The famous preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick told of the time a young man came into his office and announced with satisfaction, “I don’t believe in God.” Fosdick without batting an eye replied, “Tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in. Maybe I don’t believe in that kind of God either.” There are many understandings of God in the world today—and in the church for that matter. Some understandings are helpful, some are harmful, and some are idolatrous. As a child I remember being told by a lot of church people, including my parents, to never “take the name of the Lord in vain.” What they meant was that I should never “cuss” and in particular I should never put the word “God” before the word “damn.” They were of course referring to one of the Ten Commandments. I later learned that cussing had nothing to do with taking the Lord’s name in vain. We are taking the name of the Lord in vain when we (as Christians) represent God in ways that are contrary to the character, life, and teachings of Jesus. More often than we want to admit, the word “God” has been used and manipulated to justify much violence, greed, prejudice, and arrogance in our world. And when God is so misused, it’s no wonder that many people embrace atheism or agnosticism. I have more respect for atheists who reject “God” for the right reasons than I have for those in the church who believe in “God” for the wrong reasons. (But that’s the subject of another sermon.)
Polls over the last two decades pose quite a challenge for churches in the United States. According to these polls, a staggering number of Americans, especially those under the age of forty, avoid any associations with a church because they are convinced that they will never find one in which they can explore their religious doubts. Many say they could see themselves becoming an active member in the future while others say they would be willing to come back into the Christian fellowship IF they could find a pastor or church friends with whom they could easily and openly discuss their religious doubts. (It occurs to me that these polls have massive implications for church growth!)
Unfortunately, the church in the minds and experiences of many is the last place they feel they can come and share their religious doubts—or much of anything else of consequence for that matter. And part of the reason for the failure of churches at this point is our assumption that doubt is the opposite of faith. If we are saved by grace through faith and if doubt is the opposite of faith, then naturally we are reluctant to express and explore our doubts within a Christian fellowship. Too many in the church fear that if they reveal their doubts, they can become first-class candidates for hell and through their doubts, they can bring down (literally) others with them.
But what if doubt is not the opposite of faith? What if doubt is part of the process of developing a genuine, honest, and growing faith? The word “faith” in the Bible almost always means “trust.” And like most of the primary concepts of biblical religion (concepts like love, grace, compassion, forgiveness, and mercy) trust has to do with a relationship. And what is involved in trusting, say, a spouse, a parent, a child, or a friend? Risk and commitment. When we say to another, “I trust you,” we are confessing that we are willing to go beyond what we know for sure about the other person. We are willing to take risks in our decisions and commitments. And although trust may deepen over the years so that we feel the risk diminishes, the trust we offer must be renewed regularly. Why? Because life is an ongoing process. Today is different from yesterday, and tomorrow will be different from today. New occasions, new challenges, new opportunities, and new crises all require that trust be offered over and over again in all our relationships. In our kind of world, trust is continually put to the test.
And that is also true of our relationship with God. IF we are in a close, loving, trusting relationship with God and IF we are going to embrace life in all of its challenge and potential, then we shall find ourselves repeatedly in circumstances where we shall have to renew our trust in God. We all face challenges, difficulties, pain, sorrows, and decisions in life. Life is not “a bowl of cherries.” And as we face life as it is, we must struggle with our faith if it is genuine. And that struggle entails doubt. Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and author wrote, “At least doubts prove that you are in touch with reality, with things that threaten faith as well as with things that nourish it. If we are not in touch with reality, then our faith is blind and not worth much.”
Part of the function of doubt is to keep us in touch with reality. And for faith to be genuine and redemptive, it must be in dialogue with life as it is. About forty years ago one of my students brought me a book to read which changed my life. The title of the book was Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ron Sider. Sider is a conservative Evangelical, and I’m sure he and I would disagree on a lot in theology. But Sider is the one who exposed for me the disgrace and tragedy of world hunger. I was so shaken by what he wrote that I checked many of his footnotes and drove the librarian nearly insane borrowing books and articles through interlibrary loan to verify what Sider had written. I discovered that world hunger is even worse than Sider claimed. This discovery challenged my view of God, Christianity, humanity, ethics, and perhaps most painful of all my goals in life. My wife Susan and I took a long time working through all the doubts and implications surrounding the tragedy of world hunger and how it questioned our faith, our lifestyle, and the presence, justice, and compassion of God.
But there is another role doubt plays. Doubt reminds us of the risk of faith. The Bible is honest about the doubting of the faithful. We often speak of the “patience of Job.” But the Job of the Old Testament was not really a patient man. Most of the book of Job (the poetry section) deals with Job’s struggles with God. He comes to doubt God in a most radical way. As our text for today demonstrates, he feels he has been betrayed, abandoned, and abused. What is most interesting about this fascinating book is that it is Job, not his never-questioning friends, who comes to a face-to-face, redemptive encounter with the Living God. Without his doubts, he would never have seen the real God behind the idolatrous masks erected by safe, status quo religion. He moved through his doubts to genuine faith/trust, but he could never have reached that point in his pilgrimage without the honest exploration of his doubts.
And what you find in Job is not an isolated occurrence in the Bible. Voicing our struggles and doubts is intimately bound up in the life of faith. Such honesty and prayer are at the very core of the Psalms, the heart of Israel’s worship. There are more laments in the book of Psalms than any other type of psalm. Laments express an excruciating sense of abandonment, suffering, and perplexity. In these laments the psalmist asks “Why am I suffering?” and more importantly “Where is God?” in the midst of the pain and turmoil. One is hard put to find a single lament in most hymnals today. Either we no longer have these doubts and feel such pain and abandonment, or we are not as honest as those people of faith were over two thousand years ago.
And then there is our Lord. There have been many slick attempts, motivated by doctrinal rigidity, to neutralize Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Perhaps it’s time for the church to be honest and say what seems so apparent with these words. In the agony of death, our Lord had his fear and doubts, as much on Cavalry as he did in the Garden of Gethsemane. You see, faith/trust in God is not an easy thing. As the Canadian theologian Douglas J. Hall reminds us, “Who could take it seriously in our kind of world if it were?”
So is there a role for doubt in the life of faith? It’s time for the church to answer that question loud and clear with a resounding “YES!” We would all like to walk by sight in this world. I know I would, but sight is not what faith is all about. In fact, the Apostle Paul says that now we see dimly as through a mirror. (Mirrors at that time were made of metal. What one saw in the reflection of a metal like brass was distorted and lacking in detail.) At best we see pale outlines, smudges, intimations of what might be. But we would rather not live by such faith. And that’s why we are so threatened by doubt. We become defensive and frightened when our own doubts and those of others are brought out in the open. That reminds me of notes made by a preacher in the margin of his sermon: “Point weak, holler louder.” We think by hollering louder, beating the drums of brittle theology which allows no room for doubt, or just not dealing with our doubts by pretending they don’t exist, we have scared that bogeyman away.
But once doubt has surfaced, it will never go away, even if we never voice it. That doubt will eat us alive, burrowing deeper and deeper into our psyches. It will be the one demon we fear the most, haunting us in the most private chambers of our souls. Wouldn’t it be better to be honest with God and each other about our doubts? To bring them out into the open and to discover their legitimate and vital role in the life of faith? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to see our doubts as ways of achieving or receiving a deeper understanding of God, our world, and ourselves?
If God is more than any or all of us together can ever completely understand and experience, we should see that all our theologies are at best transitional. Theology is all human-made (and with very few exceptions, until the last seventy years, manmade—as in male dominated and thus excluding half of the human race). Theology is a human attempt to understand God. And since God is more than we shall ever totally understand, doesn’t it make sense to admit that we should grow in our theology? If we still believe exactly today as we did twenty years ago, one of two things has happened: either we have comprehended all there is to know and all we need to learn and experience about God, or we have stopped growing and have settled for a static and what will eventually become an irrelevant faith. Too often our rigid concepts become idols as real and harmful as any pagan statue worshiped in the ancient world.
I don’t know where I first heard the following statement, but I’ve come to appreciate its wisdom and truth: “god” must die so God can live. The “god” in that statement is our imperfect perception of the infinite Deity who created this universe and who transcends and incorporates everything. That imperfect perception must give way to a greater understanding and experience. And once we allow that transition to occur, like Job we will come closer to a face-to-face, redemptive encounter with the Living God. Of course, should we choose to embrace such a vibrant and dynamic faith, we will have our times of uncertainty and struggle. Like a trapeze artist who must let go of one bar before being able to grab the next one, we all feel vulnerable when we are between the bars. But I would imagine that is exactly what every person who has grown in faith has felt at one time or another.
One concern Christians may express if we examine our religious doubts so openly and honestly is that we may find ourselves beginning to reject what is currently precious to us in our faith. I understand and have experienced that fear. But if all truth comes from God and is indivisible (and if Jesus is the “way, the TRUTH, and the life”), then we should have no fear of truth wherever we find it. We see such fear in Archie Bunker’s definition of faith to Meathead (for those old enough to remember “All in the Family”). Archie said, “Faith is believing what no one his right mind would ever believe.” Genuine faith and trust does not require Christians (or those of other faiths) to have a frontal lobotomy to “believe” in God. Archie’s faith is DOA—dead on arrival. It will never allow him to trust God at a deep level. How can you trust a god who dismisses truth and reason? God does not fear the truth, and neither should those who trust God. We have an obligation to be discerning in our search for truth, and we should never confuse being open-minded with being empty-headed or gullible. But running or hiding from truth exposes a religion based on suspicion and fear. And who wants that kind of faith? If the polls are correct, apparently a lot of young people see through the charade too many Christians call faith, and they have too much sense to fall for such a travesty.
I think it’s time for the church to admit that the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is disobedience, resignation, apathy, and playing it safe. If faith is betting our lives that God is as Jesus said and revealed, then faith can never play it safe. And whenever, like Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Peter and Mary Magdalene, Paul and Phoebe, we choose not to play it safe but to walk by faith, doubt will always be there—it will be there to play its crucial role in our growing discipleship and our deepening trust in the Lord.
