Homebrewed Christianity Adventures in the Spirit: Building a New Architecture for Christian Doctrine w/ Philip Clayton
Faith That Includes Doubt
- Faith and doubt coexist as the default posture for the modern believer, not problems to be externally fixed.
- Philip Clayton describes the 'secular believer' who carries doubt into theology and treats questioning as integral to belief.
What You Believe Versus How You Believe
- Belief has two axes: the content (what) and the mode of holding it (how), mixing existential trust with plausibility.
- Clayton outlines six levels of belief where most lived Christianity occupies community-relative plausibility rather than demonstrable proof.
Alps Jump As A Faith Metaphor
- Clayton recounts jumping between two rocky promontories in the Alps as a metaphor for existential leaps of faith.
- He emphasizes the internal sense that a leap is doable and the retrospective conviction that it was the right move.
Philip Clayton has been one of the most important conversation partners in my theological life — we literally worked out some of this stuff together at Claremont — so sitting down with him to trace the whole architecture of his thought from the beginning felt less like an interview and more like a reunion at the whiteboard. We started where Philip started: the secular believer, that figure he described in his Yale dissertation who carries doubt not as a problem to be solved before the real theology begins, but as the very medium through which faith moves. From there we mapped his six-level structure for how beliefs actually work — spoiler: about five percent of what Christians believe falls into the "demonstrably true" category, and the rest is a lot more interesting and honest than most of us admit. Philip walked us through what he learned from Pannenberg about doctrine as hypothesis, the racetrack-and-motorcycle story behind his concept of theological "traction," and why the shift from reductionism to emergence in contemporary science matters so much for anyone trying to think seriously about God and the world. We got into panentheism — why it's more compelling than classical theism, what it means for divine action, and how a Korean doctoral student's research on comfort women completely changed the way Philip thinks about where God shows up in the world. By the end, we were talking about what he calls a new architecture for Christian doctrine: not a final set of answers, but a set of questions a follower of Jesus simply has no choice but to keep returning to. This one is the long game. Pour something good.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
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