Talking About Faith

Along with everything else that we are facing in these troubled times, many people are also struggling with unanswered questions about faith. Some turn to spiritual guides who offer only the kind of answers that discourage further exploration. Others, myself included, believe that a healthy respect for questions and doubts is what makes for a trustworthy guide on matters of faith.

There is nothing inherently wrong with providing well thought out answers to any number of faith-questions, as long as it serves the purpose of clearing up relatively minor matters --- e.g., whether any of Jesus' followers saw his crucifixion directly (yes) --- for the sake of focusing more intently on major ones --- e.g., whether it would make a difference to faith if his bodily remains were someday discovered in a previously unknown burial chamber (perhaps, perhaps not). With respect to the latter kind of question in particular, the Christian tradition represents a wider range of opinion than most believers may realize. Because this is so, helping people with questions about its beliefs and practices should be less a matter of giving definitive answers (e.g.: If you are the Christian you say you are, then you will believe/do…) than of encouraging attention to as many possibilities for interpretation as possible.

Not every believer, it must be said, understands the Christian faith this way. Some have told me in no uncertain words, for example, that there can be no uncertainty for a true Christian. A questioning spirit is an unfaithful spirit, of which one must repent. A less extreme version of this point of view insists that questions about the faith of the church should be referred immediately to religious authorities who alone can provide timely, credible, and approved answers to them. I respect the integrity with which many clergy and lay colleagues in ministry have defended this way of looking at things. Nevertheless, I must continue to disagree with them. As does a very good friend of mine, who puts his own objection to their outlook this way: God gave us minds, and he expects us to use them. To this wonderfully pithy statement I have only one thing to add: when we put our minds to the task of resolving our own questions and doubts about faith, it helps to have a caring Christian friend or pastor who knows how to listen, how to encourage us in our struggle, and how to refrain from imposing answers that could get in the way of our finding our own.

One very able faith-guide I know agonized over how to help a single mother of two think through whether she could in good conscience abort a fetus conceived as a result of rape. Because her upbringing included the teaching that human life begins at conception, this young woman had all of a sudden and through no fault of her own found herself without options and desperately looking to her caregiver for some. The question she asked, and the informed answer her caregiver gave her, opened up new possibilities for deeper exploration: Hasn't the church has always taught that human life begins at conception? The historically accurate answer to this question is "no." Her caregiver knew it, and immediately gave it, with the aim of encouraging her care receiver to look at her concern from every angle. After weighing all the options, she chose to carry her baby to term, even though she knew that her decision would have enormous impact on her life and the lives of the children she already had. Her caregiver put the outcome in what for me is exactly the right perspective: It's not what she decided to do that matters the most; truthfully, I would have made a different decision than she did. What matters is that as a Christian she realized that she needed to make a choice consistent with everything else that she believed.

Listening, encouraging, and holding back from sharing one's own convictions too soon and/or too confidently do not come naturally. Even trained professionals, the clergy included, sometimes forget that in fulfilling their respective callings to apply their knowledge skillfully for others' benefit, they can overwhelm people with answers to questions that their hearers are not really asking, and in terms that their hearers cannot really understand. Even though they do not come naturally, however, these skills can and do come with learning and practice. As does the passion to help people find answers to questions about their faith, or their lack of it, that their own life situations and circumstances compel them to ask.

You know, I ought to write a book about this someday. But wait: I just did. More from it later.