Are Faith and Doubt Compatible?

Accustomed to read God's word aloud together. So first from James chapter one.

Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith without doubting, for the doubter is like the surging sea driven and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord, being double minded and unstable in all his ways. — James 1

And now from John chapter 20.

But Thomas, called Twin, one of the 12, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples were telling him, we've seen the Lord. But he said to them, if I don't see the mark of the nails in his hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will never believe. A week later, his disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Don't be faithless, but believe. Thomas responded to him, my Lord and my God. Jesus said, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. — John 20:24-29

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Are Faith and Doubt Compatible?

Today, in the next to last sermon in this series, "No Bad Questions," I want to take on this question: Are faith and doubt compatible? Can faith include doubt? And I want to acknowledge that this is a very personal question for many people. Compared to a lot of the other things we've talked about, this is a very painful question to people.

I want to see if you could find yourself in any of these scenarios. Maybe some of you grew up in a church that equated doubt with sin. I did an Amazon search. There are books that are all in this genre. One recently: "Doubt the Sin God Hates the Most." A famous Christian author and speaker declares that doubt's a sin, and the evidence points out: Jesus never doubted, so why should you? He was sinless.

Others grew up in the church, and as you grew up, what was maybe concrete or clear or more black and white as a child took on more and more shades of gray. And the things that you were more certain of, you began to feel like you were less and less certain of. There were days that you felt like God was letting you down, and other days you felt like you were letting God down. Maybe that's you.

Others maybe have been involved in church ministry or campus ministry, some parachurch ministry, and you've been involved in teaching. You find yourself preparing a lesson, and as you're preparing the lesson, there's this thought in the back of your head: Do I really believe this? I don't know. And it makes you feel odd. Am I supposed to be doing this? Maybe you feel like you're losing your faith. Maybe you've even confessed that to somebody in leadership. And instead of being encouraging, they've pulled out one of these two passages and sort of pounded you over the head with it.

Finally, others have wondered if strong faith is a personality trait. You feel like you see other people who don't seem to have questions or doubts or misgivings. And you wonder: Maybe that's just that type of person, and I'm not that type of person.

In any way that we come at this, doubting can be very painful. It can be very isolating. It can make you feel shame. It's a hard thing to talk about sometimes in Christian communities.

So today, as we look at this question, I want to look at it under three headings. First is what is the nature of faith? What is faith? Second, two types of doubt. And finally, what do I do with my doubts?

What Faith Is Not

Now, it's probably easier to talk about what faith isn't than what faith is. So let's start with some things that faith isn't. Faith isn't certainty. And I need to say that very right up front because a lot of times people go to a passage in the Bible and isolate one verse and therefore miss the context. We do this a lot with Hebrews chapter 11, verse one. People go to this and say, this is the definition of faith.

Faith is being certain of what we hope for and sure of what we do not see. — Hebrews 11:1

And you walk away and go: faith must be certainty. But if you read the rest of the chapter, you know that can't be what that means. That chapter, Hebrews 11, is famous as being the hall of fame of faith—heroes of faith from the Bible. And as you work through it, you see that all kinds of people listed in that chapter are filled with doubt.

Abraham, the father of faith, was one who tried to make God's promises happen on his own terms. Moses, the great leader of Exodus, argued with God: "Why me? I can't speak well. Use somebody else." And the list goes on and on. Faith can't be certainty.

Faith is acting as if what we believe is for sure, and acting—going out in action—treating our beliefs as if they're true. There's a British missionary in the twentieth century, Leslie Newbigin, who wrote a really helpful book on doubt and faith. I would highly recommend this to you: Proper Confidence. He actually says that this idea of faith as certainty is a really dangerous one. It's a twentieth century idea that actually leads us to nihilism. It leads us to skepticism. It leads us away from faith toward unbelief, because it presents faith as this monolithic whole.

Another writer, Reinhold Niebuhr, says that when religious people insist on their certainties, it's often because the things that they believe in are being shaken. He calls it a frantic orthodoxy—like, I'm scared. The things I put my hope in are not as sure as I thought they were.

What Faith Isn't

Faith isn't certainty. Faith isn't also feelings. Feelings go up and down. They can be based sometimes on your blood sugar. Feelings are a gift from God. Don't hear me say that feelings are bad. Sometimes Christians conflate those two things—feeling's bad. Feelings are a gift. And yet there's a popular idea that faith is sort of drumming up feelings, trying to get myself into a cheerleader-like state about the things that I believe.

Would we want to say a person with clinical depression can't have faith? Depression affects a person's expression of their faith, but we wouldn't want to say that. Faith isn't about feelings. It's not about what we feel at the moment. It's more than that.

Faith also isn't fantasy. We don't believe in Jesus despite evidence. Faith is believing in what we come to understand and reason through and process through. It's not screwing up our stomach muscles and stepping boldly into the dark. It's engagement.

Faith isn't anti-rational or sub-rational. Many of you are thinkers, and that is a gift—to be able to use your mind. Investigation, asking questions, engaging in thinking and weighing the alternatives, all of this is a gift. Faith is not opposed to or against reason.

Finally, faith isn't just for Christians. A lot of Christians look around and they're like, I sort of envy you. You can be wistful about your unbelieving friends. They don't have to deal with these faith-doubt questions. And yet, everyone—even the most ardent atheist—has faith of a certain type or another. They rely on commitments or foundations that they can't prove. We all take for granted that our universe works according to rules. It's regular. The reliability of our senses to perceive what's going on in the world, the rationality of our minds. We have things that we can't prove, and yet we all yearn for: beauty, truth, love. None of these can be proved scientifically. Faith isn't just for Christians.

What Faith Is

The Bible uses the word faith and the concept of faith three ways, and it's really important that you understand all three. In several places, particularly the book of Jude, it talks about "the faith"—a content of teaching, the things that we believe in. Faith is also used to describe trusting, the act of believing. And finally, faith is something that can be measured in terms of quality and quantity. Jesus speaks of strong faith, weak faith, big faith, little faith. You can think of faith not as data on a hard drive, but like a muscle that you have to exercise. It can grow.

Saving faith is really all three of those things. There's content to it. There's an act of trusting. There's a way in which it can grow or it can be small.

How do you get faith in God? How do you in fact believe anything? Very simple. Three things.

First, you ask. Over and over in the Bible, we see people asking God and God responding and giving them the gift of faith. Faith is something we can ask God for, just like the centurion father who, in encountering Christ, said:

I do believe, but help my unbelief.

In other words, give me more.

Second, it's a process. How do you come to believe in anything? It's not a light switch. It's a process that takes time. Tim Keller describes it as sustained attention and then some attraction—like, I'm interested in that. I like that. A demonstration of its reliability and an explanation. It's not a linear process. It takes time. It involves engaging your mind and your will and your emotions. You have to sometimes see how it works in the lives of other people, how it works in the life of a community. This is one of the reasons that bringing people who don't yet believe into a faith community is really helpful. They need to see it kind of worked out.

Finally, you engage your whole self in the act of believing.

Faith isn't just intellectual assent. Jesus called his first disciples—it's a really great picture of what it means to exercise faith. Jesus comes to Simon Peter and the other disciples who are fishing and says, "Come and follow me." It's a whole self engagement.

One writer says it this way: "What would you think of a little boy who was given a bicycle and gave up learning to ride a bicycle because he complained that he could not sit still without falling over?" So you're not riding the bicycle. You don't want a bicycle; you want a chair. You want something that is passive. Faith requires an active engagement, like a bicycle, not a chair.

If that's what faith is, what is doubt? Now this is what's hard for Christians. This is one of the reasons we get all these fuzzy answers, because there's more than one kind of doubt. So when I ask the question, "Is faith and doubt compatible with one another? Can faith include doubt?"—here's the answer: it depends. It depends on what you mean by doubt.

The Bible uses this in these two passages we looked at today, and they sort of correspond to two different types of doubt. I'm going to borrow some terms from a friend of mine who's a pastor in Atlanta who talks about "struggler doubt" and "straddler doubt." So let's look at both of those.

Struggler Doubt

Struggler doubt is what we see in so many places in the Bible. If you open up the book of Psalms, the psalmist will say, "Why are the wicked prospering? What I see doesn't line up with what I know of who you are." The prophets look around and they say, "God, where are you? Why does it seem like these other nations are prospering and even successful against us? They're wicked people. Don't you see?" Again, struggle doubt.

You open up the wisdom literature. Job is like, "Why am I suffering like I am?" He's holding up what he knows of God and what he sees in his circumstances and said, "These don't—I don't know what to do with this."

This is what we see most famously in John chapter 20. Jesus is interacting with the famous doubter of the Bible, Doubting Thomas. Poor guy—he should also have been famous for his mission work. He took the gospel to India; he was super famous for that. We call him Doubting Thomas, not Indian Missionary Thomas.

But in this story, we see how Jesus interacts with those who struggle. What is Jesus like in this moment? Do you see His kindness? Do you see His invitation? There's not a real sense of rebuke in this. The word there for doubt in that passage is apistis—"a" meaning not, "pistis" meaning faith, not believing. Thomas is struggling with what he has heard and seen, what other people are saying. He's like, "How can this be true? I can't reconcile those two things unless I see his hands, the mark of the nails. Place my finger in the mark of the nail, my hand in his side—I'm not going to believe." Jesus welcomes him with his doubts.

Straddler Doubt

The other kind of doubt, though, I'll call straddler doubt. That's from James chapter one. It's a kind of doubt that is incompatible with faith because it isn't either faith or not faith. It's something in the middle. James uses a word that means "two minds," of two minds. It's the classic one foot on the dock, one foot in the boat. A person who is not willing to commit. This is not a person who says, "This is what I know of God, and it doesn't reconcile." This is a person who's like, "I'm not so sure about anything. I'm going to hedge my bets."

When I was younger, in high school, my dad bought a yellow canoe that was 18 feet long, fiberglass canoe. My dad loved this canoe. And we would take it out on lakes and rivers around East Tennessee. And I remember my maternal grandfather came to visit and we were going to go out for a canoe ride. My dad's in the front. I'm in the middle. My grandfather is a very big man—Granddaddy Garrison, big man. He's got his life vest on. He's standing on the dock, and he gets into the canoe the way you're not supposed to get into a canoe. At this moment, he has one foot on the dock and one foot on the boat. And you know the rest of the story. I don't even have to finish the illustration, do I? Because you know what happened to all of us. Within ten seconds, we're all wet.

It's an uncomfortable place to be in. It's an untenable place to be in. This is what James is saying about this place of diacrino—doubt. It's not either faith or not faith. It's straddling. It's not one or the other. It's a person who's ambivalent, who refuses to commit, who's hedging their bets, who's splitting their thinking, who's double-minded. It's like dating two people at the same time. You can do it, but it's not going to work very well or very long. It's unstable.

This is why straddler doubt is incompatible with faith. Struggler doubt is compatible with faith.

What do I do with our doubts this morning? I've got a bunch of applications for you. Those of you who are struggle doubters, can I encourage you in this? Value your doubts. That may seem an odd thing to say from a pastor, but value your doubts. There's something in that that can lead you toward God, that can lead you toward knowing God more. Engaging those is a way of engaging the Lord. I appreciate how Tim Keller writes this:

A faith without some struggle doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or too indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless, either against the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she or he has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, his own doubts, which should only be discarded after lots of reflection.

Really helpful. Engage them. Value your doubts. They can take you to the Lord.

Second, for stragglers and straddlers, doubt your doubts. Notice that even as Jesus is so gracious with Thomas, he still calls him, "Stop doubting and believe." In other words, you should work to try to resolve, try to work through and engage your doubts until they do bring you back to Christ.

Now, I know in our culture it can feel really smart to be a person who is doubtful about everything, who is a skeptic. And yet that is a false drug. That is a dangerous opiate. Because while it makes you feel really smart, it actually is a type of intellectual dishonesty. If you are a person who's smarter than everybody in the room and can see through everything in the room and is cynical about everything in the room, it's likely because you're not willing to fully engage in one of those things deeply. It's a way of rebuffing.

The Gap

For straddlers, as the Brits say, mind the gap. Mind the gap. Nubigan's very helpful here. Spiritually speaking, there is no Switzerland in this life. Here's what he says:

The universe is not provided with a spectator's gallery from which you can survey the total scene without getting personally involved.

You're going to have to make a decision for or against God. You're going to have to come to a place of saying, "I can't remain one foot on the dock, one foot on the boat. I can't hedge my bets." Because to not accept God is to reject him.

Most famously, there was a man named Sheldon Van Auken in his book A Severe Mercy, who really wrestled over years. He was involved at Yale, studied English literature at Yale and Oxford, and he got to know C. S. Lewis and was wrestling with this whole idea of faith and doubt. And he was a very famous straddler, and he says this:

There's a gap that I discovered between the probable and the proved. I didn't know how to cross it. If I were to stake my whole life on the risen Christ, I wanted proof. I wanted to taste the fish. I wanted certainty. I wanted to see him write in letters across the sky. I wanted to talk with him. I got none of those. And I continued to hang out on the edge of that gap. However, there I found there was a gap behind me as well. There was a gap in front of me to belief, but there was a gap behind me to rejection. He said perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble, but what about the leap to rejection? I couldn't reject Jesus. There was only thing to do once I had seen that there was a gap behind me. I had to turn away from it and fling myself over the gap toward Jesus.

You have to pick a side. So I now choose my side. I choose beauty. I choose what I love. It's all I can do, choose. I don't affirm that I am without any doubts, but I have to go to Him asking for help, having chosen, trying to overcome it.

I say this, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

It's really helpful. Van Auken's very honest about the fact that nobody gets everything cleared up to come to Jesus, and yet there's no neutral ground. You're either with Him or against Him. There's a gap either way.

Stay Connected

For strugglers, stay in community. Stay in relationship. It's remarkable to go back to John chapter 20, read this passage about Thomas and Jesus, and recognize the passage of time. Do you realize between those encounters, between which Thomas was absent when all the other disciples saw the risen Christ, and then when Thomas is present seeing the risen Christ, it's a period of seven days. There's a week in which Thomas hung in. And I think that's remarkable.

There's something about doubting that causes us to want to pull away, to pull back from community, to retreat from relationships of being around other people who are more confident today in their faith than you. And yet what we see in Thomas is exactly the opposite of that. He hung in. And my encouragement to you, if you're a person who is struggling, if you're like, "I'm not even sure I'm a Christian anymore," is to stay. Stay in your community's group. Stay in your relationships.

Stay with other Christians. Because there's something about being with other people that helps us to resolve those and work through those together.

Finally, for strugglers, come to the table. Come to the Lord's table. The Lord's Supper is a great gift to doubters, to those who struggle. The Heidelberg Catechism says this:

May one who doubteth of his being in Christ or his due preparation come to the Lord's Supper?

It's old language. Listen to this:

The one who doubteth of his being in Christ, he is to bewail his unbelief and labor to have his doubts resolved and may and ought to come to the Lord's Supper that he may be further strengthened.

You know, there's a lot of people who grew up in the church and view this as like the table of certainty. Like you got to be rock solid to come to this place. God feeds weak sinners. And it is such a place of comfort when all the things we're wrestling with can't be resolved—to come, and in a very simple act, yes. Jesus, body and blood, I'm okay with that today. I need that today. Jesus is so gracious to feed us.

Focus on God

Finally, one thing. Focus on God. Faith is about Jesus. It's not about faith. One of the ways that people get wrapped around the axle is asking the questions: Do I have enough? Do I have enough? Do I have enough? Is this enough? My faith feels so weak. It feels so small. Maybe I don't have it anymore.

Look, faith is not about self, it's about God. You can liken it to having a windshield on your car. Faith is like the windshield that you look through to see God. If you look at the windshield while you're driving, you're very likely to crash your car. But if you look through the windshield, you're going to get to where you need to go.

A life of being overly focused on the faith, faith, faith—do I have it or not—is going to crash. That's a really hard place to be in. But continuing to look through that, it's about him. It's always been about him. It's not about you.

Let's go to him together.

Father, we thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. I pray, Father, for my brothers and sisters who struggled this morning. Lord, I pray that you would meet us in the places of our straddling. Bring us fully to you. Lord, I pray for those who are struggling, that you would encourage them to stay. I pray this all in Christ's name. Amen.

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Something a little different for this morning. I know we don't usually do this in a Presbyterian church, but as we sing this next song, if you are a straddler and you would like somebody to come to pray for you, I want to invite you to come down front. Nobody will see you. They all look at the screen anyway, but I'll be happy to pray for you.

If you feel stuck with a foot on the dock and a foot in the boat, I want to invite you to Jesus, to know him, to give your life to him. And right after that, guess what? We got the time for the stragglers—for those who are struggling with faith this morning. We got a table for you. Let's come and engage Jesus together.