’s. As Ehrman writes, there is now an organization with over a thousand members called The Clergy Project to support pastors, priests, etc. in such a situation (and clergy from non-Christian traditions are included). And, of course, millions of lay Christians have left their religion behind for a host of reasons.

I have had my own experiences along this line, with the related emotional trauma. But I came to realize that whatever it was that I was experiencing, it wasn’t a loss of faith. Rather, it was a loss of beliefs, or better, it was a transformation of my beliefs. What is typically traumatic comes about in the gap between losing one set of beliefs and finding a new belief system to replace them. This is not unrelated to what Søren Kierkegaard called the “leap of faith.”

A quote, which I use often, helps makes this clear. St. Anselm (11^th century England) said that theology is “faith seeking understanding.” Understanding, in this case, is making intellectual sense of our faith. Creating or finding beliefs, in other words, to express our faith. But faith comes first and is present before any intellectual understanding or expression of it.

Try this analogy (and remember that analogies are always limited). Consider your first experience of light. It was just there, without explanation. Initially, you may not have even thought it was a “thing” at all. Then you learned the word “light” and gradually associated it with certain objects: the sun, light bulbs, fire, etc. But what was it? In school science classes you learned about chemistry and physics, energy, waves and particles (which one is it?), the speed of light, and how the eye reacts to light. You may have learned how theories about light have changed over the centuries. And yet, there remains the universal experience of light which ultimately eludes our explanations of it (and for which painters and poets may be as helpful as scientists).

I think that is what our experience of “God” is like. I put that in quotes because here again it is just a word, a label, which may be helpful for some but not for others. Countless words have been used and many traditions acknowledge that all words are just pointers to what cannot be named. And yet, we want to understand and make sense of this experience, whatever words we choose.

Recently I came across a writer who said that we are born with a sense of separation, an awareness that we are somehow cut off from something ultimate. I don’t think that is quite right. I do agree that we have such a sense early on but I think it develops after we are born. Initially our sense is of oneness, of union with the world we are in and of our Source. Soon, however, out egoic identity begins to develop, especially from our interactions with the adult humans around us. They tell us “who we are:” our name, our gender, race, nationality, religion, and our various attributes. In short, our identity apart from other things in the world.

Eventually, we may be told about God, almost always in language from some religious tradition.  But we may wonder, “What is God?” Some children, not unreasonably, may try to connect this idea with their own experience. But if they tell grownups about their experience of God, they may not get much support if it doesn’t conform to religion’s official explanation. “No, honey, that’s not what the Bible says.” Oh.

Fast-forward to adulthood and we have learned that God is whoever our religion says God is, often in great detail, in its scriptures, creeds, doctrines, etc. What we have also learned is that God is not what we have personally experienced, which is usually viewed with suspicion. We can only take it seriously if it fits within our religion’s boundaries.

And yet, Christianity especially keeps talking about faith, which I think is our experience of God, our awareness of God’s presence. “Your faith has saved you,” Jesus says on several occasions in the gospels. Not your beliefs about God. Not your conformity to official teaching. Just faith. And interestingly, Jesus never defines faith or explains it. He also detects faith in many people that surprise the religious people around him. “Him?! Her?! You’re kidding.”

So, I don’t think you can lose your faith because you can’t lose the presence of God or whatever you want to call this reality which is the source of our own reality, our own true Being. But your faith can become so obscured that you think you’ve lost it because it doesn’t conform to or resonate with whatever the religious or spiritual authorities you live with have been telling you “real” faith looks like.

The clergy Ehrman describes as having lost their faith have actually just experienced a collision (usually over the course of many years) between their experience of God and their tradition’s definition of God. Unfortunately, many clergy, and lay people, have been so indoctrinated that they viscerally believe that their tradition’s view of God is the only one there can be. To reject their tradition’s beliefs is, then, to reject God altogether. How sad, and unnecessary.

Another quote I use often is from the 20^th century scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who explains our core identity this way.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Like Anselm and like Jesus, Teilhard says faith, our spiritual experience, is primary. It is our essence. It’s where we start. And from that we make sense of what it means to be human, to be a person in the world. That is our human journey. Today, traditional religion is fading away because it is failing to guide and assist people in their human experience. Instead, it wants to help people “find God”, in conformity with their tradition’s rules and teachings, when God is actually all around us. Instead of learning creeds and catechisms, religion needs to be helping people to discover this truth that Teilhard again puts so succinctly.

“God is not remote from us. He is at the point of my pen, my shovel, my paint brush, my needle – and my heart and thoughts.”

And religion could do with a dose of this Teilhard wisdom, as well: “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

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