Shane Rosenthal: Is faith supposed to be blind?

Is faith supposed to be blind? No. The word the New Testament writers used for faith, the Greek pistis, was the ordinary word for trust in the ancient world, and trust was understood to be something you have reasons for. Blind faith, the leap-in-the-dark version most of us grew up with, is a much later development. That history matters, because the blind version is the one that keeps collapsing, and recovering the older one changes how you handle doubt, deconstruction, and every hard question in between.

For most of my life I believed the blind version. Faith was a leap. A feeling. Something you decided to trust because you were supposed to. That Christianity eventually collapsed for me: I spent years in pastoral ministry, then went through a long season of deconstruction where I seriously questioned whether the Christian story actually happened in history. What changed everything wasn’t a new emotion or spiritual experience. It was running into evidence I had never been taught, evidence that the first-century writers of the New Testament weren’t inventing myths but were trying to report something massive and world-shattering that they believed they had witnessed.

So sitting down with Shane Rosenthal, host of The Humble Skeptic podcast, felt personal. Shane’s work has had a profound impact on me. When I discovered his show I found myself nodding along to everything he said, because finally someone was scratching an itch I’d had for years. This conversation gets right to the heart of what faith meant before we redefined it.

What the word faith actually means

The Greek word for faith in the New Testament is pistis. It wasn’t a special religious term the biblical writers invented. It’s the same word Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, and Josephus used, and it simply means trust. Shane’s everyday examples make the point:

“When you trust somebody, if you trust your babysitter, you trust your doctor, you trust the chair you’re sitting on, there are usually good reasons to do so.”

Nobody hands their money to a financial advisor they just met on the street. Nobody leaves their kids with a babysitter they know nothing about. We trust important things to people we have good reasons to trust, and that is exactly the kind of trust pistis names.

“When Aristotle says you need to proceed on the basis of evidence which gives you trust, that’s what the word pistis is. And so when you start thinking about that, this is the word used in the New Testament everywhere. They’re not saying blind faith. That’s actually what we impose on the Bible based on where we’re at.”

That looks like a fine linguistic distinction until you notice how much rests on it.

How faith became blind

If faith was never meant to be blind, how did we end up here? Shane has spent decades doing man-on-the-street interviews with Christians across denominations, and the responses are remarkably consistent. Ask “What is faith?” and the overwhelming answer involves some version of a leap, a feeling, or an internal conviction. Ask “Why Christianity and not other religions?” and most people struggle to articulate anything beyond personal preference.

His historical explanation starts with the early church. Those first Christians couldn’t proceed on subjective faith, because they were constantly moving into pagan neighborhoods and trying to convince their Druid neighbors. A warm feeling proves nothing to someone who worships different gods. Something had to persuade the world, and whatever it was eventually converted the Roman Empire.

“But once it did happen, I think the Christian West forgot the roots because we took for granted the reasons, because everybody around us was Christian. In the Middle Ages, Europe became Christian and then we stopped needing arguments for faith.”

Then the Enlightenment arrived and people started getting critical. Instead of returning to the evidential foundations of early Christianity, the culture took a massive subjective turn. Romanticism swept through art, philosophy, and religion, and by the 1800s American Christianity had been profoundly shaped by pietistic movements that internalized everything. Faith became a feeling. Evidence became unnecessary. And that is the version most of us inherited.

What happens when that faith meets the world

I’ve been working with people who are deconstructing for about eight years now, and I keep asking the same question: why weren’t we taught any of this in church? We wring our hands about young people leaving Christianity when they head off to college. But what if the problem is that we handed them a version of faith that was never designed to survive contact with competing worldviews? Shane’s verdict is blunt: “You’re setting people up for total failure.”

He asks you to imagine sending a missionary family to India and putting their kids in a Hindu university without any preparation in Hinduism, or any sense of why Christianity might be true in contrast to other explanations of reality.

“It’s not going to be an accident that your kids come home asking tons of questions about Hindu beliefs. And if you haven’t helped them to see why Christianity is true in opposition to this competing version of reality, man, that can be totally confusing.”

One woman Shane interviewed on his show captures the whole problem. She had the faith-is-a-feeling worldview and used her experiences and emotions as proof that Christianity was true. Then she got a Hindu roommate who had the same kinds of experiences and feelings about Hinduism. They just nodded at each other, neither one able to say why her faith was more than personally meaningful. Shane called it what it is: “That’s just like a shampoo commercial.”

What Hebrews 11:1 actually says

Sooner or later, every conversation about faith runs into Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The verse gets quoted constantly to justify blind faith. But Shane did a deep dive into the Greek, and the word often translated “substance” or “assurance” was commonly used in the ancient world for title deeds. If you had property somewhere and wanted proof it was yours, you’d go get the title deed. You could hold the deed without yet possessing the land itself, and the deed gave you assurance that the inheritance was real and coming.

“Faith is the title deed of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. The reason it’s not seen is that it’s not today. It’s relating to our heavenly inheritance that isn’t yet obtained.”

Read that way, the verse describes what faith connects you to, a future inheritance you don’t hold yet, rather than defining faith as belief without evidence. The evidence that grounds the faith itself is still external, still public, still the kind you can examine. Which brings us back to where we started: faith is trust rooted in evidence.

How Jesus handled doubt

If faith were supposed to be blind, you’d expect Jesus to rebuke people who asked for proof. He didn’t. Consider John the Baptist, the man who preached “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” a sermon connecting Jesus to the entire sacrificial system, the Passover lamb, Isaiah 53. From prison, that same John sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you really the one, or should we look for another?” John is doubting his own sermon.

Jesus doesn’t tell John to just believe, and he doesn’t shame him for the question. He says, “Go tell John what you’ve seen and heard this day. The blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised.” Shane unpacked what is going on in that answer:

“The way he says this, ‘go tell him what you’ve seen and heard, the blind see, the deaf hear,’ he’s actually quoting Old Testament prophecies that have been fulfilled in those disciples’ sight.”

Eyewitness testimony connected to fulfilled prophecy. That is how Jesus chose to comfort someone in a moment of doubt, with evidence rather than a demand to believe harder.

Deconstruction as delayed honesty

Shane said something in this conversation that hit me hard: deconstruction is delayed honesty rather than rebellion. When the only faith you’ve ever been given is faith without reasons, you’re not equipped for the Hindu roommate, or the philosophy professor, or your own honest questions. And when the foundation finally cracks, it looks like rebellion from the outside. Often it’s just someone finally being honest about what they were never given tools to handle.

That doesn’t mean every deconstruction story ends outside Christianity. Mine didn’t. For me it meant rebuilding on a different foundation, the one I wish I’d been given from the beginning: a faith that expects questions, invites investigation, and actually provides reasons to believe.

It’s also why what Shane is doing with The Humble Skeptic matters. He’s doing exactly what the earliest Christians did rather than asking people to check their brains at the door: pointing to eyewitness testimony, fulfilled prophecy, and public events instead of private feelings and blind leaps. Near the end of our conversation he told me what he’s really after:

“What I’d least like to do is get people curious so that they begin to study these things on their own, because I think these things are worth looking into. They’re very weighty subjects and fascinating little historical questions that are worth exploring.”

That’s the invitation. Not certainty handed down from on high, but curiosity that leads somewhere, and evidence that holds up under scrutiny. Because maybe the problem was never you. Maybe the problem was what you were taught about faith in the first place.

Common questions

What does the Greek word for faith actually mean?

Pistis, the word for faith throughout the New Testament, wasn’t a religious term invented by the biblical writers. It’s the ordinary Greek word for trust that Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, and Josephus all used. In the New Testament, faith means trust based on good reasons, not believing without evidence.

Doesn’t Hebrews 11:1 teach that faith is believing what you can’t see?

The Greek word often translated “substance” or “assurance” in that verse was commonly used for title deeds in the ancient world. The passage describes what faith connects you to, a heavenly inheritance that hasn’t arrived yet. The “things not seen” are future, not unevidenced.

Did Jesus rebuke people for having doubts?

No. When John the Baptist sent his disciples from prison to ask whether Jesus was really the Messiah, Jesus pointed to miracles that fulfilled Old Testament prophecy and told them to report what they had seen and heard. He met doubt with evidence, not shame.

Why don’t more churches teach the evidence for Christianity?

Once Christianity became the dominant culture of the West, churches stopped needing arguments for faith, because everyone around them was already Christian. The subjective turn of the 1800s, through Romanticism and pietistic movements, then recast faith as an inward feeling, and many churches simply inherited that approach without questioning it.