He grew up inside the church. His father was a Baptist minister. Faith came to him early, naturally, almost with what he called his “mother’s milk.” Then, in his teenage years, that inherited faith stopped being enough. He saw hypocrisy. He saw people whose church life and ordinary life did not match. He judged that harshly, by his own later admission. He drifted into atheism. Then, over time, he found his way back.
That is not an unusual story in one sense. Many people inherit faith, reject it, and either return or do not return. But Graham’s account is useful because he was clear about what turned him away and what brought him back.
What turned him away was not first of all a philosophical argument. It was people.
And what brought him back was also people.
That matters.
In my own People of the Sign trilogy, I spent a great deal of time wrestling with the difference between inherited religion, lived conviction, and mature faith. One of the recurring problems in religious life is that we often confuse early formation with final understanding. We are given a faith as children that may be sufficient for childhood. But then the mind develops, the world intrudes, hypocrisy becomes visible, pain arrives, and the old formulations no longer carry the same weight.
That does not necessarily mean the faith was false.
It may only mean it was unfinished.
Graham made a distinction in our conversation that I think is essential. He spoke of rejecting a childish faith, not a childlike one. That is a very important distinction.
A childish faith is one that has never grown up. It depends on formulas it has not examined. It is content with slogans where reality demands substance. It cannot answer honest questions except by suppressing them. It wants certainty without depth.
A childlike faith is different. It is simpler, but not shallower. It trusts. It asks. It depends. It does not pretend to mastery. It is open, alive, and teachable.
This distinction matters because Jesus commends childlikeness, while Paul tells us to put away childish things. Those are not opposites. They are complementary. We are not meant to remain mentally or spiritually infantile. But neither are we meant to lose the capacity for trust.
Graham’s story turns on that point.
He did not return to faith because someone out-argued him. He returned because he encountered Christians whose lives had integrity. They were patient with him. They did not abandon him when he was dismissive of their beliefs. They had a steadiness and compassion he could not explain away. Their lives made the Christian claim plausible again.
That is a fact of enormous importance.
We often imagine that faith is lost and regained primarily through books. Books matter. Ideas matter. Graham himself went on to become a theologian, teacher, writer, and editor. He clearly values the life of the mind. So do I. But what he described, and what I have seen repeatedly in life, is that people are often driven from faith by embodied contradiction and drawn back by embodied coherence.
This is one reason John 13:35 remains so central: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
That verse is often quoted sentimentally. It should not be. It is a hard test. It means the credibility of Christian witness is not finally measured only by doctrinal precision, but by whether the life of Christ is visible among his people.
That does not diminish doctrine. It places doctrine where it belongs. Truth must become flesh in human conduct or it begins to testify against itself.
Graham’s later reflections on Luther were also useful. He said that Luther’s “justification by faith” might better be rendered as justification by trust. I think that is exactly right, or at least very close to right.
Faith, in the biblical sense, is not merely assenting to a set of propositions. It is trust in the word and character of God. It is relational. It is personal. It is existential. It means that the theological search begins in trust, continues through many questions, and in the end returns to trust.
That too is a pattern I recognize.
One of the themes in People of the Sign is that there is a difference between signs that point beyond themselves and signs that become substitutes for the reality they signify. Religious systems often make that mistake. They turn formulations, institutions, or inherited habits into ends in themselves. But the sign is meant to lead you on. It is not meant to replace the journey.
That is why the “why” questions matter.
I appreciated Graham’s answer when I mentioned my son at age two, asking “why” over and over again. Graham said that was actually a good theological instinct. He was right. Theology should ask why. It should keep asking why. But it should also recognize that not every why is resolved in the same way.
Some are clarified intellectually.
Some are clarified morally.
Some are clarified only through suffering.
And some are clarified not by explanation, but by encounter.
His reference to Job and Aquinas was helpful here. Job’s questions are not answered by a neat argument. They are answered by the presence of God. Aquinas writes one of the greatest theological works in history and then, after a profound spiritual experience, says it is all straw compared to what he has seen.
That does not mean the thinking was useless. It means the thinking was always penultimate.
That is another recurring issue in my own work. I have often returned to the relationship between the divine curriculum and the laboratory of creation. We do need the curriculum. We need revelation, scripture, inherited wisdom, theological reflection. But all of that is meant to be lived and tested in the world as it actually is. If we go into the laboratory without the curriculum, we blow things up. But if we cling to the curriculum as though it were an excuse never to enter the laboratory, we also fail.
Adult faith has to live in both worlds.
That is part of what made Graham’s present work so interesting to me.
Seen & Unseen is not simply a publishing project. It is the fruit of his whole trajectory. A man who inherited faith, rejected a shallow version of it, returned through integrity and trust, deepened through theology, and then came to see that Christian faith is not a private compartment but a lens through which all of life can be read — that man is well positioned to help others do the same.
The name itself matters: Seen & Unseen.
The visible world is not all there is. But neither is the visible world unreal. The question is how to perceive it rightly.
Graham brought Pascal into our conversation at exactly the right point. Pascal understood something many moderns have forgotten: the methods by which we investigate matter are not the same methods by which we come to know God. Experimental science has its place. Historical inquiry has its place. Rational argument has its place. But God is not one more object inside the world to be measured, weighed, and subjected to laboratory conditions.
God is hidden.
Not absent. Hidden.
That distinction is crucial.
He is hidden even in the places where Christians say he is most revealed. Even in Jesus Christ, one could see and yet not see. One could hear and yet not hear. One could shake his hand and miss who he was entirely.
This is why the seen and unseen belong together. The question is not whether God can be reduced to the seen. He cannot. The question is whether the unseen changes how we see.
That is where Graham’s project becomes important in a fractured age.
Much of modern Christianity has either retreated from public life or entered it in a crude and slogan-driven way. On the one hand, faith is privatized. On the other, it becomes ideological. In both cases, something is lost. What is lost is the disciplined habit of looking at politics, economics, sport, literature, grief, technology, and ordinary life through a theological lens without becoming shrill, simplistic, or sectarian.
That kind of work requires maturity.
It requires the kind of person who has passed through inherited religion, doubt, reconstruction, discipline, and trust.
It requires someone who knows the difference between childish certainty and childlike dependence.
And perhaps that is why Graham Tomlin’s life struck me as worth attending to. His trajectory is not merely biographical. It is representative. It shows how faith can be tested without being destroyed, corrected without being abandoned, and deepened without becoming less accessible.
That is not a small thing.
Many people today are not rejecting Christianity itself so much as rejecting thin versions of it, hypocritical versions of it, or unexamined versions of it. Some may never come back. But some, like Graham, may discover that what they rejected was not the whole of the matter.
And for those people, the witness that matters most may still be what first mattered for him: lives of integrity, patient trust, and people who refuse to give up on them.
That is not the whole of theology.
But it may be where theology becomes believable.
Sneak Peek
Next up, on Sunday, is my conversation with Steve Bezner, reflecting on how culture shapes our understanding of faith and why following Jesus often means choosing kingdom values over cultural ones.
After that, on Tuesday, comes my conversation with Dan Allender, exploring trauma, healing, and the Christian story, and how God meets us in the deep places of pain.
So that is what lies ahead in writing, even though the interviews themselves are already available to watch.
And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
