Just to be clear I’m not talking about someone who is angry at God, hurt by the church or anything dramatic. Just people that begin at YEC and then became open to the Bible being non literal and then beginning to recognize even the stories written in a way that appears to be read literally but is full of hyperbolic speech that eventually leads them to things like heavy natural theology where they no longer believe that the miracles are real, that they virgin birth was real or that the resurrection was real. The Bible slowly goes from being real to less real and it eventually becomes essentially a giant metaphor devoid of anything supernatural. They are in a community of mostly people who accept same sex, reject the modern purity movement, are anti slavery and ect…. They enjoy church and have many church friends just no longer believes in the supernatural at all and thinks it’s all metaphorical and philosophical and decided that there is really no reason to believe it and so ofer years they begin to externally voice they just don’t believe it and eventually end up in atheism. Not angry atheism that hates Christianity. Just the belief that there is just simply nothing literal in the entire Bible including an actual god.
Since I’m in a similar boat and have these discussions with people it comes up and especially on Facebook and other random threads. There are millions and millions of people with similar ideas about Christianity as we find in BioLogos and other similar groups. For me personally I have zero scientific reason to believe in God. I have seen prayer answered for sure very few times in my life in a way I just don’t think it’s coincidence. None of it necessarily supernaturally charged up. No magical healings, resurrections and so on which is fine because I’m a biblical cessationist and so I don’t expect it. But it does mean I also don’t have the supernatural or miraculous things to lean on. Christians in general , even in here , are no better or worse than a decent person from any other faith or non faith. There is nothing historical to look back on to say this was for sure a god involvement here. I choose to believe in God really because of 2 events in my life that just seemed to coincidental to have just happened and neither one again is necessarily supernatural and based off of other very unlikely to be coincidental events I hear from others could just have simply been something extremely unlikely but not impossible and can’t be verified as carried out by a god.
Now I’m not particularly struggling with my belief in God becsuse as mentioned I just simply believe he’s real despite having no real reason to outside of those two events. But despite that, the faith is just there. I can’t really imagine ever not believing in God becsuse I don’t expect anything from him. I don’t think he’s not involved in his creation just that he’s not not involved with it in a crazy supernatural way.
But I have meet a increasingly growing number of people , more in the last two years than ever in my whole life who over the span of 5–10 years have slowly moved into atheism because the Bible slowly just became one giant non literal metaphor.
So that’s why I asked my question. Within natural theology where so much is turned from the supernatural into a metaphor what are the ways y’all encourage disciples 5-10 years in to not just move into atheism.