Trusting Our Doubts

After turning in grades at the end of a term, most seminary faculty members subject themselves to the usually humbling task of reading their students' course evaluations. Once, while I was reading my own sets, a colleague walked into my office and silently laid on my desk a copy of a letter that was signed and attached to one evaluation form. It was from a student he had previously described as someone he had not gotten through to at all. Now, in a somewhat awed tone of voice he said, "Well, he sure got through to me."

I picked up the letter to read it, and found especially interesting its next to last paragraph:

Professor, you made a bigger difference than you could possibly know by showing me how to raise responsible questions about things we thought we were never supposed to doubt. When you first started doing that, I truly believed you were a man of no faith. Then, I began to see that it was your very faith that was pushing you, and us, to raise the questions in the first place. I guess the difference between you and me is this: My faith was so weak I couldn't allow myself to question anything; you believe in God so strongly that you can question everything.

I commented to my colleague that the last sentence would make quite an epitaph for him someday. He replied with a smile, "I'm putting it in my last will and testament today."

Because the student who wrote this moving letter was also one of my own advisees, I knew something of his spiritual pilgrimage, and the toll it took on relationships with fellow Christians less hospitable than he to questioning and doubting official church teaching. In his community of faith, to doubt is to sin, the only atonement for which is to deny, rather than to work through, the doubt. Forgiveness of this particular sin always includes the admonition to go and doubt no more.

Most people I know who experience full blown crises of doubt would very much like to doubt no more. The problem is that they cannot simply will their doubts away. They need to be able to counter them with reasoned arguments, precisely what believe-it-or-else types are either unwilling or unable to put forward (or both.) A former parishioner of mine, very doctrinaire about what being a Christian involves, once told me that we should not even think about trying to answer a doubter or an unbeliever. All we would accomplish, he said, would be to give credibility to his erroneous thinking.

Not everyone, of course, must wrestle as my advisee did with a church tradition inimical to raising questions and thinking hard about what we are to believe as Christians. Some people grow up in churches hostile to the very idea of tradition itself. Imagine what it is like for them to be trapped in classes presided over by old geezers like my colleague and me, forced to listen for hours on end to historical overviews of normative Christian doctrines. Having had it up to here with all that, another advisee of mine once laid his fury on me full blast: There is nothing, absolutely nothing, about the trinitarian controversies that could possibly have relevance for anybody today. I don't mind mucking around in mythology like this, but it surely is crucial to know that it's mythology and not truth.

Many Christians are every bit as certain of their theological liberalism as my former parishioner is of his proudly vaunted conservatism. One thing both they and he hold in common is an antipathy to taking seriously any questions raised from standpoints different from their own. Another is an unconquerable certitude that their beliefs are the right ones and that people who differ from them deserve only their contempt. A major lesson to be learned from these anecdotes is that conservative Christians hold no monopoly on closed-mindedness. (Read much feminist theology lately?)

In today's churches, questioning and doubting have fallen on bad times. Both conservatives and liberals act like they have taken doubt-shots to make sure they escape the infection. I know a better serum for them all. It is stored in the introduction to Paul Tillich's great book, The Protestant Era. Among the many helpful things that Tillich wrote in that introduction, the best was his suggestion that just as we are justified (pardoned) by a gracious God in our sins, we also justified (made acceptable) in God's sight in our doubts.