In Defense of Doubt

Unbelief is the decision to live your life as if there is no God... But doubt is something quite different. Doubt arises within the context of faith. It is a wistful longing to be sure of the things in which we trust. But it is not and need not be a problem. --Alister McGrath

I love and cherish the faith I was surrounded with growing up. The best way I can describe the feeling it gave me was that of authentic wonder, as there was always a sense around my home and in my family's church that God was close and intimate. He was never an abstract deity who interacted with us through strange rites and rituals, intonations and recitations. Instead, He was immediately available, whispering mysteries into people's ears and making them to speak incomprehensible languages. Somehow He was so good to know that He made people recklessly happy. They would cry and dance and sing songs about Him, songs that spoke of lions, banners and thrones. While I never saw this God or his Holy Spirit, I knew these persons were all around me, and if I had enough faith that they were real, I would begin to touch and taste something truly sublime, and ordinary life would become extraordinary. Although God could be downright perplexing––theatrically knocking people over was somehow an expression of deep significance––I knew two things for certain: He loved me and wanted a relationship with me.

All of these things were wonderful in themselves. However, alongside my vague sensation of the majesty of God, I began to have more questions about Him––questions that strove to reconcile the God I experienced in my emotions and the God that occupied my rational thoughts. Slowly, faith had become less simple. At first, I was prone to assume I had lost sight of what it meant to have faith like a child; indeed, that which came so easily when I was a child. And wasn't this the goal, the pinnacle of our aspiration toward holiness, to have impregnable faith that is never rocked by the winds of doubt? I remember being informed that faith the size of a mustard seed could move mountains. I think this was meant to be encouraging. But the fact that mine could barely move me was a sure sign that my faith, were it to be measured, would be roughly the size of a submicroscopic and totally theoretical particle. So, like the alcoholic who drinks steadily so as never to experience the agony of withdrawal, my first and only instinct was for more. More faith from more experiences with that crazy, untethered, knock-you-flat kind of God. But try as I might, nothing happened. He never spoke. And in the void, God suddenly seemed all but non-existent.

So, when I was a teenager I began to feverishly read apologetics. They were simple books, ones that gently stroked my need to feel sane, ones that told me I wasn't crazy for believing in an invisible power. But this felt like cheating, like I was reading “Christianity for Idiots” in the closet while all the genuine believers were out exercising their reliable, broken-into-submission kinds of faith. Still, this was all I had. And I began to love it. Over time, it became a natural part of my life to experience God through the writings of people who knew something about Him that I didn't, and couldn't, through my own efforts. At first this was merely a vicarious, almost parasitic experience, but eventually my sense of knowing God strengthened such that reading about Him gave me a sense of solidarity and community with the author. All along, though, there was a part of me that thought intellectualized faith was somehow a cheap knock-off. Or worse, a betrayal to the very nature of faith, a thing which leans not on its own understanding.

As I look back on the culture of Christianity I was raised in, I can begin to discern where this thinking came from. We were “charismatic”, and we had put a high price on the ineffable expression of the soul and, as a consequence, saw everything else as beneath this pursuit. Powerful faith was in vogue; questioning and doubt were pesky hindrances to powerful faith. Additionally, I have little memory of learning actual doctrine––aside from the most basic, whittled down elements. Theology was a word, if used, that was regarded with skepticism. In fact, I can recall hearing on several occasions a joke that replaced Seminary with the word cemetery, as in, “My son just got home from Cemetery School, the place where true faith goes to die.” To a real extent, we were snobs. We were the ones who didn't need all the dead spirituality that depended on expository preaching, liturgical prayers and complicated theology. We had the living God on the tips of our tongues.

However, in my childish thinking I hadn't realized that all this emotional and worshipful expression of faith, were it authentic, must have come from a distinct point of acquired knowledge about the character of God. In other words, I wasn't aware that for everyone, with no exceptions, the mind engages and informs the heart; they were sibi mutuo causae––the mutual causes of each other. For it is undeniably true that we all have a theology, insofar as we have a means of interpreting the revelations––whether special or general––He has given us. The gulf I perceived between my reading and someone else's worshiping wasn't a gulf at all. Rather they were inextricably connected, part of the same whole, part of the full expression of the soul toward God. Being created in God's Image, we reflect the Trinitarian nature. That is, God expresses himself in his Word and in his Spirit, the logos and the pneuma. Together these distinct persons are the pleasure of God toward Himself. We were created to bring pleasure to God in a similar way; by engaging faith through the exercise of the mind and the expression of the heart.

If you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. ––Proverbs 2:3-5

My wife, Deborah, teaches Sunday school, and she is entertained by how simply the children accept basic truths. Recently, a mother came to pick up her child after service, and she asked what they learned. The woman's four-year-old daughter said, wide-eyed, “God calmed the storm!” Deborah smiled at the mother and said it was cute how kids say God did something when they really mean Jesus. Immediately a look of concern crossed the mother's face, perhaps wondering whether the person teaching her daughter was a heretic. My wife quickly clarified that she believed that, yes, Jesus was God. “Isn't is great, though,” she said, trying to recover, “how easily children see that there is no distinction between the two.”

Miscommunication aside, Deborah was making a real observation, namely, that the paradoxes of our faith are easily reconciled when our intellects have no good reason for challenging them. In other words, children don't simply believe because they are virtuous; they believe because they haven't any reason not to. Paradoxes and difficult questions are dealt with easily by children, to a large extent, because they are ignorant to much and incapable of caring overly about much. Their worlds, quite frankly, are small and egocentric. And a simple God––one without depth, complexity, or ambiguity––works really well for anyone truly fascinated with themselves.

As parents, our charge is to help shape and develop character and empathy within our children, a process of learning they will begin to carry on themselves. So, in reality, when they hit the point in their lives when empathy and depth of thought makes faith challenging, it is you, the parent, that led them to this point. You encouraged them to not live their lives absorbed in their own subjective reality, but to reach out and see beyond. Therefore, parenthood itself is a confession that it is not fundamentally desirable to have childlike faith––for where it comes easily, it also comes cheaply. Because the process of learning and growing never ends, especially in discerning the character of God, we should say that we, ourselves, want nothing like the faith of our childhood. We should be moving away from the immaturity of behaving simply as our environments suggest, and we should be moving with purpose toward knowing with precision the substance of our desire to serve and love God, namely, through the acquired knowledge of the goodness of His person.

There is something deficient about the person who does good work for its own sake without ever asking whether it's a good thing that this work be done. ––Nicholas Wolterstorff

The problem here, I think, is the confusion over why Christ gave so much focus on and favor toward children. He tells us we must become like children if we wish to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is significant that he never tells us we must think or act like children, but that we must be humble like them. In his book Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning pointed out that in Jesus' time there was no Victorian notion of the inherent goodness of children, to say nothing of the outright privilege they live in now. They were property. They had absolutely no status. Jesus was being intentionally controversial and was insulting the sensibilities of the time. Of course, He was making an allusion to our dependence on his Fatherhood, of our reliance on his provision and grace. Understood this way, in a time that thought little of children, these statements would have been the modern equivalent of saying we were to become like house pets. No one would assume that we should go around barking or licking our behinds. Nor that we should mesmerize ourselves into a lower octave of understanding. No, we would see that we were being told to see ourselves as altogether at the mercy and goodness of our master, so to speak. And if you feel off-put by this comparison, then you get His original point.

It is this reliance upon our Creator that anchors our faith, this bald humility, which in turn elevates the pursuit of knowledge from vanity to nobility. Consider, as an analogy, that an unprivileged child in 33 A.D. would have had no possessions. Were this child to desire to buy his father a gift, he would first need to be given money from his father with which to buy it. Although the father would essentially be purchasing a gift for himself, a very relational exchange would have still occurred. So it is with our faith. Faith is the gift he gives us to be given back to Himself. God the Father is Triune and thus entirely self-fulfilled.

The true reason why faith is given such an exclusive place by the New Testament, so far as the attainment of salvation is concerned, over against love and over against everything else in man...is that faith means receiving something, not doing something or even being something. To say, therefore, that our faith saves us means that we do not save ourselves even in slightest measure, but that God saves us. ––J. Gresham Machen

In this context for understanding faith, being foreign in nature and thus secure in its offering, intellectual inquiry and even doubt are seen not as threats, but as natural extensions of a life of submission and dependence. More simply stated, I am free to ask because freedom is granted me. Doubt, as natural an emotion as anxiety or pleasure, is just another part of ourselves we bring before God, and chances are good that the circumstances of your doubt were placed there by God to begin with. If circumstances suggested, for example, that my spouse had been unfaithful, I would quickly feel a pang of doubt. I would doubt her fidelity, love, and goodness. And it would be unnatural for me not to feel this way. However, being submitted to her, I would bring this doubt before her and give her the chance to prove me wrong. Similarly, God desires to show himself as faithful so that we might praise Him. And here we find ourselves in the paradoxical dance: God exercising His sovereignty upon us so that we might exercise our freedom toward Him.

If we fear to bring every ugly ounce of ourselves before Him, we miss the opportunity to see him glorified and we quash any authentic exchange. We sometimes assume our weak faith will be the source of our own reproof, but, in a wonderful twist of responsibility, Jesus is telling us to be like children precisely so our self-awareness won't stop us from receiving the gift of faith. Lack of faith is not our problem and it never will be; it is our inability to receive. Children aren't good by nature, they simply haven't developed the awareness to know how obnoxious and bratty they are, so they unabashedly run up to their parents to receive their kindness.

Something that had long been lost on me is that doubt, despite its ignominious reputation, serves as a function of faith. Doubt is not the refusal to believe; rather, it is the evidence of our desire and need to believe. Thus, it holds us accountable for seeking after the knowledge of God. Theologian A.W. Pink said that “an unknown God can neither be trusted, served, nor worshiped.” For example, if I were content in my shallow understanding of my wife, all the slobbery kisses and hyper-romantic terms of endearment in the world would not amount to a deep relationship. It is my struggle to understand her that establishes my love and desire. My emotions are engaged and informed by my knowledge of her. And if my notions of who Deborah is are wrong, then my emotions stack up to nothing. God is not interested in some mocked-up pretense of worship and adoration. He is not the God of “fake-it-till-you-make-it.” If you doubt He is good, tell Him you think His goodness smells fishy. I don't just believe He will demonstrate otherwise, I also think He will prefer every expression of honest doubt over every expression of false appreciation.

However, if your view of faith is that it is self-sustained and not something He gave you to begin with, doubt would indeed be a terrifying threat. It would be essential to have a childlike, simplistic faith in order preserve yourself from judgment. You would protect that mustard seed with your life, and any complexity or inconsistency or paradox would have to be given only a passing glance. You would have to wonder every time you approach God whether he would consider your faith appropriate enough in size as to be worthy of Him. Worse, you might lose it altogether. There might be a hole in your pocket you forgot about, a hole just larger than your mustard seed. Or in my case, that submicroscopic particle could float away without me knowing. On top of these efforts, you would have to also ignore that God is the author and perfecter of your faith and that He has placed a seal over your heart. And, in the absence of this knowledge, fear and shame would never be totally off the table.

As a young man struggling to believe God was real and doubting the trustworthiness of recorded scriptures, I felt a deep shame. I still knew God was real––the fact that I was ashamed to tell Him about my doubt was proof that I still believed. It was also proof that I felt God put conditions around His acceptance of me. My proudest moments came when, like a child, I expected God to provide me with belief, and He did so by ridding me of my childish notions of Him. And this came not by emptying my mind and blindly worshiping; it came by filling my mind so that I might have authentic worship.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. ––Paul the Apostle

Afterthought:

One of the greatest revelations of my life (perhaps abundantly obvious to most) has been that God interacts with us intellectually as well as spiritually. And while my faith is not in any theology, but in the person of Jesus Christ, I believe theology is a vital aspect of knowing the person we place our faith in. The Christian culture I was raised in was squeamish about systematic understanding of doctrine, I suspect, as a knee-jerk reaction to lifeless dogma and graceless learning. But truly, the bifurcation of theology and doxology is as needless and potentially dangerous as the notion that science and religion are necessarily inconsistent with one another. What is inconsistent, rather, is the motivation lying beneath the surface of the inquisitor. Am I engaging in science to disprove God or to better understand His creative mind? Likewise, am I engaging in theology to neatly package God and thus reduce my need for faith, or am I seeking understanding on which to build my faith?

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough... People...have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. --Charles Malik

It is said commonly that theology is meant to be done in community. I firmly agree with this sentiment. However, it needs to be unpacked, because I get the sneaking suspicion––with how swift and often this sentiment comes on the heels of the mere whisper of the word theology––that it is a subtle insinuation that this study is generally the practice of stodgy, isolated men. Insomuch as this is what is meant, I disagree. But first I want to emphasize the first imperative of the statement: theology is meant to be done. In other words, a concern for the study of God's character is God's intention for the character of His creation. The second part strikes right at the heart and nature of theology: in community. I believe we live in a culture that cringes at this mode of thinking, in large part, not because of its cold logic, but because we have idolized the individual, subjective experience over the collective Christian experience and the accumulated wisdom of centuries of spiritual learning. To borrow from Catholic vernacular, we don't treasure the idea of the communion of the saints. Why rely on outmoded thinking of those dead and gone, or those present for that matter, when I can perceive truth through experience, prayer, thinking and personal reading of scripture? Quite frankly, because I am a broken vessel.

And when my own understanding and my own ability to muster faith begins to wane, what then? For many, sadly, they simply give up the ghost. Dead end. This, rather than embracing the very communal act of being edified by the theological and philosophical thinking passed down through the generations of Christians who have experienced the same doubts and the same afflictions as you and somehow came out with reinforced faith. So I find it ironic that in our atmosphere of isolated life, our abundance of literature on all things theological is regarded as lifeless, when the reality is that our inability to value dependence on the insight of others is the most lifeless thing I can point toward in our culture. So perhaps for the sake of clarity we should say, rather, that theology is communal in its very marrow, properly understood and engaged. There is no such thing as an isolated study of God, just as a reader is never truly alone.

From personal experience, I can say that good, healthy theology serves like a balm on the wounds of destructive religious thinking. Most of the times I have been frustrated at God or the Christian faith, I had no idea that what I was truly mad at was the broken reasoning that had seeped in through the cracks and fissures of otherwise responsible teaching. In my cry against anti-intellectualism, I am not asking to bring back an age of authoritarian, lifeless religion. I am asking for the mind to be seen as a central player in the acquisition of peace with God.