I am conducting some research into why Christians - and ex-Christians - doubt. And what helped them through it, if anything did. I'd love to have some personal testimonies here ... though doubt has some features that are common in every experience, because it is so personal doubt is very different for different folks. Things one person just lives with, the next person finds crippling.
Please feel to go anonymous if that helps.
15 comments:
It's a form of doubt, anyway: the recognition of the objective truths of the gospel, without the assurance that subjectively an individual has appropriated Christ.
That is, if even the demons can recognise Jesus' lordship, then for me to do so hardly inspires any confidence in where I stand. The 'am I really trusting him?' question cannot resolve, because it makes faith a saving work. Nevertheless, I believe it's a real issue for many Christians.
But not wanting to leave a problem without a solution, I picked up something at Bray's Puritan Spirituality intensive last year that I thought was the most helpful thing I'd heard on this. He was talking about the Puritan emphasis on adoption, and it seemed to me at least that this would be an extremely fruitful line to follow. But Gerald would say it much better than I...so I'll leave the rest to him.
I was paralysed by doubts for most of my 2nd and 3rd year at university (now in my 5th year doing medicine). I could never pin it down to a single question or issue, but it was something like "Does God really exist? Because the gospel seems both implausibly good and judgement is implausibly awful, and materialism seems to offer a reasonably coherent explanation of the universe, and my non-Christian friends seem to have it reasonably sorted, and I'm getting nowhere with trying to be godly!". The two biggest helps were church/friends who kept telling me the truth and let me lean on their faith when I didn't have any, and a book by Neil Martin called Keep Going, which seemed to answer my objections one by one and also pointed out the sin in my heart. Some more thoughts, some written at the time when I was most doubtful, some written afterwards, but not really in any order are here: byfaithindoubt.blogspot.com... but I might take this down soon since I'm not sure it's serving any purpose by remaining in cyberspace and I feel a bit ashamed of some of it!
I've been reading your blog for short time but never commented, but I thought I would share my most recent experience of doubt...
I'm not sure why, but during the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I went through a period where I thought that I was not a Christian. I thought that God had placed me in a lovely godly family and brought me up at Church but had not chosen me as one of his children. At one point, I thought that God had given me all this training and equipped me with what I had in order to bring others to know Him, but I was destined to only know Him but not be saved. I felt like I was clinging on to something I did not belong to. During this time, I also discovered that one of my close friends had decided that she was not a Christian, and this threw me into a period of grief and depression.
Reflecting back on this, I can see a pattern in my periods of doubt - they always occur during the times when I don't pray or read my Bible. God showed me that my doubts were empty and foundless when I repented and asked for his grace. Reading Psalm 139 and meditating on it comforted me and reassured me of God’s power, love and grace.
“Search me, O God, and know my heart, test me, and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Hi Michael,
I'll describe the general impression of the doubts of other people I know in my particular context (i.e. university, around 2nd year undergrad), then those of my own, then those of a close friend of mine, in that order.
First, other people at uni: their doubts seem to revolve around questions that alot of apologetics tries to answer, i.e. questions such as ‘how can the Bible be reconciled with evolution or science in general’, ‘how can I believe that the Bible is historically accurate’, or ‘how can I know that God exists’? It appears to me that they often think that the whole of the Christian truth relies on whether these questions can be answered.
Second, myself: I’ve always had doubts, but very rarely regarding apologetic questions like the above. I don’t doubt God, and I don’t doubt the truths of the gospel, but I doubt whether my life and the life of those around me have been touched by God and those truths. To allude to Ivan Karamazov, I don’t doubt God, but I doubt his world. I think this takes two forms. First, in the past I’ve doubted my election. It’s easy to imagine Lucifer, who understands the truth about Christ, and how people are elected through Christ for salvation – but who also understands that he’s not elected and so shut out of the kingdom. It’s not much harder to reason that if all things work together for the good of those who are called according to God’s purpose, then if things are going horribly for me then I’m not elected for the kingdom, just like Lucifer. Second, I doubt the Church. Are the ‘Christians’ around me really in the kingdom, when I can so easily construct a Foucauldian analysis of how all their discourse about the ‘gospel’ (whatever that is) and ‘saving souls’ (whatever that means) and God (are they talking about the Crucified God, or merely a God-in-general?) is in fact a product of power?
Without going into details, I’m not sure how either of the two forms of doubt I’ve expressed above that I’ve had can be really resolved without referencing some positive personal experience, i.e. an experience of God’s love, or at least an experience of someone being so good to you that you believe (or want to believe) it’s God acting through them. That is, a positive experience of God that does not resolve, but overcomes, doubts.
Something I should mention here at this time: I think that alot of why I don’t have the same ‘apologetic doubts’ as many other people I know is that an important part of (but of course, not the whole of) those doubts is the notion that Christianity is less intellectually rigorous than whatever the alternative happens to be (e.g. like how the random atheist next door might think that religion is only for idiots). Having been exposed to brilliant Christian thinkers like Barth and Moltmann, and having seen how even certain atheist thinkers (particularly, the existential phenomenologists) will criticise things like the glorifying of science as incredibly naive, I suppose that I’ve realised that while Christianity at times isn’t as well-thought out as it should be, the alternatives (atheism, agnosticism etc) aren’t any better. Atheism etc don’t really have the intellectual high ground in apologetics debates.
Finally, regarding a close friend of mine (who is no longer a Christian): like my own, her doubts seemed to surround the problem of evil. Since we (me, both now and then) and her (then) mostly accepted a Barthian critique of apologetics, what avenue is left for trying to prove the truth of Christianity? Also, if we take total depravity seriously, can we ever have genuine knowledge of God, or are we too sinful to? The point I’m trying to get at is that there’s not really that much going, at least in the way we were thinking, for why Christianity is true, but the problem of evil (both as an intellectual problem and an experienced problem) is highly suggestive that Christianity is in fact false. Given this, as I’ve said above, I suspect that the only way to ‘prove’ Christianity is true must have some reference to a positive experience of God in one’s life, a positive experience so great that it simply destroys the reasons against Christianity without a struggle. As much as this grieves me, my friend had no such experience.
Sorry this comment was so long, Michael!
Sean
Around the time of my Confirmation, I was given in RE a brief introduction to apologetics whence "The Cosmological Argument" was 'presented' as without par. However, my appreciation thereof was skewed by regarding causality exclusively in terms of efficient temporal order; hence, upon exposure to Stoic notions of historic circularity, it seemed question-begging to deny as such the possibility of infinite regress, whereupon my early confidence in "The Cosmological Argument" (and thence by 'deduction' Theism, Christianity, Papal Supremacy etc.) was shattered.
Consequently, I became an atheist in a largely Ultramontane RC milieu. Since my apostasy occurred shortly prior to pubescence (I was twelve and three-quarters old at the time), various peers of mine mistook it for libertine adolescent rebellion; disgusted by the suggestion, I ossified in my atheistic views and disputatious temperament (boarding at Stannies from late 1996 to early 1997 didn't help in that respect, although the firm action staff there took against bullying probably stopped me from becoming anti-clerical to boot.)
In 1999 I joined Austin Cline's About.com Agnosticism/Atheism forum partly out of a desire to interact with other atheists and to acquire ammunition for 'anti-apologetics'. Gradually, through various interactions therein, my views started to soften a bit; moreover, it became increasingly apparent in certain threads (a particularly nasty one of which so sticks in my memory that I'm relieved at this point it doesn't seem easy to find) that theists by no means hold a monopoly on intellectual bullying, whence I found myself growing attached to posters of various persuasions who seemed hard-done-by, occasioning various posts in their defence.
Having thus softened a bit in discourse, at times I had occasion to doubt my own rationality, observing for instance that something as base and somatic as posture while playing an operatic part could affect my notions. Thence despite not properly discerning deductive 'proof' of God's existence, it seemed prudentially fitting to become reacquainted with mainstream historically-grounded religious sentiment lest more extreme notions inadvertently take hold of me (moreover, by then we were in the post-September-11 climate.) While in retrospect the actualisation of my initial repentance thereof seems thoroughly concupiscent, now that I've somehow ended up here I suppose I might as well mumble something to the effect that reflecting on contingencies seems to help chasten both doubt and enthusiasm in me.
Here's hoping my entry to this thread didn't put anyone off posting!
The Biblical ground that had been built for me growing up was tried and found wanting. The ground that I stand on today is not so certain anymore. All things, for that matter, have fallen under my intense scrutiny (Capitalism, Consumerism, Individualism), and this wielding deconstruction of various truths has been a disillusioning one - yet I've not chosen apostasy quite yet.
In fact, bizarrely, the uneven rubble that I now stand on is somewhat therapeutic, leaving space to reconstitute a real Christ that was on a real Roman Cross, who resurrected in real body-form, only to send out a woman with this particular Gospel (underscore that), only to hunger and eat a meal of broiled fish, remembering scars at the table. This Eastern picture of the Biblical narrative is much different than the Western- prepackaged one spun for me before. Of course, for a time the actual breaking down of those mythical certainties was a terrible process. There are times when I didn't want to move forward anymore.
But now that I have come out the other side of this, I can better see that the sacred/secular split is a false one - we are creatures that must craft some kind of faith structure or matrix to stand on, whether it be the almighty buck, the Promethean human, or whatever.
"Sin" didn't discontinue our humanness - go and see Genesis, where despite our work being cursed in the Garden culture nevertheless continued onward. Go and see how the semantic range of "image" and "likeness" in Gen 1 isn't just about conscience or a disembodied soul of completely different substance from the human flesh and bone. Old testament scholars are in consensus that the "Imago Dei" is more than just rational minds or ethereal souls, rather it is the full embodiment of God in humans doing culture. I am indebted to an Old Testament Professor for this realization. Without these conceptual turns, I am not sure where I would be today.
Lastly, contemporary media that labels itself "Christian" is a huge problem. Films like The Passion of Christ do us little good, where we see the portrayal of a Christ that is too high-minded, too concerned with establishing a god that is of another substance, solely sacred in his pursuit. Media like this drives a wedge into the Biblical claims of truth, localizing a cosmic thing...
Okay, I'll get off my soapbox already!
My biggest challenge
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1. Unanswered prayer in the light of Jesus' claims regarding prayer
2. The goodness of creation compared with the existence of natural disasters and disease, and the unlikelihood of those those things (e.g. earthquakes and tsunamis being a result of human sin)
3. The similarities between Yahweh and El of the Canaanite pantheon
4. Eternal suffering in hell.
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My greatest time of doubts was my pre-Christian years. Asking myself the question - Is this all there is to life? and answering the obvious... There must be something more.
I wonder how often those who are not in the fold of Christ experience doubts about their lives?
I would say it is more frequent than a Christian convinced of Christ.
The first significant wave of doubting hit me like a tsunami about five years ago. I can identify a number of significant factors.
1. I lost confidence in my church's (in the Matthias group) interpretation of Scripture. This was partially precipitated by living in a third world country for a year and wrestling with what the Bible (especially the prophets) had to say about poverty and social justice. This loss of confidence was probably deepened by the (sometimes implicit) claim that their tradition's interpretation of the Scriptures was faithful over and above other traditions (a claim that I was already acutely aware of, having been raised within a biblically literate Pentecostal tradition).
2. I began a PhD, which saw me interacting with postgrads, postdocs and academics. The simpler answers (that worked in undergraduate discourse) to questions about Christianity no longer satisfied me.
3. I was struggling with temptation on various fronts (forgiveness, sexual temptation) and felt it a real burden.
4. I friend of mine committed suicide.
All these issues/events (and probably a few more) intensified and converged within a period of 5 months. In a very frightful week, I questioned my whole Christain worldview. Then began a slump of deep depression that lasted at least four months. I read the Koran, Buddhist literature, liberal scholars (e.g. historical Jesus stuff). Slowly I took myself off ministry positions/duties as it was impossible to fulfil these with integrity while asking so many fundamental questions. Gradually the depression became more sporadic and after about four years I learnt to live (somewhat) with the doubts.
ctd...
(ctd from previous post)
Throughout this experience, I found that many Christians simply did not understand what I was going through and many of them seemed unwilling to engage in the hard questions. I received many "pat" answers, which probably confirmed the validity of my doubting, as painful as it was. Many friends thought that the doubting would be a short phase and that I would emerge as a stronger evangelical Christian. This never happened (at least, not yet). After four years I found myself in a progressive church that, in addition to welcoming GLTB (which was almost a confronting experience for me at the time), also welcomed those who doubt, and in their litergy acknowledged doubt in ways that weren't dismissive or trite. (However, it was strange to be identified by some in that congregation as an evangelical when I was elsewhere judged to have succumbed to liberal thought!) I recently moved cities and now attend a mildly progressive Baptist church with my wife (who is still evangelical).
Where am I with doubting now? Over the last five years I have raised so many questions about Scripture, Jesus, the Bible, doctrine, the existence of God, the nature of God, etc, that it has been very difficult to piece together a coherent picture of what I actually do believe. Succinctly, I suppose that I believe in God and that I wrestle with the big questions about God within a mostly Christian context/conversation. I have put aside some minor questions (e.g. did Paul really write 1 Timothy? - I don't think either side of the debate is persuasive). I'm happy to live without having to give an answer and affirm either a liberal or conservative perspective on such issues - even if the implications (e.g. on one's doctrine of Scripture) are defining for some. For me, greater obstacles revolve around the issue of divine violence (e.g. in OT, Revelation, some atonement theories, etc), the nature of Scripture (at present I cannot affirm a conservative viewpoint because too many questions remain unanswered), the significance of Jesus, Jesus' relationship to God.
Sometimes I feel that I can identify myself as a Christian. Other times I have doubts about this. Less frequently, I feel that Christianity (in any form) is just a mistake. Most of the time I find (who I presently understand by) Jesus of Nazareth to be simultaneously challenging yet someone who I feel commends to me a way of living that I should emulate.
In terms of who has helped me through this: I found Tom Wright helpful earlier on, though I feel that his work on Jesus has one massive flaw in that it does not seriously address the nature of the gospels (not sure why he is so easily sidetracked into Pauline studies at the moment). I still esteem him much higher than someone like Barnett (whose books on NT and history were on the whole unconvincing in their perspective). I am finding "Exclusion and Embrace" by Volf to be helpful, in that he illustrates how (orthodox) Christian theology can address difficult issues about living in the real world in a somewhat satisfying way. I appreciate that he engages with so many Christian and nonChristian scholars with respect and is able to draw from them as well as differ with them. Unlike other books I have read, a book like this makes it difficult to simply dismiss the whole Christian theological enterprise as being insular, myopic and having nothing to contribute to a wider conversation.
Michael, if you want to know more for your research then I'd be happy to contact you.
Anon1 - thanks for this. I too found Exclusion and Embrace a really powerful book, for some of the same reasons you mention.
I would be very happy for you to contact me ... my email address is michael dot jensen at moore dot edu dot au.
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