Quotes about Doubt

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no opportunity for faith either.

Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy. Nor does it offer insurance against feelings of doubt and betrayal. If anything, being a Christian complicates the issue. If you believe in a world of pure chance, what difference does it make whether a bus from Yuba City or one from Salina crashes? But if you believe in a world ruled by a powerful God who loves you tenderly, then it makes an awful difference.

And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God's invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends - where?

Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God wants me to. Prayer is the precise point where those themes converge.

I can worry myself into a state of spiritual ennui over questions like What good does it do to pray if God already knows everything? Jesus silences such questions: he prayed, so should we.

The question {WHY}, though, never goes away-- not for me, not for anybody. We keep groping toward light while living in darkness.

Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

The worst moment for the atheist is

positioned myself. I once described the people I tend to hear from as "borderlanders," those caught in a no-person's-land between faith and disbelief. Some approach the church cautiously, attracted to Jesus but turned off by his followers. Some have fled the church due to bad experiences, yet still yearn for the consolation they felt there. I've spent time in the borderlands myself and want to honor those wandering on the edges, the misfits.

I've yet to meet someone who found their way to faith by being criticized.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you," he said.