Nathan Brown and Ryan Bell are good friends. Brown is book editor at Signs Publishing Company in Australia and Bell, the former pastor of the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church, has come off a year-long experiment with atheism.
Bell now says that he doesn’t think God “exists.” The world, he explains, “makes more sense to me as it is, without postulating a divine being who is somehow in charge of things.” Brown has published a book that is, in substantial part, a response to his friend’s experience. It’s calledWhy I Try to Believe: An Experiment in Faith, Life and Stubborn Hope, and his friend is author of the foreword. Ryan Bell says Brown’s book is “likely among the most honest efforts to grapple with faith in the midst of doubt that you will find.”
His book is a memoir as well as a theological reflection, a record of why he persists in Christian conviction “despite challenges and disappointments” such as come, he suggests, to any thoughtful person of faith. The word “trying” in the book’s title expresses “healthy honesty,” what he also calls “humility.” It’s an acknowledgement, too, that many of his questions remain “unanswered.”
Titles for the book’s ten chapters aptly summarize the author’s themes. After “Trying to Believe” comes “Hoping to Believe,” where Brown quotes Jim Wallis’s remark that two groups may be the best at viewing the world “realistically.” They are “the cynics and the saints,” and they differ in this crucial regard: the saints, but not the cynics, enjoy “the presence, power and possibility of hope.” Hoping that life is “more than molecules and mathematics” changes us for the good, he says, and “reconnects us to the present.”