In today’s episode, you’ll hear the story of Molly Worthen. As a journalist and historian at UNC, Molly has written about Christians for years as an outsider. But in this conversation, she shares how something unexpected happened to her recently: she became one.
Molly talks with Lorien Foote, a history professor at Texas A&M. They explore Molly’s worldview before becoming a Christian, the evidence that led her to faith, and how changing her mind wasn’t as scary as she expected.
This forum was held at Texas A&M in Spring 2024. Thank you to the forum planning team for making this event possible.
If you're willing to suspend your disbelief in the supernatural, then you can begin to investigate the historical context of Christians' claims about the empty tomb and the appearances of Christ. You're still faced with a leap of faith, but it's no longer a wild leap in the dark. It's a it's a well-researched, reasonable leap. And then you start to realize that you were always making a bit of a leap, and you just weren't acknowledging it.
Doubts never go away. They're just like antibodies in every good, healthy body. Every faith has doubts that are there, and you just sort of live with them.
We should hold our beliefs about the world lightly and treat them as tools to navigate the evidence we have. And as the evidence accumulates, that might make our tools seem inappropriate. We've got to be willing to change those tools, change our worldview as we gain new evidence.
I became a Christian when I was 41. I was basically settled on the big questions about who I was. And it is just tremendously exciting that that might not be true. God can drop these beautiful bombs in your life that you don't look for. And it's been incredibly intellectually stimulating.
If I believe that it's more likely than not that this guy rose from the dead, then I can go with him on the other things he says about himself.
I was reading the Gospels over and over and having a reaction. I'm still waiting for the mystical experience that I thought I would get at some point. The closest I have gotten to that is the experience of seeing, for the first time, the sheer strangeness of the things Jesus does. His interactions with people, especially the accounts of healing and the way every healing is a little bit different. Jesus meets each person on their own terms.
I did not have to treat the Gospels as inerrant. All I had to start to do was to treat them with the same methods and the same kind of respect and questions as I would treat other historical sources. But for that to be possible for me, they had to be sort of defamiliarized.
If you are committed to an anti-supernaturalist understanding of reality, then any possible explanation of the empty tomb and Jesus's appearances to his followers is preferable to the Christian explanation, no matter how baroque and elaborate. And I had to come to grips with my own deep anti-supernaturalist bias.
