Doubt

[H]ave mercy on those who doubt;” - Jude 22

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Legitimate doubt is a difficult and oftentimes necessary process of struggle. It’s not unlike the strain a climber has to put himself through just to achieve a firmer handhold on the rock face he’s attempting to scale: it causes you to stop, reassess, and question why you are where you are so that you can put yourself in a better position to move forward. But it is not a restful stopping. It is a taxing, frustrating, and oftentimes exhausting situation. There is a lot of exertion without a lot of movement. The hope, though, is that the new handhold allows you to continue the climb with more confidence than your previous position provided.

But, like so many legitimate things in life, doubt has its illegitimate doppelgänger, as well. The imitative version that cloaks itself in legitimacy so as to escape the rigors of climbing the rock face at all. This is doubt as an excuse, an escape hatch, a bail out on responsibility and difficulty. 

Legitimate doubt locates the struggle within ourselves: God has said something that we find our minds simply incapable of processing. Illegitimate doubt is fueled by the non-belief of the outside world and our desire to conform to it. It’s not that we don’t understand what has been said or even why God might say it, but we love the idea of sitting at the cool kid’s table more than we do being faithful to our Lord. 

So doubt has its place - if it’s legitimate. To everything there are seasons, even wrestling with God. But make no mistake: doubt is not a virtue. It is not noble. It is not mature. It is simply a process of questioning and repositioning. And just because you go through a season of doubt does not mean that you are guaranteed to come out better on the other side. What’s more is that we can easily confuse our doubting of an institution (like a church) or a tradition or a denomination with the doubting of God. So we wind up doing battle over secondary or tertiary issues while thinking they represent the immutable core of Christianity itself. To put it simply, we can easily throw babies out with the bathwater. 

If you would doubt God (which may be legitimate), then doubt your doubts, as well (which is always legitimate.) We doubt because we are “of the flesh, sold under sin,” (Romans 7:14) and because, “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” (I John 5:19). We are less than we ought to be and the deceptions and glamours of the world are intense and powerful. God knows this and His love makes allowance for it. We are called to walk by faith and not by sight, after all (II Corinthians 5:7). But doubt is not innately virtuous because, “[God’s] invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made,” (Romans 1:20) and “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) It is not that God cannot be seen, but that we refuse to honestly interpret the mountains of evidence that stand before us wherever we look. 

So wherever your doubts may take you, go there without fear. Explore the hills and valleys of creationism, textual criticism, biblical inerrancy, Christian history, comparative religion and theology. 

But be honest with yourself while you do it. Are you looking for a way out of your rightful obligations or are you sincerely searching for answers to the kinds of questions that have been keeping men up at night throughout the centuries? God is patient and kind to those who desire to find Him. “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7) But do not play games with the God of the universe or your eternal soul. You will not win. 

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