Later this year I’ll be teaching for 3 weeks at our church’s adult forum on the topic of Christian Universalism. In preparation I’m diving back in to some key books that have guided my path, starting with Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God. It’s been a few years since I’ve read this one, but even before I get out of the first chapter I’m reminded why this one spoke to me so powerfully.

When wrestling with Augustine, Luther, and Calvin’s teaching on predestination and how it conflicted with what he had been raised to know of God’s love, he challenges the common “crisis of faith” framing:

In fact, what I have here called “a crisis of faith,” and at the time regarded as such, was not a crisis of faith at all. For it was precisely an unshakable faith in the love of God–a faith that my mother in particular had instilled within me–that made my doubts about Christianity and the Bible possible; and had I known more about the Bible at the time, or had I possessed a less naive view of revelation, I might have been spared these doubts as well.

This rings true to my own experience: that it was not a lack of faith that caused me to strike out in search of a more beautiful expression of God, but rather it was because of that faith that I knew there must be something better than what I was being taught. Hallelujah.