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By Alan Reynolds
IF YOU feel bothered by doubt, I invite you to go ahead and examine your
beliefs. Question the things you have been taught. But don’t stop there. Keep on.
Doubt your doubts. Question them as thoroughly as you have questioned your
faith. I think that in the end, you will find that belief makes more sense than
unbelief.
Too many times, I have had secondary school or university students tell me they
went to a priest or a pastor with questions about their faith, only to be told
they should not question, only believe. But if Jesus Christ is the truth, we
should not feel afraid to doubt what we have been told.
It is, in fact, the only way that false beliefs can be shown to be false, that
bad customs may be replaced by good customs, that ancient idols may be toppled
from their thrones.
People once believed that the earth was flat. But Christopher Columbus said, “I can’t believe that!” and sailed on until he discovered the Americas.
Luther’s protest
Martin Luther was taught to accept the penitential system of the medieval church
and the sale of indulgences as a means of salvation. He said, “I can’t believe that!” and tacked his ‘protest’ to the door of the parish church of Wittenberg – thus beginning the Protestant Reformation.
People once wondered whether ships might cross the Atlantic Ocean powered solely
by steam engines. Someone wrote a book showing it was quite impractical, but
one person exclaimed, “I don’t believe it!” – and the first boat to cross the Atlantic by steam carried a copy of that same
book.
Jesus of Nazareth, in this sense, was one of the greatest of doubters. The Jewish people considered the Samaritans to be an ignoble and inferior people
with whom proper Jews should have no dealings. Jesus refused to judge all the
people of Samaria by that notion, and told the story of a good Samaritan who
was a better person than either a priest or a lawyer.
He was taught that pleasing God meant keeping every letter of the Law. “I don’t believe it!” he said, and taught that healing the sick was allowed on the Sabbath, and
justice and mercy were more important than tithing herbs.
Progress, the development of truth, is built upon such doubters – the questioners who stop to think and to inquire.
Isn’t doubt necessary to real faith? We don’t attain real faith through sticking our head in the sand. Real faith is not
something we’re born with, or inherit from our parents. We must find it for ourselves. A
creed is the expression of someone else’s faith, not ours. It is something outside ourselves. It is not ours until we
test it, question it, doubt it, and wrestle with it as Jacob wrestled with the
stranger in Genesis 32:22.
Only by looking our doubts in the eye will we come to a faith that is ours,
strong and secure. Then we may come to understand, believe, and cherish it for
ourselves. We can’t claim faith for our own until we have taken the risk, like Peter, of stepping
out of the boat onto the water (Matthew 14:28).
Clearing God out
When I started college, I told my mother I was going to clear God out of the
universe and begin all over.
But by disbelieving in God, I did not escape belief. I ran headlong into belief
in atheism, materialism, into faith that the ultimate, creative factors in the
universe are physical particles operating blindly without mind behind them, or
purpose in them. Talk about credulity!
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I could not swallow the Christian faith unquestioningly; I had to fight for it. And finally, it became mine. Every doubt raised against it, every question asked about it, I have faced
often with agony of mind. I am not afraid of them.
Now I understand what another Christian once said: “Who never doubted, never half believed.” It’s hard, sometimes, to believe in God, but it’s harder to believe in nothing.
Can you settle comfortably into disbelief?
Just when all seems settled, there comes the glory of a sunset, the mystery a
microscope reveals, the birth of your baby, the death of a friend, the wonder
of someone who loves you – and our unbelief is shaken to the core.
Opposite of faith
The opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear. If faith is blind acceptance of
what we have been taught or told, mere assent to intellectual propositions,
then faith is dangerous. But if faith is trust in the goodness of God and the
grace of Jesus Christ, then its opposite is lack of trust – fear, anxiety.
This is what ‘doubt’ originally meant in the New Testament – that existential anxiety which comes from lack of trust in the rightness of
things, lack of confidence in the ultimate victory of righteousness, lack of
trust in the goodness of God.
It is fear of which we need to be afraid. Fear is the enemy of our age,
attacking our will, our heart, our intellect, and making us an impotent
culture, unable to come to terms with our problems, in spite of our power and
all our wealth.
It is fear that seems to drive us to our own destruction, in spite of ourselves.
We’re afraid to feed the hungry, lest we might have to sacrifice too much
ourselves. We’re afraid to deal with environmental problems, because they might cost too much.
We’re afraid to embrace disarmament because someone else might have a gun. We’re afraid to search for truth, lest we should find that truth does not exist.
There are so many good and intelligent people in our culture who have rejected
Christian faith. Simply because they couldn’t believe the world was created in seven days or that Jesus turned water into
wine, they have rejected the whole of the gospel. Yet they have never
questioned the alternatives, never begun to doubt their doubts.
So go ahead. Question your beliefs. Attack what you were taught in Sunday School
or what you hear from TV evangelists – but then follow through to the logical conclusion. Question your questions,
question your doubts, and doubt the alternatives. I daresay you may find the
alternatives to faith more difficult to hold than faith itself.
As Tennyson wrote: “There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Alan Reynolds is a Richmond-based author and retired United Church pastor. This
piece is from A Troubled Faith ( Word Alive) .
September 2009
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