It is the right thing to do. Listening to the questions and doubts of those who are struggling with belief in God, the nature of scripture, doctrine or how to think about the subject matter of the culture wars. No one truly begrudges the spiritual journey of another. But seriously, I think we’ve taken the principle of listening way to far. Have you ever heard a wife explain about relating to her husband that when she wants to share (that means ‘talk’ but it might mean ‘rant’), she just wants him to listen and not offer any solutions? I get it that everyone wants to be listened to because that’s a part of relating one to another, but this isn’t a biblical model of accountability. If the things we say or the questions we ponder aloud solicit a response, our responsibility–ironically–is to listen. Our questions and doubts should be with a goal in mind–the locating of truth and wisdom. But when we’re so focused on the journey itself, even to the point of making an idol out of our questions and doubts, then we’ve lost sight of Christ and made ourselves the focus of the journey.
Doubt seems to be the pervasive doctrine of the young “evangelicals,” many who self-identify as emergent. As appropriated by this group, doubt is probably better described as a virtue, because to have doubt means not having answers, and not having answers means not being right (or wrong). By not being right about anything means we can continue to converse about the questions and develop relationships around the common ally of curiosity. Doubt should be a welcome guest in the life of faith, but doubt should not be a permanent disposition.
I Doubt, Therefore I Am
Over the weekend, Jay Bakker (son of Jim and the late Tammy Faye Bakker & gay-affirming pastor) appeared on CNN discussing the latest Pew Research report on belief in God. According to their 2012 findings, 68% of Millennials indicate they never doubt the existence of God while only 5 years ago that number was 76%.
Early in the interview, host Don Lemon posed the challenge “If God exists, prove it.” The point of the question was to elevate the reasonableness of doubt because if God can not be empirically verified then unbelief or doubt is rational. The question felt like someone knocked the wind out of me. Certainly Lemon wasn’t suggesting that our knowledge of God starts with us? Skepticism is not the result of investigation but the ultimate assumption, so its no surprise special revelation serves as no answer to the dilemma of knowledge of God. No wonder so much doubt prevails among the Millennial age group.
After catching my breath, Lemon continued his conversation with Jay Bakker, venturing into some areas even Lemon could not avoid describing as subversive. Bakker stated that even on the cross, Jesus doubted–”Christ was an atheist.”
I lost my capacity to breathe again. God didn’t believe in God (as Bakker put it). And this is based on what?
“Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46 ESV)
In paying the penalty for our sin, Jesus had to be be separated from the favor of and fellowship with the Father that was eternally his. In quoting Ps. 22:1 Jesus probably had in mind the remaining passages of the psalm which moves on to a cry of victory. He may have quoted a question, but the doubt and unbelief attributed to Christ is nonexistent as he expresses belief quite clearly with the words “my God.” He knows why he must die–the ultimate purpose of the incarnation. In his cries he is not expressing confusion over the purposes of God the Father, but a message to those who are watching, that being forsaken was for the salvation of others. We can’t wrap our mind around this fully, what it was like for God the Son to experience a form of separation from God the Father, but to justify human doubt and unbelief on the basis of theistic-atheism is nothing short of tragic.
Bakker quoted Paul Tillich in the interview, asserting that doubt is not the opposite of faith but an element of it–a topic I will take up in a forthcoming post. Certainly doubt is a part of our journey in the faith and is something that each of us experience to varying degrees. But let’s not ordain doubt as the shepherd of our thoughts and allow it to lead us away from the possibility of knowing the God who has made himself plainly knowable. We need to challenge the distortion that somehow doubt is a neutral assessment. Doubt is not always innocent. It is often the starting point intended to challenge the truths that have already been revealed and redefine the gospel that fails the expectations of doubt.
June 18th, 2012 | 5:01 pm | #1
“Doubt is not always innocent. It is often the starting point intended to challenge the truths that have already been revealed and redefine the gospel that fails the expectations of doubt.”
Satan knows how to manipulate doubt into a weapon for use against God.
That being said, I appreciate conservative young evangelicals fighting the good fight against liberal young “evangelicals.”
June 19th, 2012 | 4:18 am | #2
If the model of doubt you address is the one people are truly holding up, I then agree with you in how problematic it is. No one can be in a consistent state of doubt. As I’ve mentioned in previous comment threads, the Cartesian self isn’t a thing; no one can constantly doubt the things s/he believes. You couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if this was the case, let alone have genuine theological discussion.
But, speaking as a “Millenial,” and someone who does have a belief in God, I think there is a value to listening in a culture that still prides enlightenment rationalism in harmful ways. I haven’t doubted God’s existence in my life, but I by no means am certain of who he is in his entirety. I align more with the Eastern church on this one, as I see mystery an essential value to Christianity. One of the harms of the Great Schism was the split in philosophies in East and West; the West adopted systematic, Aristotelian logic driven by certitude, as evidenced by thinkers like Aquinas. The Eastern church, however, kept mystery as a focal point of theology. The great Eastern thinker Bonaventure held that the truths of the faith are found in the “concidence of opposites,” or the paradoxes of belief. I don’t buy that wholesale (it fails the same test that the Golden Mean of the ancient Greeks does), but I think it speaks a valuable truth about the faith. Anyone who thinks the Triune God is “clear” or “entirely understandable” would have to be absolutely mad.
So I think, then, your discussion of “listening” helps us to put the term in a better light. Listening doesn’t mean throwing out all presuppositions and surrendering oneself to the speaker; listening means a willingness to engage in ideas, and not seeing the speaker as an enemy. When I hear someone like Sam Harris speak against Christianity, I don’t think, “Well, I’m not going to listen to him, because he’s on the other side.” Nor do I think, “Well, in order to really listen, I need to forget about God.” Both are wrongheaded ways of going about intellectual interaction. It’s often the case that people we disagree with actually share a whole lot with us than we think. It’s definitely the case with New Atheism and a lot of Christian thought; the modes of philosophy are near identical at times.
So I think you’re right, Sarah, that doubt shouldn’t be a state of existence. We may doubt a lot of things at a given time, but there are always those beliefs we have that we can never escape.
However, I think an equal danger here could be the opposite of doubt: absolute certitude. The C.S. Lewis scholar Gary Tandy put it well here:
I don’t know if I’d say the opposite of faith is certainty, but the idea the quotation is getting at is key. To think we could ever have all the answers to Christianity is to err, and to overestimate our knowledge and God’s mystery.
June 19th, 2012 | 10:23 am | #3
Christ once said, “Happy are those who believe, but have not seen.”
Doubt is part of our Faith. But, raising doubt to a virtue is nothing more than moral preening. For sixty years our society has celebrated the “doubter”. He is a more authentic human type. His depth of soul, his inner despair gives him a dignity that the simple “believer” does not hold. To doubt is to suffer. It’s become chic to doubt. The doubter wears his exitensial despair with pride.
If one reads the Gospels carefully, he will realize that even those who were with Christ for years doubted who He really was. Even after His Ressurection, those who witnessed His works, continued to doubt. Judas himself went as far as to betray Him. We all assume that if Christ would just show us physcially His wonders than all doubts would melt away. If it was only so. Both the New and Old Testaments are filled with people who saw but still failed to believe. Seen in this light, “doubt” takes on a different meaning. We can only assume that we also would fail to act in “Faith” even if Christ appeared before our eyes and performed miracles. There would be the exceptions. But those exceptions are made possible through Christ’s Grace. And those given such graces usually had great trials (almost all of the Apostles and early Popes were martyred).
Mother Teresea spent her entire apostolate in spiritual darkness. Her Faith wasn’t predicated upon doubt, or proofs of the physical or mystical manisfestations of Christ’s existence. Yet, for 5 decades she hid her spiritual suffering while she performed incrediable works of mercy. It wasn’t that she didn’t doubt or even despiar; but, she didn’t make such things the focus of her religious faith.
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