About a year ago, I posted on my old website a lecture I gave at Asuza Pacific University<\/a> on the role of doubt in the Christian life.\u00a0Below is a greatly abbreviated version (half the length) of that lecture that cleans up some of the \u201coral\u201d feel of the original lecture. Based on\u00a0feedback I\u2019ve received over the past year, I thought reposting it in this form would be of benefit to some.<\/em><\/p>\n The Benefit of Doubt<\/strong><\/p>\n Doubting one\u2019s faith in God is a very tough place to be. Faith in God is what keeps it all together when you are facing one of life\u2019s many challenges things.<\/p>\n They don\u2019t and he doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n So you feel your faith in God slipping away\u2014and it is unsettling, disorienting, and frightening to watch that happen. You doubt that God cares, that he is listening; you doubt that he is even aware of who you are\u2014that he even exists.<\/p>\n In such a state of doubt about God, you feel like there is clearly something very wrong with you.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe I\u2019m not smart enough. Maybe I\u2019m a faker. Maybe I haven\u2019t memorized enough Bible verses. Maybe I need to go to church more often.\u201d<\/p>\n Whatever it is, you\u2019re<\/em> doing something wrong<\/em>. It\u2019s all your<\/em> fault<\/em>.<\/p>\n And so we do the only thing we have been taught to do. We do everything in our power to get out of that state of doubt as quickly as we can. For some, if doubt persists, they live lives of quiet desperation, ashamed or afraid to speak up. Others simply walk away from their faith.<\/p>\n Surely, doubt is the enemy of faith, right?<\/p>\n To have faith means<\/em> you don\u2019t doubt, right?<\/p>\n Doubt is a spiritually destructive force that tears you away from God, right?<\/p>\n Wrong.<\/p>\n There is a benefit of doubt.<\/p>\n Doubt can do things spiritually that nothing else can do.<\/p>\n Sometimes we think of our faith as a castle\u2014safe, comfortable, familiar. But what if God doesn\u2019t want us to be comfortable and safe? What if comfortable and safe keep God at a distance?<\/p>\n Doubt tears down the castle walls to force us on a journey. It may feel like God is far away or absent when in fact doubt is a gift of God to move us to spiritual maturity.<\/p>\n Doubt is not a sign of weakness but a sign of growth.<\/p>\n Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God<\/em> behind, but Doubt forces us to look at who we think God is<\/em>.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re honest, we all think we\u2019ve God figured out pretty well. We read the Bible and maybe memorize some of it. We go to church a lot. Maybe even lead Bible studies or something.<\/p>\n We\u2019re doing great, and God must certainly be impressed.<\/p>\n It is so very easy to slip into this idea that we have arrived\u2014that we really think we\u2019ve got all the answers and that we almost possess God.<\/p>\n We know what church he goes to, what Bible translation he reads, we know how he votes, we know what movies he watches and books he reads. We know the kinds of people he approves of.<\/p>\n God happens to like all the things we like. We feel like we can speak for God very easily.<\/p>\n All Christians who take their faith seriously sooner or later get caught up in that problem. We begin to think that God really is<\/em> what we happen to think<\/em> he is. There is little more worth learning learn about the creator of the cosmos. No need. God is the face in the mirror.<\/p>\n By his mercy, God doesn\u2019t leave us there\u2014and doubt is God\u2019s way of helping that happen.<\/p>\n \u201cI want you to die constantly.\u201d \u2014 God<\/strong><\/p>\n Doubt is experienced as distance from God. But that doesn\u2019t mean that God<\/em> is dying for us. Doubt signals that we are in the process of dying to ourselves and to our ideas about God.<\/p>\n Jesus talks about that. He says, \u201dtake up your cross<\/strong>\u201d and ,\u201dlose your life<\/strong> so you can find it\u201d (Matt 10:38-39)<\/p>\n Paul talks about being crucified<\/strong> with Christ\u2014\u201cI no longer live<\/strong>, Christ lives in me\u201d (Gal 2:20); or \u201cYou have died<\/strong> and your life is hidden<\/strong> with Christ in God\u201d (Col 3:3).<\/p>\n All that talk of dying and being crucified and hidden does not describe a one-time moment of conversion. It describes a required daily mode of Christian living\u2014where you surrender control\u2014all the time.<\/p>\n Dying is a normal mode of Christian existence, and doubting is a common way to get the dying process moving. And when you are in that process, God feels far away\u2014but that is when he may be closer to you than he ever was.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t run away from doubt. Don\u2019t fight it. Don\u2019t think of it as the enemy. Pass through it\u2014patiently\u2026 and honestly\u2026 and courageously\u2026. When you are in doubt, you are in a period of transformation.<\/p>\n Welcome it as a gift\u2014which is hard to do to if your entire universe is falling down around you. God is teaching you to trust him<\/em>, not yourself. He means to have all of you, not just the surface, going to church, volunteering part. Not just the part people see, but the part no one sees.<\/p>\n Not even you.<\/p>\n The Dark Side of the Bible<\/strong><\/p>\n God wants you to doubt? Really? What about John 20:31: \u201cThese things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.\u201d<\/p>\n John seems to be saying, \u201cIf you know your Bible, you won\u2019t doubt but believe. So Christian, if you doubt, you just don\u2019t know your Bible well enough. Your faith is weak. Maybe go to one more Bible study that week.\u201d<\/p>\n But think of this from another angle. Jesus himself had his moments where he doubted God and God was very distant from him\u2014God abandoned him\u2014and he knew his Bible very well.<\/p>\n In the garden and on the cross, Jesus said what psalm after psalm says: \u201cGod where are you? I don\u2019t see you anywhere. Are you even there? I am giving up all hope.\u201d<\/p>\n That one passage in John doesn\u2019t cover everything. It just means that John wrote his Gospel so people could see how great Jesus was and put their trust in him. It does not imply \u201chenceforth thou shalt be a perfect faith machine and never doubt.\u201d<\/p>\n Also, I don\u2019t expect the New Testament to say, \u201cDoubt is God\u2019s way of making you grow.\u201d The New Testament doesn\u2019t answer every question we might have for all time. It describes the early mission of the church. The Old Testament is another matter. The Old Testament records Israel long history of day-to-day life with God. And the Old Testament writers aren\u2019t shy about the dark side of their faith.<\/p>\n For example, the Psalms talk about God\u2019s distance. In nearly half of the 150 psalms, something has gone wrong\u2014some barrier has arisen between Israel and faith in God. At times, the psalmist feels abandoned by God and he is holding on by a thread.<\/p>\n One example is Psalm 88. In summary, here is what the psalm says: \u201cGod, I have been on my knees to you night after night. I am so troubled, and in so much agony, I might as well be dead. I am absolutely without hope\u2026and you don\u2019t care. All night and all day I call to you\u2014I\u2019m on my knees\u2014but nothing. I am in absolute pain and the only friend I have is darkness.\u201d<\/p>\n Feel free to call this a faith crisis.<\/p>\n Maybe he doesn\u2019t know his Bible well enough. Maybe he needs to go to another Bible study so he can learn you shouldn\u2019t feel this way, let alone talk this way. I mean, what\u2019s wrong with him and his weak faith?<\/p>\n This \u201cabandoned by God\u201d experience is in the Bible because it is valued as part of normal Another example is Psalm 73. Basically this is what the psalm is about: \u201cYeah I know how the system works: God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked. I\u2019ve read the Bible. I\u2019ve been to Hebrew school. I get it. My problem isn\u2019t that I have forgotten what the Bible says. My problem is that what the Bible says doesn\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n This writer goes on and on about how the Bible says that God is supposed to bless the faithful and punish those who are not. But he looks around him and sees the exact opposite. The wicked and arrogant, they are healthy, strong, they prosper. But he\u2019s doing his best, and\u2014nothing. \u201cI am wasting my time. Why bother? The world makes sense without you. Hey God, if you were there Donald Trump wouldn\u2019t own half of new York City and homeless shelters wouldn\u2019t be struggling for every dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n The dark places of the Bible connect with the dark places of our souls.<\/p>\n I know a lot of people raised in the church who are like the writer of Psalm 73\u2014but they are afraid to talk about it.<\/p>\n They have heard sermons and Bible studies their whole lives where they were taught to think of the world in a certain \u201cChristian\u201d way, and then maybe in high school, maybe in college, they begin to see that it\u2019s more complicated. Then there is a major disconnect between what they had been taught and what they see. Faith is no longer a convincing way of explaining the world, and so they leave it.<\/p>\n When you feel like that, realize that you are right where so many of the writers of the Psalms are\u2014not to mention Ecclesiastes and Job.<\/p>\n Your period of doubt has value\u2014to move you further on in the journey, even when you feel like you\u2019ve left the path altogether<\/p>\n Doubt gets you moving.<\/p>\n Listen to Some Deep People<\/strong><\/p>\n Embrace the doubt. Call it your friend. God is leading you on a journey.<\/p>\n Spiritual masters of the Christian church caught on to this long ago. It is not a part of the contemporary Protestant scene as much (with exceptions<\/a>, of course), which is a shame.<\/p>\n Many (especially Protestant) Christians tend to intellectualize the faith\u2014we live in our heads. Our faith tends to rest in what we know, what we can articulate, what we can defend, how we think. We tend to place \u201cthinking\u201d over \u201cbeing\u201d rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n That is why doubt for people like us<\/em> is the great enemy. We spend a lot of effort in removing doubt. Our world is flooded with books and apologetics organizations whose job it is to give the answers quickly and easily\u2014no struggle, no doubt\u2014all this Jesus stuff, piece of cake.<\/p>\n That attitude robs us of a spiritual experience that you can\u2019t avoid anyway and that wiser Christians, since almost the beginning of Christianity, have told us is vital for the Christian life.<\/p>\n Many people have spent their lives thinking about what these and other mystics wrote concerning their experiences of God. I am not one of them, but I am learning. Let me boil down what they are saying. The \u201cdark night\u201d is a sense of painful alienation and distance from God that causes distress, anxiety, discouragement, despair, and depression. All Christians experience this sooner or later\u2014some more intensely than others, some for longer times than others. But the feeling is the same: they lose their sense of closeness to God and conclude that they no longer have faith. And so they despair even more.<\/p>\n St. John\u2019s great insight is that this dark night is a special sign of God\u2019s presence<\/em>. Our false god is being stripped away, and we are left empty before God\u2014with none of the familiar ideas of God that we create to prop us up.<\/p>\n The dark night takes away the background noise we have created in our lives in order to prepare us to hear God\u2019s voice later on\u2014in time, when God deems we are ready.<\/p>\n When the dark night comes upon us, we are asked simply to surrender to God and trust him anyway. The reason St. John calls this a dark<\/em> night is very important: it is because you have no control<\/em> over what is happening. That is a very important piece in all of this, because people want to control.<\/p>\n Imagine, like the Chilean miners, being all alone in a deep dark cave, miles down, with absolutely not a single ray of light\u2014utterly pitch black. You have no idea where you are or how to get out. All you know is that you are helpless. You try to find your way, you grope, but nothing. You start walking slowly at first, and then you realize that wherever you are, it is big, dark, flat, and you can\u2019t do anything about it.<\/p>\n You are out of control. The point of the dark night has done its job.<\/p>\n Listen to Another Really Deep Person<\/strong><\/p>\n In 1975, the Jesuit philosopher, John Kavanaugh, went to work for three months at the \u201chouse of the dying\u201d in Calcutta with Mother Teresa.<\/p>\n He was searching for an answer to some spiritual stuggles. On his very first morning there, he met Mother Teresa. She asked him, \u201cAnd what can I do for you?\u201d Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. \u201cWhat do you want me to pray for?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peteenns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/images-11.jpeg?resize=190%2C266&ssl=1\" "\\"images")
<\/a>Sometimes things happen in our lives\u2014it may be one big catastrophe or a line of smaller things that pile up\u2014and you start having a lot of doubts. At first, when you have those disruptive thoughts, you try to push them to the side, hoping they\u2019ll just go away, before God notices.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peteenns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/images2.jpeg?resize=192%2C128&ssl=1\" "\\"images\\"")
<\/a> we are only leaving behind the idea of God we like to surround ourselves with\u2014the small God, the God we control, the God who agrees with us.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peteenns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/e4c2ab8cefacee689832ae5f3e4d3ddf-300x50.png?resize=300%2C50&ssl=1\" "\\"e4c2ab8cefacee689832ae5f3e4d3ddf\\"")
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<\/a><\/em> Christian experience. John Calvin said that the Psalms are a \u201cmirror of the soul.\u201d Sometimes the soul looks like Psalm 88. If your soul ever looks like Psalm 88, at least know that you are good company.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peteenns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/images1.jpeg?resize=203%2C248&ssl=1\" "\\"images\\"")
<\/a>This experience of deep doubt is sometimes referred to as the \u201cdark night of the soul.\u201d That expression has come to us through the writings of two sixteenth century Spanish Catholic mystics: John of the Cross and his mentor Teresa of Avila.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peteenns.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/10\/images-21.jpeg?resize=201%2C251&ssl=1\" "\\"images")
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<\/a> India: \u201cPray that I have clarity.\u201d Mother Teresa said firmly, \u201cNo. I will not do that.\u201d<\/p>\n