CHAPTER 1
I Believe in Doubt
The Value of Understanding Doubt
Part of the glory of the Christian faith is that at its heart is a God who is a person. “He who is,” the father of Jesus Christ and our father, is infinite, but he is also personal. The Christian faith therefore places a premium on the absolute truthfulness and trustworthiness of God, so understanding doubt is extremely important to a Christian.
Of course, faith is much more than the absence of doubt, but to understand doubt is to have a key to a quiet heart and a quiet mind. Anyone who believes anything will automatically know something about doubt. But those who know why they believe are also in a position to discover why they doubt.
The follower of Christ should be such a person. Not only do Christians believe, they are those who “think in believing and believe in thinking,” as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith’s shoulder.
Consequently, a healthy understanding of doubt should go hand in hand with a healthy understanding of faith. We ourselves are called in question if we have no answer to doubt. If we constantly doubt what we believe and always believe-yet-doubt, we will be in danger of undermining our personal integrity, if not our stability. But if ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt.
If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith grows stronger still. It knows God more certainly, and it can enjoy God more deeply. Faith is not doubt-free, but there is a genuine assurance of faith that is truly beyond a shadow of doubt.
Obviously then, each one of us should understand doubt for God’s sake and for ours. God is to be trusted, yet we human beings are prone to doubting: That is justification enough for trying to understand doubt. But an understanding of doubt will also bring two particular benefits to followers of Christ today.
First, a healthy understanding of doubt will act as a safe-guard against today’s widespread and unnecessary breakdown of faith. Christians are confronted by a situation that militates openly against assured faith. In most modern countries, public life has grown more secular and private life more pluralistic. In the Western part of the modern world, the Christian foundations of Western culture have been torn up and discarded.
Our Christian past is in disrepute, and the very basis for any faith, Christian or otherwise, is held to be discredited in thinking circles. At the same time the vacuum created by collapsing Christendom has been filled by a bewildering variety of alternative faiths, facing us with a jostling and anxiety-creating pluralism.
Many of us are also smarting emotionally under the sting of reactions to our faith and are keenly aware of the intellectual deficiency in our response.
In such a situation, it is hardly surprising if at times we falter as believers in a disbelieving age. This state of affairs has aggravated the already serious problem of doubt among Christians. Some, in response, have abandoned the faith altogether; many more have kept the faith but abandoned all pretense of any intellectual component.
The loss of faith has not been stanched, and this has suggested that the Christian faith is a fragile, vulnerable belief with little intellectual integrity. This suggestion, in its turn, lends support to the common rejection of the Christian faith among thinking people.
What is most damaging is not that Christians doubt but that there seems to be so little honesty about doubt and so little understanding of how to resolve it. This must be changed.
What is most damaging is not that Christians doubt but that there seems to be so little honesty about doubt and so little understanding of how to resolve it.
Second, a healthy understanding of doubt helps us to prepare for the years of testing that, I believe, are to come. Faith at its truest is radical reliance on God. It is a conviction born of understanding, grounded solidly in the truth of who God is and what he has said and done. But what our faith “should be” may be far removed from what our faith “is.”
In practice, many of us have become Christians and are continuing to believe for less than the best reasons and clearest motives. This will have serious consequences in the critical years ahead when the civilizational conflicts deepen and the battle between God and the gods grows more intense.
For example, one person’s faith may be a genuine trust in God but also a trust in certain Christian friends, while another person has truly committed to God and also to the care of a strong local church or Christian community.
Or again, others may honestly put themselves under the Lordship of Christ, yet at the same time adhere passionately to some aspect of the Christian way of life that by temperament or nationality they would be likely to espouse anyway.
In each specific case it is impossible to determine the exact line of distinction between faith and faith plus, between our faith in God and our faith in other people and things. Where faith is not as strong or as pure as it should be, it is not illegitimate.
If our motives had to be spring-water pure, which of us would pass the test? But impure faith that is weak or wrongly based is always vulnerable in a crisis. To the degree that other motives are also at work, faith is not radical reliance on God alone.
Seen in this light, every test that shows us what we are really relying on can be constructive. If testing shows that our attachment to Christian friends or to a particular lifestyle or culture is stronger than our attachment to God himself, we must ask whether these supports for faith are in danger of becoming substitutes.
What we need, then, is to be stopped short before the process of substitution is complete and faith becomes altogether empty.
The Square One Principle
Jesus challenged the Jews of his day with a searching question: “How can you have faith so long as you receive honor from one another, and care nothing for the honor that comes from him who alone is God?” Ostensibly their faith was solely in God, but that faith was only nominal. In reality, their faith was in each other.
More precisely, their nominal faith in God was supported and accredited by a closed system of mutual human honoring that made the need for any honor from God superfluous.
We should ask similar questions of ourselves, particularly those of us who are Western Christians. What sort of faith do we have? How can we know how strong our faith really is so long as we are comparatively untroubled in a world of material affluence, social ease, and spiritual privilege?
Or to reverse it, could it be that in the deepening turbulence of our generation God is not only judging a culture that has abandoned him but also, as it were, shaking up the bag and testing the foundations to see if we Christians are as ready as we think for the critical years ahead?
The coin has two sides. Much of the weakening and breakdown of faith we are witnessing is a logical consequence, pure and simple, of the deep deficiency of faith today. On the other hand, it may also be a sign of God’s hidden sovereignty and wisdom preparing us for a tougher future.
Long-standing supports are crumbling, and many of the accepted assumptions of normal Western life are being shaken—such as social stability and a reasonable prosperity.
We are forced to see the true foundations of our faith (that is, our practical rather than professed faith, our day-to-day trust, our matter-of-fact belief, our down-to-earth reliance). Far better to be tested today and have the chance to put right what is shown to be wrong than to be tested tomorrow and be found wanting.