Hi, I'm Nate.
Faith Lab is built on one conviction: Christianity is deeper than most of us were shown. Its history holds up. Its Bible is stranger and more beautiful than the Sunday school version. And it still changes people. Each episode digs into one piece of that, grounded in the best scholarship I can find.
From the pulpit to taking it all apart
I'm Nate Hanson. I grew up loving church, and as a young adult I went all in. I was a pastor and helped plant churches in San Francisco. Somewhere in those years, the version of Christianity I'd been handed stopped holding up under my own questions, and I burned out.
Back in Oregon, I started a podcast called Almost Heretical with Tim Ritter, and later my wife, Shelby Hanson, joined me on the mic. It became a home for people wrestling with hard questions about God and the Bible, and it grew to more than two million downloads. For most of a decade, I took my faith apart in public.
- Pastor and church planterPlanting churches in San Francisco.
- Almost HereticalStarted with Tim Ritter, later joined by Shelby. More than two million downloads.
- The scholarshipThe hardest questions turned out to have serious answers.
- Faith LabPassing on what I found, one question at a time.
What I found was deeper and stronger than I ever imagined.
What brought me back was the scholarship
Deconstruction had left me with questions I assumed had no good answers.
- Does God exist?
- Who was Jesus, really?
- Can we trust anything the Gospels say?
So I started reading the people who had spent their lives on exactly those questions: Richard Bauckham, N.T. Wright, Peter Williams, Tim Mackie, and many others.
What I found was deeper and stronger than I ever imagined.
- The Gospels hold up as history, written close to the events and full of details you can check.
- The first Christians were worshiping Jesus as God within a few years of his death.
- The case for God's existence turned out to be far more serious than the version I had dismissed.
The more I dug, the fewer leaps Christianity required compared to the alternatives I'd been left with.
Today I see the resurrection as the historical anchor of everything. Along the way, Shelby and I found our way back to church too, and found a community that feels like the best parts of my early faith.
The evidence got me back in the door, and what I found on the other side goes far deeper than I expected. That's what I want to share.
Six ways in
Every episode is short, and every one is grounded in serious scholarship. Here's where they go.
The evidence
Can we trust the Gospels? Did Jesus really rise? What the history actually shows.
The unseen realm
The spiritual world of the Bible, from the divine council to the powers Jesus came to defeat.
Miracles and the supernatural
Why the modern world stopped expecting them, and why so many people still report them.
The first Christians
What the earliest believers saw, what they believed, and what they were willing to die for.
Changed lives
True stories of people Jesus turned around: skeptics, seekers, and missionaries who went where no one else would.
What I'm reading
The books, scholars, and ideas I can't stop thinking about, passed on in plain language.
The people this show is for
People who were handed a thin version of Christianity and walked away from it, or are about to.
The Bible read in its own world, the strange and beautiful parts included.
Honest questions, because the faith I found again doesn't need anyone to stop asking them.
That's what Faith Lab is for. If you have a question, a story, or an episode idea, I'd love to hear from you.
Christianity is deeper than you've been shown.
Faith Lab is free and listener-supported. Help keep it going for five dollars a month.