Believing, Doubting, Trusting

The postmodern age is open to hearing that we all have worldviews—basic assumptions that spool into a narrative about who we are, where we come from, and what we ought to be doing. Whether we come to our worldviews through a kind of cultural osmosis, or whether we stand upon well-articulated premises bolstered by a martial array of philosophy, we are all believers of some sort.

This recognition has proved salutary for Christians concerned to engage believers of other stripes. It is, thankfully, more rare these days to hear the materialist dogmatism that claims to be “rational,” “scientific,” and “objective,” denying any faith commitments or presuppositions.

But this growing critical awareness of our own interpretive frameworks has not had entirely welcome consequences. Sometimes it causes a cloying skepticism, relativism, or compartmentalization in which our beliefs and our lives get out of sync. Over at  Fare Forward , Jake Meador draws on Chesterton and Bunyan to sound a healthy warning against reacting against arrogance by becoming timid about making truth claims at all. A healthy, humble trust in God’s promises transcends that baleful antithesis.

Renowned New York pastor and author Tim Keller bases his apologetic on “doubting your doubts” in  The Reason for God . By recognizing our doubts as derived from alternate worldviews, and examining them to find that they have less explanatory power than the Christian story, we are drawn to know the God of Reason. British man of letters  A.N. Wilson  has spoken of his return to Christianity after abandoning it as a young man: “My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again.” Let us use doubt as a means to find the answers, not to avoid them.