Quotes about Doubt

judging by how the Bible actually behaves—God did not design scripture to be a hushed afternoon in an oak-paneled library. Instead, God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for us to be stretched and to grow.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all

We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element—maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosophy or science. "Some 'chosen people'! What kind of God did you say you follow? Apparently one who lets bad things happen to you.

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That's how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it's enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

I didn't know how to "do" faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.

We should not be surprised when we find ourselves in a similar spot, experiencing a God who is not beholden to our thinking, a God who doesn't act according to our sense of certainty, even if we can find a Bible verse or two to back it up. God can't be proof-texted. God will not be backed into a corner.

Christianity is a setup for letting go of certainty. The two pillars of the Christian faith express the mystery of faith: incarnation and resurrection. Of course, there's more to the Christian faith, but two elements make Christianity what it is, and both dodge our powers of thought and speech.

One of the great comforts of Israel's epic is that it contains raw expressions of fierce doubt and lack of trust in God embraced by the ancient Israelites as part of their faith. I am thankful to God for this Bible rather than a sanitized one where spiritual struggles of the darkest kind are brushed aside as a problem to be fixed rather than accepted as part of the journey of faith.

But doubt is not the enemy of faith, a solely destructive force that rips us away from God, a dark cloud that blocks the bright warm sun of faith. Doubt is only the enemy of faith when we equate faith with certainty in our thinking.

Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to "know what you believe," that the more faith you "have," the more certain you are.

Doubt means spiritual relocation is happening. It's God's way of saying, "Time to move on.

Rather than defining faithfulness as absolute conformity to authority and tribal identity, a trust-centered faith will value in others the search for true human authenticity that may take them away from the familiar borders of their faith, while trusting God to be part of that process in ourselves and others, even those closest to us. The choice of how we want to live is entirely ours.