While at Westminster Theological Seminary, Goodwin was forced to look at other people’s faith as part of his studies. “If you remove this ‘Jenga‘ piece from the tower of your faith, what happens to it,” Goodwin said. “I turned that lens around. So what happens if someone were to used this theological judo on me,” he began to ask himself.
That led Goodwin to deconstruct his Christian faith and made him second guess what he knew about Christianity. Most of his classmates were training to be pastors, while he was training to go into secular academia. So Goodwin says he was thinking more like his skeptical clientele would be and asking those types of questions.
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“I began to feel like I was being lied to and being trained to lie to other people,” Goodwin shared. He started to feel like there were workarounds to hurdles in the faith when people asked hard theological questions. Goodwin gave the example of translating Bible texts, saying, “Why did we translate it this way and not that way?” The answers he received were because of the seminary’s theological commitments.
“So it could go the other way? Yeah, if we had different theological commitments,” Goodwin said.
Goodwin explained, “I spent the next several years after seminary ‘Rubik’s Cubing‘ God’s world trying to see God in His world instead of just in His Word.” But that didn’t stop Goodwin from sharing the gospel with those he was teaching, although he was struggling with doubts.
The Westminster Theological Seminary graduate was teaching at universities on how to defend the faith. “I remember standing in front of classes thinking, ‘I’m giving them these pat answers, but if these students knew what I knew, they would ask me certain questions that would change this dynamic—while I was trying to prepare them to run into skeptics, I’m also in my own mind very skeptical of what I’m saying,” he said.
After being challenged by a close friend, Goodwin dove deep into the Bible, something he hadn’t done since seminary, because he was afraid it would lead him to question more of the faith. He said, “I literally told God, ‘If I find one more thing in the scriptures that doesn’t have a good explanation without resorting to having to bend over backwards and hop over barrels to explain it—I might lose my faith.’”
“In those five or six years since seminary when I wasn’t living in the text, all my presuppositions had fallen off,” Goodwin revealed. All the armor he had that helped him “bulldoze” his way through scriptural issues was gone. The tools he used to use when reading the text were gone, so he was reading it through a different lens.
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Goodwin expressed that it was possible for him to continue running from his crisis of faith while pretending to believe and being in community. Or he could turn and face his doubts. He said, “I spent the entire year of 2021 traveling and meeting with professors—people who are knowledgeable in the original languages and the scriptures—and raising my issues.”
Goodwin said the he was surprised to find out that he was late to the party. “All the issues that I was raising, they’re looking at me like, ‘You finally got here.’” One person he met with told him, “If you can learn to deal with these issues, then you’ll be a mature Christian. To have wrestled with this and found a way to still believe—that’s when you know you’ve made it.”
His journey made him dive even deeper, leading him to read books from trusted theologians. But he felt his questions still weren’t being answered, so Goodwin started to read liberal theologians he’d been warned about in the past. “It got to the point where the liberal dudes were the ones bringing the most comfort, because they were the ones being the most honest about the issues,” he said.
