Something like a metaphorical acceptance of Jesus
I’m fed up with myself. I’m a denier who wants to be a believing Christian. Not merely a denier, however, but someone deeply preoccupied with the historical study of Jesus and early Christianity. I developed this obsession a few years ago, an experience I have described as almost revelatory. Yet I didn’t know how to direct this fixation. I needed some form of outlet, which ultimately led me to create this Substack.
Over the past year I’ve formed friendships online, written essays I’m genuinely proud of, and learned an enormous amount through the process of publishing here.
Yet I’m growing weary of feeling like an outlier. From what I can tell, most people who share this intense interest in ancient Christian history and the historical Jesus tend to move in one of two directions. Some remain comfortably agnostic, treating the subject primarily as an intellectual or historical pursuit. Others find ways of reconciling historical-critical inquiry with personal faith. Both groups, at least outwardly, appear relatively confident in their positions. I find myself in neither camp. My own stance is marked instead by a persistent uncertainty. I resist identifying as agnostic, largely because the prospect unsettles me, yet I also find myself unconvinced that God exists, and even less certain that Jesus was his son—despite a sincere desire to believe otherwise.
So what do I do?
Two Jehovah’s Witnesses have been coming to my porch weekly, where I do most of my writing. They are attempting to persuade me toward belief, though if anything the encounters seem to have the opposite effect. I’ve experienced something similar here on Substack as well. Extended debates arise over the truth of Christianity, and in those moments I often find myself adopting a strongly skeptical posture, arguing against the claims that God exists or that Jesus is his son. In part, this seems to be a natural response to my own uncertainty.
When someone asserts that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, my instinct is to press the question: how do you know? What would constitute proof? These conversations tend to reach a familiar endpoint. Eventually the other person concedes that the resurrection cannot be demonstrated in a strict evidentiary sense and that belief ultimately rests on faith. Yet that answer raises another difficulty for me: why should I place faith in something that, from my present standpoint, appears so improbable?
That response tends to frustrate people when I voice it. But am I being unreasonable?
I’ve wondered if there is a solution—something like a metaphorical acceptance of Jesus. The trouble is I don’t know what it is, or what it means. Perhaps it would involve treating the claim that Jesus is the Messiah not as a literal statement about divine metaphysics, but as a recognition of the moral and imaginative world his followers believed he revealed. In that sense, “Messiah” could function less as a biological or ontological claim about God’s son and more as a way of saying that, in this one figure, people encountered a vision of reality they found uniquely authoritative: a radical ethic of forgiveness, the inversion of status, the insistence that the last are first and the first last.
I’m not saying I believe this. It’s only a thought. But I sometimes wonder whether the earliest followers themselves experienced something closer to that: the sense that in Jesus they had found the decisive interpreter of God’s will, the one through whom the meaning of life suddenly seemed clarified, even if the language they used to express that conviction eventually became theological in ways they may not have fully intended. If that were the case, “Messiah” might be less a proposition to be proven and more a recognition that this particular life and teaching continue to shape how people imagine God, justice, and the meaning of a human life. I’m not sure whether that solves anything. But at times it seems like a possible way of thinking about the problem.
Interestingly, I have found that no one advises learning to live with uncertainty. Instead, they pray that I will eventually become a believer. It is difficult to inhabit this uncertainty about God while continuing to attend church every Sunday. I often feel like a fraud when I sit there. No one at my parish knows what I actually think. I rarely discuss it with anyone besides my wife. I want to feel the conviction that others seem to possess so naturally, but what I have instead is only the desire for it—like a man standing at a well with a rope and no bucket. I want to feel it. I suspect it would be something like a drug.
I find it somewhat easier to entertain belief in God than belief in Jesus, though even here the problem persists. The form of divinity that seems most plausible to me is not the personal and benevolent God of traditional Christianity, but something more ambiguous—something merely God-like. I struggle to reconcile the claim that God is good with the reality of a world in which children die of cancer. If such a God exists, the possibilities appear limited: either God’s power is constrained, God is indifferent, or God is not morally good in the way believers claim.
I’m reminded of a passage from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy:
The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didn’t make it suit everyone, did he?
I dont believe he much had me in mind.
This reflects the God who seems most plausible to me. Perhaps others feel their prayers are heard and answered. Mine, however, seem to disappear into silence. It does not feel as though anyone is listening. Never has.
If it helps, you’re not alone. I know of regular attendees at my own parish who aren’t sure they believe in God, and have met several over the years with a similarly expressed desire to believe but who struggle to reconcile the seeming impossibility of the claims with empirical methods of verification. I share a similar bias of a modern mind, I’ve always been far more of a head Christian than a “heart” Christian, as some put it. I rarely if ever “feel” anything, certainly nothing like God speaking to me or an active sense of some supernatural presence, at least nothing I can’t attribute the movingness of the music or the impact of the liturgy. I’m skeptical of many claims to divine encounter but maybe none moreso than my own.
That said, something that’s helped me with my own faith is couching it in terms of hope rather than certainty (I love the liturgical phrasing, “the sure and certain HOPE of the resurrection). I sometimes liken it to assessing love. I don’t think there’s any way to empirically prove my love for my wife. Certainly there are details that provide evidence from which one could surmise that my love for her is an acute possibility, but it’s not like you can crack open my skull and point to the little neon sign in the affection zone that says “spouse,” and even the things we can empirically verify, such as the actions I take towards her, the engagement ring I bought her, the wedding we held in front of witnesses, or any of the wonderful aspects of the life we’ve built together, these things are predicated on that unverifiable love more than the other way around. And much like faith in a miracle, they’re a collection of visible evidence predicated upon an invisible truth. I think it’s something like that with faith.
The truth of the Christian story, for me at least, this notion that the entire universe is predicated upon a God whose essential character is that of self-giving love, and that Jesus is the most tangible expression of that, as the human vessel through which God binds himself to suffering to bring about our making…that is the most beautiful story imaginable. It is, in some ways, the best possible configuration of reality, to my mind. As such, that story is almost worth believing in even if I had no reason to think it was true (though for the record I think we have plenty of reasons to think it is true). But like any morals or principles that we hold to be “right,“ these are things we strive to live out even on the days where we don’t “feel them“. My love for my wife is not predicated on a constant sensation of butterflies; as it works in me it evolves into a posture of behavior as much as an emotion. So likewise, if we predicate the entirety of our faith on empirically verifiable claims about the historical Jesus, then our faith will never be anything but ambiguous and uncertain (not that there isn’t room for ambiguity or uncertainty in genuine faith, I think there’s plenty), because empirical history is rightly limited in what it can state with tempered degrees of probability about anything, and many of the most important claims about Jesus are simply not susceptible to objective verification by those methods. That’s why the closest we can get through “objective“ history is establishing that, probably, figures like Peter or Mary Magdalene genuinely believed they had encountered the risen Christ, but there’s no verifiable test we can run to “prove” the Virgin birth or the feeding of the 5,000.
Also, if I may be potentially heretical for a moment and make a too-long comment even more digressive, I’m not entirely sure how central a role the “historical“ Jesus is supposed to play in our faith. The historical Jesus is always, by definition, confined by the limitations of the historical-critical method. Historians aren’t necessarily seeking to answer questions about the relevancy of Jesus for our life today, they are simply trying to ascertain what can or cannot be said about particular historical instances with varying degrees of confidence. But that’s not the Christ attested to by either the New Testament writers, the early Church Fathers, or most other writers of Christian history. All four gospels, despite any historical details they may relay, they first and foremost are written from the perspective of theological reflection on the singular event of the resurrection. There is no non-risen Jesus anywhere in the New Testament, even the stories told about him that take place chronologically before the crucifixion are still, in every meaningful sense, speaking of the Resurrected One. He is only known as the one on the Cross.
And besides, it’s not like we’re ever called as people of faith to encounter the historical Jesus, we are called to encounter the resurrected one. Even the person most certain in their faith doesn’t have access to a time machine to take them back to an encounter in first-century Galilee. For us, Jesus is only encounter-able as a literary figure, or as a relational one in the living body of the church, or as an enigmatic inspiration in our own studies, be historical inquiry or devotional practice. In a sense, a “metaphorical“ Christ, as you were speculating about is, in some ways, the only Christ we have direct access to (at least those of us too skeptical to accept a direct supernatural encounter, even if we had one).
It’s like how sacraments give us tangible means for ascertaining glimpses of the imperceptible. I dont think the bread and wine have to literally transform in our gut to be true encounters with the body and blood of Christ. Is that a metaphorical encounter? A literal one? Somewhere in between? I have no idea. But if it’s a true encounter, how it is so is just a detail, subservient in importance to our posture in receiving it as a gift.
So I dont think you’re as far from being a believer as you might think. You’re already, in some sense, pursing Christ. If you’re a regular student of Christian history and part of a church community, you are a Christ-follower. Even some who saw him face to face cried “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.” I think you maybe just share (as I do) the modern presupposition that empirical verification is somehow a better or truer means of ascertaining reality, and since the miraculous remains a rather inaccessible enigma in that methodology, the resurrected Christ is always too far from your reach for comfort. But that may just be our modern biases getting in the way. The grammar of the early church certainly doesn’t approach these things in the terms we’re used to. And I think sometimes we have a habit of over-emphasizing the importance of confidently affirming abstract propositions as opposed to living our life in alignment with what we hope to be the truth. If you live your life seeking to emulate Christ’s self-giving love, you believe in him truly enough to be counted a sheep instead of a goat.
But that’s just one man’s rambling opinion. Thank you for your willingness to share your struggles. I know it helps many of us to realize we aren’t alone in our uncertainty.
Hey Joseph, thanks for writing so vulnerably and honestly. The tension is a sign of honest-to-God work in religion. I think it's best to think of Christian faith as a kind of trust, rather than an irrational or blind faith. I conceive of my own faith as a mosaic of reasons, arguments, feelings, relational, mystical, and practical considerations. Primarily, it's built around a felt, intersubjective relationship with Jesus, but it also draws heavily from a rational critique of all other positions (and argument in their support). Thinking in terms not just of arguments or evidence for Christianity but arguments against other worldviews. There are many in this latter camp. Ultimately, I think other worldviews fail. While Christianity isn't without epistemic conundrums (problem of evil, etc.), I think we can safely say no worldview is without such conundrums. We need not be irrational, per se, but we do need to accept that reality is strange. And so our understanding of reality must be on par with its existential strangeness!
And Christianity is attractive not just for its intellectual or rational position (which I believe is strong), but for its role as a source of meaning whereby, as C.S. Lewis says, I believe in Christianity like I believe in the sun, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. But admittedly, this makes the "leap" somewhat existential, though again, not irrational or anti-intellectual (even Kierkegaard wasn't anti-intellectual, surely). In this vein, if I can offer some encouragement as one stranger on the internet to another writing about religion that you would simply open your hands. Cast away all considerations and allow the heart to open up. You've done a lot of hard work to think and process. Now, perhaps, opening one's hand can open up a new spiritual avenue--do not cling to your own position, or thoughts, or beliefs, but simply open the door of your soul and listen. We are all limited in our epistemic scope but if Christianity is true (assume for argument), then flinging open one's hands and heart in a posture of openness may lead to where you want--towards something radical, peace-giving, and joyful.
Prayerfully,
Mark