When the ground seemed to shift
The crisis of faith and science
In the nineteenth century the church felt the ground move. New scientific accounts of the age of the earth and the origin of living things arrived with the force of an earthquake, and for many believers it was as though the very floor of faith were buckling beneath them. Some concluded that faith simply could not survive the new knowledge and let it go. Others dug in, defensive and afraid, certain that to grant the science a single inch was to surrender everything. The disorientation was real, and it was widespread, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away. People were not foolish to feel the tremor; the questions were genuine and the vertigo was honest. And yet, given time, something became clear that the panic had not foreseen. Faith proved less fragile than the fear assumed. The heavens went on declaring the glory of God whatever their age turned out to be. In Christ all things went on holding together. The God who had made the world was never threatened by a closer, more careful look at how He had made it; the threat had lived mostly in the assumption that He would be.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the expanse shows his handiwork.”
— David — Psalm 19:1 (WEB)
“He is before all things, and in him all things are held together.”
This is Disorientation as intellectual upheaval, the season when new knowledge seems to threaten the foundations and the old certainties shake. The phase asks for a particular kind of courage here: not the courage to stop asking questions, but the courage to keep faith while the answers are still unsettled, trusting that what is truly bedrock will still be standing when the tremor passes.
Perhaps your own disorientation arrived the same way: you learned something, a fact or an argument or a discovery, that seemed to knock the floor out from under what you believed, and you could not un-know it. That vertigo is real, and you are not the first to stand in it. But notice how such crises tend to resolve. But notice how the older crisis resolved. The faith was not destroyed by the new knowledge; it was, over time, refined by it, forced to sort its true foundations from the cultural furniture it had mistaken for the gospel. Some of what trembled in you may have needed to tremble, because it was never bedrock to begin with.
This is not a call to stop thinking, or to fear what you might find; honest inquiry has never been the enemy of a faith that rests on the One who made the mind that inquires. It is an invitation to hold steady while the dust settles, and to trust that the God who holds all things together is not undone by what you have learned. The ground that really matters did not move. It only felt like it did.
The Church has met these moments before. When new accounts of the age of the earth and the origin of living things arrived with the force of an earthquake, some of the faithful concluded the faith could not survive the new knowledge and let it go, while others dug in, brittle and afraid, certain that granting an inch meant surrendering everything. In hindsight the faith endured across the traditions, and was often refined, made to distinguish its true foundations from the cultural assumptions it had wrapped around the gospel. Before a watching world expecting belief to collapse under inquiry, the whole Church need not fear an honest look at the world, for the One in whom all things hold together is unthreatened by the truth about His own handiwork.
What cannot be shaken is the God in whom all things hold together, before all things and beneath all knowledge. The heavens declare His glory however old they prove to be. When every confident account of the world has been revised and revised again, He remains the One who made it, unthreatened by the truth about His own handiwork.
- What did I learn that seemed to knock the floor out from under my faith, and have I let myself look at it honestly?
- Where might my faith be clinging to cultural furniture I have mistaken for the gospel itself?
- Do I trust that the God who made my mind can be sought with it, rather than defended against it?
Lord, when the ground of my faith seems to shift, steady me. You are before all things, and in You all things hold together, including the questions I cannot yet answer. Give me courage to seek You honestly, certain that the truth about Your world will only lead me back to You. Amen.