Truth and Faith

I’m listening to the podcast of Bill Moyer’s Journal from 5/11 when I hear these lines from recent Regent University grad Carly Gammill:

Part of the goal of many of us who are going out from this institution from here on to make it clear and accurate what it really means to be a Christian leader to change the world, which is not to indoctrinate anyone but to share the truth and to offer the truth and to rely on the truth in the way that we handle our lives as an example to others. (emphasis is mine)

I remember when it was just called “the good news” instead of truth. She also uttered this naive understanding of the law:

I intend to help further the administration of justice and to do justice. And I believe in absolute truth, and I believe in absolutes. Not grey, you know, not relative truth but absolute truth. And that’s what God’s word is. (emphasis is mine)

With all that truth I wonder how one can have any faith. Truth leaves no room for doubt. Faith does not exist without doubt. As the Christian philosopher Paul Tillich put it “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” I’m beginning to wonder if places like Regent and Liberty might be forking a new religion from the Protestant tree.

Their religion doesn’t seem to require faith as much as fealty to a central leader like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Perhaps they’re growing into an American version of Catholicism?