Recently, I listened to some speakers discuss the religious nature of doubt, how everyone doubts, and how doubt really comes in only two different categories. Essentially, the speakers noted that the nature of one’s doubt stems from the nature of one’s heart, which generally takes on two main postures of pride or humility.
Tim Keller classifies all doubt into the two categories of either dishonest doubt or honest doubt. He says dishonest doubt is proud and lazy. It responds to God’s revelation in Scripture by saying ‘that’s impossible’ or ‘that’s just silly’ and then walks away. These statements, of course, are not arguments—they are just assertions. Keller notes that dishonest doubt is close-minded; it refuses to consider the possibility that there exists purposes and power beyond one’s initial comprehension.
By contrast, honest doubts are humble in nature because they lead you to ask genuine questions, not just put up a defiant wall. When you ask a real question, it puts you in a position of humility and vulnerability. Humility means that you admit there is something you do not yet know. And so, what if God gives you an answer? And what if that answer contradicts you, shatters your categories, or demands things from you that you feel like you are not yet ready to give? Honest doubt is open to challenging beliefs; it is open-minded.
Many people have doubts, and really everyone should have doubts because that means that their faith (whatever it might be) is being critically examined and being taken seriously, not just merely assumed or naively believed.
All my life I have struggled with doubt. And I have definitely not been an honest doubter all my life either, not even close. Popular questions such as these have troubled and wearied me: How can we trust that the Bible is reliable? Can we be assured that Jesus resurrected from the dead? How can intense suffering coexist with an all-powerful and all-loving God? How come the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament seem like they have as much in common as oil and water? Why is homosexuality ‘wrong’, especially when it seems like Christians just pick and choose what they want to believe from the Bible’s many outdated rules like not ‘touching pigskins’ or not ‘wearing two types of cotton cloth’? Does the innocent tribal person who has never heard the gospel go to heaven or hell, and why? Why can’t all religions just lead to the same God anyways?
I will say that my episodes of dishonest doubt never really gave me relieving answers, just bitter rejection, apathy, and justification to sin. But honest doubt, on the other hand, actually led me not only to answers, but also–and more importantly–to peace with those answers.
If you are really asking God—from humble doubt—for insight into who he is and what he does, he might just give it to you. Are you open to the possibility of a God who might give you uncomfortable answers? Likewise, Keller profoundly describes doubt as a foot poised: it can go backwards into unbelief, but it can never go forwards without picking up a foot.
But every doubter has to be consistent and fair in his doubts, too. Are you so confident in your doubts that you are unwilling to doubt your own doubts? To be fair, you must treat your doubts like your doubts treat you. You are only being fair to your doubts by doubting your doubts as well, because doubts are, after all, inherently doubtful and subject to doubtfulness. Conversely, you are not being fair to your doubts when you choose to not doubt your doubts; by not doubting your doubts, you have give unwarranted power to your doubts than they deserve or warrant.
Interestingly enough, Keller notes that the top two reasons people lose their faith have nothing to do with intellectual reasons. Rather, such controlling doubt stems from pain (that we have gone personally experienced and the inability that a good God would allow it to happen) and the desire for sexual freedom. Quite possibly, intellectual objections to the Christian God may not always be sincerely intellectual in nature, but might instead be a smokescreen to conceal or justify matters of the heart that are striving to find any reason to reject God’s authority in favor for their own.
At the end of the day, however, these things are not rational arguments, of course, but things that cloister our minds from the possibility of an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-ruling God. Keller says that the problem is not the doubt; it is the proud, unyielding, self-centered heart behind the doubts.
Are you a doubter? I hope so. But let’s at least be honest doubters who take our gaps of understanding to God in humble admission and eager disposition.
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75% of this blog is taken verbatim from Tim Keller and JD Greear’s adaption of Keller’s sermon on Mary and Zechariah; here is the link: http://www.jdgreear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/2f-The-Fear-of-Hopelessness-Luke-1-26-38-Do-Not-Be-Afraid.pdf
