Editor’s Note: Below is a lightly edited automated transcript of their conversation. There may be typos or grammatical errors.
Aaron Lee: Hi, everyone. This is Aaron for SOLA Network. And I am here today with Sam D. Kim. Sam wrote the book A Holy Haunting. I reviewed it for SOLA, and I want to talk to him today about his book and some points that I made in my review. Sam, it’s nice to see you here. How are you doing?
Sam D. Kim: Pretty good. Such an honor. Thank you so much for your support. And your gracious words.
Aaron Lee: Your book, published by Morgan James Faith, is A Holy Haunting. It’s about faith and how people come to faith. Is that correct?
Sam D. Kim: Yeah, yeah. The faith journey and the process. And I do three buckets: faith as a theory, process, and practice — because it’s often misunderstood by the secular elite, and misunderstood by those within the walls of the church as well.
Aaron Lee: Something really interesting about you is just your entire background. Can you tell me some of your background, maybe introduce yourself to our audience as well? And how writing this book really came about?
Sam D. Kim: Yeah, so I’m an ethics scholar. I was at Yale, and was appointed at Harvard Medical School at the Center of Bioethics. Basically the evangelical scholar for Christian ethics there. And one of the main reasons why I felt compelled to write A Holy Haunting was because of this crazy misconception that secular elites, and then those in the church had about faith, like everyone kept saying, faith is a blind leap. You know, it’s about a visceral leap. And I’m like, it’s not — because the New Testament depicts it as a series of steps.
You can clearly see that with the disciples’ journey of faith, it was like as the Beatles say, a long and winding road, not a straight path. It was sinuous. And I really wanted to kind of clarify that especially for those in STEM and engineering and a lot of my friends in the Ivy Tower that just felt like they couldn’t relate to the anti-science sort of rhetoric that they understood fit. So I wanted to help them kind of see that. It’s not only rational, but it’s also beautiful.
Aaron Lee: You have this story at the very beginning of your book, where you’re describing spiritual rebirth and you used a word: spiritual puberty. Can you explain that term?
Sam D. Kim: Yeah, we were actually going to… one of the titles of the book was Spiritual Puberty… corny, but the point is, it comes from Jesus’s statements. Where he says in John 3, If you want to be born, if you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to be born again. And so that’s maternity, or, you know, birth. And in another passage of Scripture, Jesus says, If you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to become like little children, which equates to puberty.
So if faith can be akin to maternity and puberty, it’s going to always be something of a mess, whether it’s changing diapers, because it’s a messy… I mean, I have two sons. 16 and 11. And it’s messy. Their birth was messy, but at the same time, adolescence is also messy. Rebellion and resistance and independence, all of that. And so why do we take what’s rooted in Scripture, a messy process, and try to really clean it up and make it very black and white? And I think that doesn’t do it justice.
So to frame spiritual puberty, I use the idea of being a skeptic of love when I was in, you know, in the first grade and thinking when I saw these long haired aliens (girls), I really theorized that they must have crashed from a galaxy far, far away because they were so different than I was. And different from the guys that I was hanging out with. And then in Sunday school, I heard that Eve was created to be a helper. And I was like, well, this is definitely not true. Because none of the girls I knew were very helpful at all.
So I was, I was skeptical, a skeptic of love, until I turned, I think 11 or 12, in the fourth grade, where I experienced my own puberty process. And I realized that there was no power that could overcome this change in me. It went from skepticism to worship, from skepticism to idolatry. So I relate that to how sometimes when we think we know something, or how we try to frame something about what we believe we’re actually trying to make sense of those things in it could be quite silly, but we’re just trying to make sense of the world.
And I think a lot of atheists or agnostics, a lot of times they think of faith that way, or even God that way. “God no, I can’t believe that. I don’t think I believe I definitely don’t believe that.” But as they go through a developmental evolutionary process, where you have a kid or you get married, there are these tensions and things that happen that can explain everything, and you begin to… the layers sort of go away. And you begin to see differently, like I did.
Aaron Lee: Obviously it’s a funny story, right. But I mean, I think it’s very relatable. The way that you actually define Biblical faith in the book is that you say, “it’s a lifelong evolutionary longing to make meaning of human existence, in light of a higher plane of reality.” Now, that’s a great definition. But I’m going to ask you if you can explain that in simpler terms for me and for my audience.
Sam D. Kim: Well, what that simply means is that… like C.S. Lewis would say… if nothing in this world can ultimately satisfy you, then then the logical rational reason would be that you are made for another world. Solomon talks about in Ecclesiastes, how eternity was set in their hearts. All it really means is that no matter what we do… Psalm 46 says that deep calls out to deep… there’s something about our lives that just doesn’t satisfy. And it’s so deep, it’s chasmic, and nothing can do it. And so we want to make sense of our life. And it’s just not enough. This material life sentence… we are seeking for something transcendent, something beautiful, some meaning.
And what that really means is we’re trying to make sense of why are we here? By accident? I think that’s the question… like Rick Warren would do that in A Purpose Driven Life. Are we here on purpose? And it’s almost like we can’t get away from it. And that’s why my book is called A Holy Haunting. This is a question that haunts us.
Aaron Lee: Deconstruction plays a big part in your book. You’re not afraid to tackle it. And there was one section that moved me a lot. It said that some who deconstruct, they choose to live as expats and a self imposed exile. And you kind of explained that, but I want to ask you, if you can elaborate that for us on the podcast.
Sam D. Kim: I just have so many people who read the book… or before… just stories of coming, you know, people coming to me. One Columbia University student, asked for a private meeting and said, “You know, I don’t know how to break it my parents, but I don’t think I’m a Christian anymore.” Or a new student at Columbia was the president of his youth group at Singapore and couldn’t ask these tensions, questions and doubts he had to his youth group or his youth pastor or his pastors because he was supposed to be the role model Christian. He also didn’t want to be a contagion that helped people stumble in their faith.
And when they look me in the eye and tell me this… it’s heartbreaking for them, because there is no safe place to process those doubts, without disappointing themselves or others. And so what ends up happening is they isolate and they become expats — really, spiritual vagabonds — and leave the church because they think they’re doing the better thing for the church.
Aaron Lee: I think it resonated with me because I think many of us probably know people that are like that. You conclude with a call to “cross the swamp of doubt.” How would you give advice to people who are maybe struggling with that, or trying to make it across? And then what advice would you give for leaders, pastors, who are trying to help people as they come along to do that?
Sam D. Kim: Yeah, I would say, crossing the swamp… It’s a lot about fear. But my advice would be for pastors and leaders is… what does Jesus do when people doubt in the New Testament? Like for example, Thomas. So I feel like especially in the Asian context, there’s a lot of honor and shame. And we might be disappointed in leaders that doubt like that. But when Thomas doubted his faith, Jesus didn’t come with a triumphant theology of power. But he helped him understand and integrate in their discipleship of theology a weakness as well.
When Thomas says, “I won’t believe, unless I touch your hands and your side.” It wasn’t about power, right? I mean, the power happened in the resurrection. Why did he comply to Thomas’s request? It was an act of love. It was gentleness. And it was kindness, and ultimately, even miracles like the resurrection or feeding the 5000 didn’t convince the disciples of the legitimacy and historicity of Jesus, who he was as Messiah. It was his kindness that led them to repentance, and the convergence took place.
My advice would be, we must also lead like Jesus, and open our hands and walk with people. And that kindness, and that love of God translates. There’s a lot of times from what I’ve seen with deconstruction… is that people don’t leave the faith. Their greatest fears are hyperbolic and catastrophic because I can’t believe that I’m having these thoughts. And so just giving permission relieves a lot of the tension. And it will begin to see the love of God sort of break forth.
Aaron Lee: I want to hear how your background as a Korean American played into this book, because I don’t think you’re shying away from it in your book. Did your background and your upbringing make you want to write about this? Or maybe that’s what makes you relate more to people who are deconstructing or struggling in their faith? I don’t know if it’s true or not.
Sam D. Kim: Oh, well, like I said, I think I think it definitely does. As an Asian American, especially Korean American. My father, my parents helped plant churches. I mean, they weren’t pastors, but they were business leaders, entrepreneurs. They were strong on the theology of power and breakthrough and high intensity prayer which is sort of a Korean invention, spirituality, that sort of, you know, revitalized Korea economically in many ways as well.
But why I think deconstruction was hard for me in particular was because there’s no theology of weakness. There’s nothing taught on grief, there’s nothing taught on ambiguity. There’s nothing taught on being nuanced about life when the Bible speaks a lot about it. So I think that I was taught to think very black and white. And to process that was very difficult. And I didn’t want others to feel that and do it alone. And I hope that in some small way, my memoir, in many ways, could help them not feel alone. That’s really the goal. To know a friend along the journey that feels that way.
Read Aaron Lee’s review of A Holy Haunting. For more, check out our new Books and Reviews page — your one-stop resource for all of your reading needs. It features Asian American authors and issues, book recommendations, and interviews.