Doubt is Not a Friend to Christian Faith

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A popular song by the band Sidewalk Prophets explores the experience of two characters who find themselves feeling hidden and in need of hope. The song is titled “Save My Life,” and in the second verse we hear the voice of one of those characters: “I’m the pastor at your church/ For all these years you’ve listened to my words/ You think I know all the answers/ But I’ve got doubts and questions too/ Behind this smile I’m really just like you/ Afraid and tired and insecure.”

When someone is experiencing feelings like this, it is obvious that we should respond with compassion and offer the words of hope that are so desperately needed. Thankfully, the refrain of the song makes it very clear that the songwriters recognize that. But there is something else that the song seems to get exactly right. The pastor’s state of mind is depicted as a scene of desperation, and the implication is that something needs to change very quickly. It is not good for this person to continue in a state of disconnect between his public persona and his private doubts. What is needed, the song suggests, is to reconnect with the reality of hope in God’s capacity to save.

I have heard this song many times in the past, but it struck me in a fresh way recently when it came on the radio in my car. What caught my attention was how rare this message seems nowadays, even if it may have been taken as fairly obvious in the past. It is becoming more and more common in Christian circles not only to acknowledge the reality of doubt but actively to  celebrate it. Not only is doubt seen as something that happens and that needs to be addressed; it is seen as a friend to Christian faith. And I want to suggest that with this shift a line is being crossed into treacherous spiritual terrain.

I want to be clear from the outset that I am not advocating intellectual dishonesty or the suppression of hard questions—quite the contrary. I fully acknowledge that thoughtful and prayerful exploration of questions can deepen and mature one’s faith. The danger I want to call attention to is a tendency to see an ongoing state of doubt as spiritually healthy. We see this tendency in calls to embrace doubt itself as a good, such as the recent blogger who put the matter bluntly: “Let me lower your expectations right from the start. It’s unlikely you’ll have all your questions answered, and your doubts will not be eradicated. And that’s OK.” Another recent article suggests that we should “make doubt and questioning a part of the church’s culture,” even to the extent of seeing doubt as a spiritual discipline.

The problem with making peace with a condition of doubt stems from the kind of faith Christianity is at its core. Christianity emerges from the self-disclosure of God. God has reached out to us in our spiritual blindness to show us who He is. This process of divine revelation happened “in many and various ways by the prophets,” as Hebrews 1:1 reminds us, but most directly God “has spoken to us by a Son.” Furthermore, God has not only spoken in Jesus but has also acted decisively in Jesus for our salvation. Christianity emerges out of the shared conviction that God has done something that makes all the difference for the world. And God has called the church into being, as a community under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to live out and proclaim the good news embodied in that divine revelation. In that light, an ongoing posture of doubt undermines the very calling of the community of faith. And to deny our ability to know what God has revealed is to suggest that God cannot get through to us. 

All of that said, there are any number of experiences that can threaten one’s confidence in the shared convictions of the Christian faith. A college student takes a class on world religions and begins to ask carefully for the first time why the Christian account of divine revelation (as opposed to, say, that of Islam) is to be trusted. Someone is scolded for her faith because, her accuser insists, Christianity has caused great harm in human history. Another struggles earnestly to reconcile his belief in a loving, all-powerful God with his pain and grief in the midst of a tragedy. How can Christians address these emerging questions in a way that matures faith and draws us closer to God?

It must be said clearly that it is not wrong to feel the weight of these questions. I think there is a helpful comparison here to be made with temptation. A person cannot help feeling temptation, but we are responsible for how we respond to that temptation. In a similar way, we cannot always control the questions that burden our hearts and minds. But how we deal with those questions makes all the difference in the impact they will have on our faith. To that end, I want to offer three suggestions for how a Christian might respond to a lurking sense of doubt.

First, it is important to explore troubling questions from a posture of commitment. We always stand somewhere as we critically examine the beliefs we hold on any subject. It is not only possible to maintain our commitment to Christian faith as we search for answers to our questions; it is vital that we do so. This is addressed in one of the great works ever written on faith and doubt, St. John Henry Newman’s An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. Newman draws a distinction in that book between what he calls investigation and inquiry. For Newman, investigation involves careful reasoning about the claims of the Christian faith from a posture of assent to those claims. In a season of investigation, one continues to pray, to worship, and to trust that truth has been revealed to us by God as one works through those claims. There is an echo here of St. Anselm’s language of “faith seeking understanding,” the idea that we hold faith even as we are moved by our love of God to explore thoughtfully the nature of that faith.

This is contrasted with inquiry, as Newman calls it, in which a person insists on standing in a neutral position while examining questions about the faith. An inquirer is not yet willing to commit to or stand within the worshiping community until these questions are resolved. Now I don’t think that too much hangs on the actual terminology Newman uses here; to my mind the terms could be reversed without much confusion. But the idea at the heart of this distinction is critically important. For someone who has made a commitment of faith, that commitment does not need to be suspended to take on serious questions. In fact, withdrawing one’s participation in the community of faith during seasons of doubt can distance one from the very resources that can most help.

Second, it is important for us to be honest about the moral dynamics that can be in play when doubt begins to lurk. Sometimes it is tempting to entertain doubt precisely at those moments when we are feeling the difficulty of obedience to God’s commands. This is certainly not always the case when doubts arise. But there are times when intellectual questions can become an excuse for moral permissiveness. Newman again recognized this dynamic in Grammar of Assent, noting “the influence of moral motives in hindering assent to conclusions which are logically unimpeachable.” In other words, a person may be otherwise convinced of the truth claims of the Christian faith but unwilling to accept the change in behavior that faith would require. In such times it is important to remember that the ground of God’s commands is God’s love for us. And to love means to will the good of the other. So one way in which God’s love is expressed to us is in giving us commands that lead us in a good and healthy direction. Using a smokescreen of intellectual sophistication to avoid making changes that we just don’t want to make can only hurt us in the long run.

Third, we need to remember that the purpose of questions is to lead us to answers. God has made us in such a way that we long for the truth. In this respect, our tendency to ask questions is good; it is a way of exercising a God-given inclination. But that inclination is designed to lead us somewhere. As a character in C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce memorably put it, “thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.” If we could never arrive at answers to our deepest questions, it would be much like living in a perpetual state of unsatisfied thirst. It is understandable, of course, that people react against church environments that default to simplistic or dismissive answers to complex questions. But it is another thing altogether to suggest that complex questions do not have answers that we can know. For a faith that is rooted in God’s self-disclosure, rejecting what God has revealed undermines our natural desire for truth.

To be sure, there are some things that are not given for us to know in this life. There are some questions that we may wish to have answered, such as the day of Christ’s return, that are known only to God. Furthermore, there is a proper place for mystery—rightly understood—in Christian thought. The Christian tradition has long acknowledged that some matters are above reason but not contrary to reason, such as some of the intricacies of the relations among the Persons of the Trinity. But these cautions are given precisely because there are substantial claims that Christianity makes without equivocation. To abandon these claims is to deny what God has made known to us. 

By contrast, the New Testament is brimming with a proper confidence; a conviction that God has given the world the answer it has long awaited. The Gospel of John begins with the confident assertion that the Son has made God known to us (1:18). The letter of 1 John makes it clear that the church’s testimony flows from what God revealed in the incarnation: 

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—what we have seen and heard we also declare to you so that you also may have fellowship with us, and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ (1:1-3).

In Acts we see the apostles setting out, at Jesus’ command, to serve as Jesus’ witnesses to the very ends of the earth. And when Paul arrives in Athens, he claims to announce the truth to the Athenians about the God they have worshiped as unknown (Acts 17:23). 

We are heirs of that same community of witnesses. We are called to declare, in the power of the Holy Spirit, what we have seen and heard in God’s self-revelation in Jesus. When questions arise that threaten to undermine that witness, let us resolve not to live in perpetual uncertainty. Rather, let us address them directly and prayerfully in the company of the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. Let us go deeper with our hearts and minds into the riches of the Christian tradition. And may we know and proclaim the hope offered in Jesus, the divine Word made known to us. Our calling is to declare and live out the truth that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14).

Doug Koskela is Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington. He is an ordained Elder in the Reach Conference of the Free Methodist Church and serves on the Firebrand Editorial Board.