A Great Story of Coming to Believe

In “How I Came to Believe in the New Church” theolog Coleman Glenn reflects on the doubts and questions that he had and the interactions with other people and experiences with reading the Writings for himself that eventually led him to the point where he'd “just as soon doubt the existence of the physical world as doubt the truth of the Writings.”

I don’t know that I ever directly questioned the Writings - but I got to the point that I felt like the only reason I believed was that I had been raised in Bryn Athyn and it would be so devastating to me if I ever let go of the Writings....

...it wasn’t until I asked Andy Heilman that I got an answer that really changed how I saw things. He essentially quoted DLW, which says “Thought from the eye closes the understanding; thought from the understanding opens the eye” [Divine Love and Wisdom 46]. The point, he said, was that FIRST you had to trust the Writings; THEN you tried to see how it was true....

Blind faith vs. believing in revelation above external evidence is still something I try to figure out. Short answer: “blind faith” means believing in something that doesn’t make sense, or believing something that you don’t understand. The first is shallow, the second is impossible. Believing that Divine Revelation is Divine Revelation simply because it says so and because you just BELIEVE is something different, although it takes a process to get to it.... [T]hat process... and the tension between avoiding “blind faith” and believing something to be true apart from external evidence is one of the reasons that stories about how people come to accept something as Divine Revelation are so interesting to me....