Doubt

Gregg’s Reflection

Until I was baptized at age 28 by a Lutheran Charismatic Pastor named Vernon Luckey, I had spent my entire life in doubt. I grew up in Atlanta, deep in the Bible Belt. We went to church a bit, but from an early age, I wondered why those people who dressed up so nice on Sunday, did not seem so nice the rest of the week. In the South, just because we are nice to you doesn’t mean we like you.

Later in life, I found out I am an Enneagram 8, the challenger. So it was my nature to question, to challenge. In fact, when I texted a pastor I coach, inviting him to sign up for regular posts from the site, he said, “Gregg, I don’t need your prophetic voice haunting me anymore than it already does.”

Coming to faith did not stop my doubt. We Lutherans are invited to question and study for ourselves, not to blindly follow anything. As I read the saints and mystics, I find that doubt can be a very good thing. Read on and see why.

Scripture

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. Joshua 1:9

When you experience trouble, you have two options. You can let doubt, fear and worry overtake you, or you can call upon the Lord. God has promised that if you call upon Him, He will deliver you. Psalm 50:15

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Isaiah 41

They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took Peter, James and Johnalong with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” he said to them. Mark 14:32-34

My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me? Mark 15:34

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” John 20:24-25

If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. James 1:5-6

Ancient Writings

It will contribute towards one's object, who wishes to acquire a facility in the gaining of knowledge, to doubt judiciously.

Aristotle

Our doubts are traitors, 
and make us lose the good we oft might win, 
by fearing to attempt.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.

Voltaire

Modern Writings

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.

Alfred Tennyson

Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

In my mind, one of the markers of an evolving faith is an ability to integrate doubt—to hold the tension between what we’ve been taught and what we’ve come to know as true. When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards, but is a necessary condition for any movement forward.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo, 6/2/21

Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me this not to be cruel but because they themselves had been taught the same thing. Doubt chipped away at those beliefs, one agonizing blow at a time, revealing that what actually mattered wasn’t the point of beliefs but the clear window of faith, faith as a life orientation, faith as a framework of values and spirituality, faith as a commitment to live into a deep vision of what life can be, faith as a way of life, faith expressing itself in love.

Looking back, I now see that underneath arguments about what I believed to be true factually, something deeper and truer was happening actually. What mattered most was not that I believed the stories in a factual sense, but that I believed in the meaning they carried so I could act upon that meaning and embody it in my life, to let that meaning breathe in me, animate me, fill me. . . . Whether I considered the stories factually accurate was never the point; what actually mattered all along was whether I lived a life pregnant with the meaning those stories contained. To my surprise, when I was given permission to doubt the factuality of my beliefs, I discovered their actual life-giving purpose. . . .

Doubt need not be the death of faith. It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world.

Brian McLaren, Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It, p. 206, 207, 212

Doubt is the mother of convictio

The fact is that all the great spiritual models of the ages before us found themselves, at one point or another, plunged into doubt, into darkness, into the certainty of uncertainty: Augustine, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, John the Baptist, Thomas, Peter, one after another of them all wondered, and wavered, and believed beyond belief.
 
Surely, then, doubt is something to be grateful for, something about which to sing an alleluia. Unlike answers that presume the static nature of God and the spiritual life, doubt stretches us beyond ourselves to the guidance of a God whose face is not always in books.
 
Doubt is what leaves us open to truth, wherever it is, however difficult it may be to accept. But most of all, doubt requires us to reconfirm everything we’ve ever been made to believe is unassailable. Without doubt, life would simply be a series of packaged assumptions, none of them tested, none of them sure, and all of them belonging not to us, but to someone else whose truth we have made our own.

The problem with accepting truth as it comes to us rather than truth as we divine it for ourselves is that it’s not worth dying for—and we don’t. It becomes a patina of ideas inside of which we live our lives without passion, without care. This kind of faith happens around us but not in us—we go through the motions. The first crack in the edifice and we’re gone. The first chink in the wall of the castle keep and we’re off to less demanding fields.
 
Doubt, on the other hand, is the mother of conviction. Once we have pursued our doubts to the dust, we forge a stronger, not a weaker, belief system. These truths are true, we know, because they are now true for us rather than simply for someone else. To suppress doubt, then, to discourage thinking, to try to stop a person from questioning the unquestionable is simply to make them more and more susceptible to the cynical, more unaccepting of naive belief.

It is that doubt is the beginning of real faith.

Uncommon Gratitude by Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams

The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott