Can I Be A Christian and Still Have Doubts?
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Faith. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
Before we begin, there is something to keep in mind: Many spiritual seekers have legitimate questions concerning Christianity and need to pursue answers that will satisfy their heart and soul, but some seekers get to the point where they are subconsciously raising smoke screens to mask their deep-seated motivations for rejecting the faith. They may think they’re hung up over an objection to some part of Christianity, when the reality is that they’re actually just casting around for some excuse - any excuse - not to take Jesus more seriously.
For many Christians, merely having doubts of any kind can be scary. They wonder whether their questions disqualify them from being a follower of Christ. They feel insecure because they’re not sure whether it’s okay to express uncertainty about God, Jesus or the Bible. So they keep their questions to themselves, and inside, unanswered, they grow and fester until they eventually succeed in choking out their faith. Os Guinness said, “The shame is not that people have doubts, but that they are ashamed of them.”
Yet for many more Christians, they believe having doubts isn’t evidence of the absence of faith, but instead consider them to be the very essence of faith itself. Andre Resner said, “The struggle with God is not lack of faith. It is faith!”
Parents play a significant role in shaping a child’s view of God. One study showed that most of history’s most famous atheists had a strained relationship with their father or their dad died early or abandoned them at a young age, thus making it difficult for them to believe in a heavenly father.
Not all doubt is created equal. There are different species of doubt. There are those who we’d call “congenital doubters” - someone who’s always asking, “What if?”
Some doubters are rebellious, even though they may not identify themselves that way. They have the attitude, “I’m not going to let somebody run my life or do my thinking.” This can take the form of arrogant pride.
Sometimes, a young person wants to rebel against his parents, and one way to do that is to rebel against the God they believe in.
Some people’s doubts stem from their disappointment with God. God says, “Seek and ask,” but some have asked and he hasn’t given.
Some have family wounds. For example, someone who has suffered physical abuse from parents who are deeply religious may find it impossible to believe.
Others have been personally hurt in the sense of being rejected by a mate or their business has gone under or their health has gone bad - they’re wondering if there really is a God, and if so, why does He let this stuff happen?
And some have intellectual doubts.
There are various factors that accentuate doubt. The seasons of a person's life can play a role in doubt. Someone may be a great believer in college, but when she becomes a young parent with a second baby, 60-80 hour work weeks, no sleep, a boss on her back, they simply don’t have time to reflect. And faith will often stagnate without some contemplative time, and doubts will creep in.
Often, we make comparisons with the faith of others. “I hate to go to church because I hear all these claims that I’m not experiencing. I believe, pray, study the Bible and work at ministry as hard as anybody, but I don’t get this joy, don’t get my prayers answered” and so on. People like this begin to think, “What’s wrong with God that he won’t give me those things?” One piece of advice here is to check out the Psalms - 60% of them are laments with people screaming out, “God, where are you?” Normal faith is allowed to beat on God’s chest and complain.
We have an unspoken, and I suspect unrecognized, fear of com-mitment these days. In our narcissistic country, our definition of freedom is the freedom to get my own way and keep my options open. We have a Baskin-Robbins culture where the most-dreaded sentence would be to serve a life with no options.
As important as it is to understand what faith is, it's equally important, and possibly more so, to know what faith isn’t. People mix up faith and feelings - some people equate faith with a perpetual religious high. When that wears off, they begin to doubt whether they had any faith at all. I tend to be emotionally up and down, but it took me years to realize this is not a fluctuation of faith.
There was a man who told his counselor, “I don’t like my wife anymore.” The counselor told him to go home and love her. He replied that it’d be emotionally dishonest to treat her that way when he doesn’t feel it. The counselor asked him if his mother loves him. How about at 3 weeks when he was screaming with a dirty diaper and she had to get up, change and feed him even though she was dog tired? Did he think she got a bang out of that? He then told the man, "I guess she was being emotionally dishonest."
The point is that the measure of her love wasn’t that she felt good about changing the diapers, but that she was willing to do it even when she wasn’t feeling particularly happy about it. And we need to learn the same about faith - faith is not always about having positive emotional feelings toward God or life.
Some people believe faith is the absence of doubt, but that’s just not true - faith and doubt can co-exist. You can have doubts even when you believe - Abraham clearly believed, but at the same time, he had doubts. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that where there’s absolutely no doubt, there’s probably no healthy faith.
Doubt can actually play a positive role. The glassy eyed ‘true believer’ who never had a doubt in the world, who always thinks everything’s wonderful, everything’s great, often finds his worldview shattered. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to them when something terrible happens.
There was a case of a toddler with cancer. Between forty and fifty of these 'true believers' jammed into the house, prayed fervently and thought, “Of course he’ll be healed.” They were devastated when he wasn’t. Their theology had been misguided and unexamined. It had never been challenged by doubts or thoughtful questions. Doubts could have helped them develop a more substantial and realistic faith - to trust God in the face of death and not just in the face of healing. Instead, theirs was a brittle faith, easily shattered.
Like I mentioned at the outset, skepticism can be subtly used as a shield to keep people away from deeper motivations. There was an atheistic author visiting a small New England town. He said he wished he could believe since in his experiences around the world people are miserable and only those with faith seem to carve out some happiness. So what was holding him back? Well, he had some renown for being an atheistic author. Who would he be if he gave that up?
A former Marine said he was miserable. He was making more money than he could spend, sleeping with every woman in town, but he said he hated himself: “You’ve got to help me, but don’t give me any of that God talk because I can’t believe that stuff.” He didn't want to have to change his lifestyle; he just wanted some magic formula to ease his conscience without having to give up any of the "perks" of a decadent lifestyle.
There was a girl who had been sexually abused. Every way God had been represented to her, filtered through her parents’ religion, was horrible. But her arguments were in the intellectual realm. She was ignoring the painful truth. It was too terrible to face. Maintaining intellectual objections allowed her to doubt without having to examine her real motivations. Can you blame her?
Another man was raising all kinds of intellectual issues because he didn’t want to believe in God because he didn’t want to sell his topless bar. The money was too good, and he was having too much fun making it. When you scratch below the surface, there’s either a will to believe or there’s a will not to believe. That’s the core of it.
How then shall we elaborate on the roles of faith and the will in the decision to believe?
Abraham was called the ‘father of the faith,’ but it wasn’t that he never doubted, or that he always did the right thing, or that his motives were always pure. He failed on all three counts. But he wouldn’t give up on God - and one definition of faith is that it’s the will to believe. It’s the decision to follow the best light you have about God and not quit. The idea of choice runs all the way through Scripture. Joshua says to choose this day whom you are going to serve.
But isn’t there also a sense in which faith is a gift from God? Yes, and that raises a big mystery about choice and free will. Perhaps a good way to think of it is like the power steering on a car - good luck trying to move the tires without it. In a similar way, our wills make the decision to put our trust in Christ, and God empowers us. In John 7:17, Jesus says, “If a man chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.” So, somehow, if we have the will to believe, God then confirms that Jesus is from God.
John 12:37: “ after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him.” Then two verses later, it says, “For this reason they could not believe.” In other words, they made a decision of the will to deny the message of the miracles - and they had made this decision not to believe for so long that they dismantled their capacity to believe.
Do you think it’s any different for the skeptic today that insists that he just cannot believe? Just think back on our examples above. I submit that it is more that he will not believe than cannot believe, and eventually he truly will not be able to believe because he will lack the capacity.
Consequently, at its core, faith is a decision of the will that we keep on making, but we’re given that option by God’s grace - we’re empowered to keep making it by his Spirit. And it’s a choice we must make without having all the complete information we’d like to have; otherwise, what we would have is knowledge, not faith.
So how should you deal with doubt? The first step has to be to decide whether or not you really want to believe. Then go where faith is. If you’re going to do faith, you probably don’t want to join American Atheists. Get around people you respect for their life, their mind, their character, and their faith and learn from them. And put faith-building materials in your mind - books, tapes and music that build strong motivation for faith, that clarify the nature of God, that examine the evidence pro and con, that deal intelligently with the critics of the faith, that give hope that you can connect with God, and that give you tools to develop your spirituality.
And you must clarify the object of your faith. There are two types of ice - thick and thin. You can have very little faith in thick ice, and it will hold you up just fine. And you can have enormous faith in thin ice and drown. So people need to clarify their reasons for believing. Why should I believe in Jesus rather than the Maharishi? What about crystals or Oriental mysticism?
Obviously I’m biased, but when it comes right down to it, the only object of faith that is solidly supported by the evidence of history and archaeology and literature and experience is Jesus.
Then you must put your faith in action. Sitting and brooding over faith and doubt will never make a believer out of anyone - ultimately you must embark on your experiment of faith by doing what faith would do. Jesus said that if we continue in his Word - that is, continue doing what Jesus says - then we are truly his disciples. Knowing the truth doesn’t mean filling your head with knowledge; this is the Hebrew ‘know,’ which isn’t gathering information, it’s experiential knowledge. Like Adam knew Eve - he didn’t just know her name and address; he experienced her.
To experience the truth and be set free, you have to be a following learner - in other words, do what Jesus says and you’ll experience the validity of it. It's kind of like riding a bicycle. You can’t watch a video or read a book; you’ve got to get on one and get the feel of it. You say, “I’ve heard some things that Jesus taught, and they sound good to me. But I don’t know if they’re true. For instance, he said it is more blessed to give than to receive. How can I know if that’s true?” A thousand debates won’t prove it, but when you become generous, you’ll realize this is truth. In Psalm 34:8, King David said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Remember, in the gospel of John, faith is never a noun, it’s always a verb. Faith is action; it’s never just mental assent. It’s a direction of life. So when we begin to do faith, God begins to validate it. And the further we follow the journey, the more we know it’s true.