Wherever Christian Faith Travels, Doubt Rides Piggyback
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(OPINION) My congregation’s Wednesday Bible group just finished a lengthy study of Matthew’s gospel, which I led.
Over my decades of preaching and teaching, I’ve read Matthew innumerable times. But I noticed something this time that hadn’t caught my attention before. It’s gotten stuck in my head.
In Matthew 28, Jesus has been resurrected and has sent word to his core band of disciples to meet him at a certain site in Galilee, several days’ journey by foot from where they’ve been holed up.
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When the disciples finally encounter face-to-face their very-much-alive Lord, Matthew (who tradition says was present) describes their reaction like this:
“They worshiped him; but some doubted.”
One reference source offers an alternative translation as equally valid: “they worshiped, but they doubted.”
We’ve heard of doubting Thomas, the disciple who hesitated to believe Jesus had actually risen until he’d seen him with his own eyes and touched him with his own hands. But in this snippet in Matthew, we see something more, something quite startling.
It wasn’t just Thomas who doubted, apparently, but several of the apostles. It may have been that all of them doubted.
They didn’t just doubt before they saw Jesus for themselves. They doubted after they saw him alive and up close. They doubted even as they saw him.
They worshipped him — and they doubted. Both things. At the same time.
This ought to encourage you and me, who never got to stick our heads inside the empty tomb, eat fish with the resurrected Jesus or stand staring into the clouds as he ascended. A lot of us who worship him sometimes find it hard to believe all the good Christian things. Or any of the things.
It’s comforting to learn that even the guys who were eyewitnesses found the whole thing as questionable as we do on our wavering days.
In Christianity, we talk endlessly about faith. We’re all about faith. Anything that isn’t of faith is sin, we say. We’ll blather on about faith until your eyes roll back in your head.
It’s comparatively rare that anybody talks about doubt. Yet doubt is as real as faith, and probably as common. In fact, I’d argue that doubt is a key element of mature, meaningful faith. Doubt keeps us honest. It keeps us from becoming the kind of bubble-headed believers who latch onto a few worn-out platitudes and let them guide — or ruin — our whole lives.
Doubt tips us off-kilter. It makes us search. It prohibits us from becoming smug and self-satisfied. It reminds us how frail we are, how little we know. Paradoxically, doubt teaches us that we have no real option except to simply trust God, to keep on believing with our actions even when we don’t feel like we believe in our heads.
Doubt is a tool God uses to grow us. I tell my parishioners that if they’re not questioning at least some of the Christian shibboleths at least some of the time, they’re not paying attention.
Doubt isn’t a sin, as many believers fear it is.
I love this Anne Lamott quote somebody emailed me long ago. I copied it down and have kept it. I trot it out occasionally when I need it:
“I have a lot of faith. But I am also afraid a lot, and have no real certainty about anything. I remembered something Father Tom had told me — that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”
That’s it. Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith. You don’t need faith if you’re absolutely sure you know everything there is to know, that your every line of dogma is as reliable as the law of gravity. You need faith when you’re unsure, when you know that you don’t know, when you can’t prove a blessed thing.
Recently, Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation published a week’s worth of devotions on doubt, written by Rohr and various associates. If you’re wrestling with doubts, I suggest you go read all the entries. They’re excellent.
If I might summarize a common thread among them, it’s that our Westernized brand of Christianity has handicapped us with its disproportionate focus on “orthodoxy” — or holding the right doctrines — over “orthopraxy” — which is living in right relationship to God and others.
Center for Action and Contemplation teacher Brian McLaren explains:
“Before doubt (set in), I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. My religious teachers taught me so: that if I didn’t hold the right beliefs, or at least say that I held them, I would be excommunicated from my community, and perhaps, after death, from God’s presence.”
Over time, however, McLaren arrived at a different, and more profound, understanding:
“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.”
In another entry, McLaren says doubt “isn’t the death of faith. It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs.”
I think he’s referring to a faith such as Matthew and the other apostles experienced, in which we bow to worship that which we can’t understand and don’t always manage to even believe in.
We acknowledge a God too wonderful for our little doubting pea-brains to digest, and are left to trust that he’ll love and save us even in our lack.
That’s when it all — faith, worship, doubt — becomes one shimmering divine truth, glowing with mystery.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a monthly column about faith and religion for Religion Unplugged.