From time to time I find myself in conversations with people who have gone to church all their life but feel they aren’t real Christians because they have doubts.
Really? Since when did doubt stop anyone being a person of faith? That’s like saying you’re not a real spouse because your partner occasionally gets on your nerves.
Doubt is a vital part of the life of faith. If you don’t have doubts, or, at the very least, questions about your faith, chances are you belong to a fundamentalist group that doesn’t allow questioning, or you are avoiding difficult issues you need to grapple with.
There is no call for Christians to be afraid of doubt. If God is truth, God is not going to be threatened by what we ask, no matter how brilliant we are.
I realized in my twenties that you don’t have to leave your brain at the door when you enter church. A lot of very smart people are Christians. Intellectually, Christianity makes as much sense as most other positions, either religious, atheist or agnostic.
Later in my life, I learnt something opposite but just as important: there are things about faith that are never going to be explained in a rational way. God is mystery as much as anything else, and a plodder like me can have as deep a connection with God as a theological genius.
A lot of people who feel guilty about having doubts are worried about things that seem unbelievable – the literal interpretation of the Bible being a major stumbling block.
But the majority of Christian scholars have not interpreted the Bible literally for centuries. It is not a historical or scientific document in the modern sense. Holy writ can be true without being factual.
There are always going to be good reasons why the most faithful of us have trouble seeing where God is – when we run up against appalling suffering and shocking evil for example. But these are dilemmas that we need to address if we are to grow into a mature faith.
The one thing it is fatal for Christians to do is to pretend – either that they have all the answers, or that the questions have not occurred to them. Australians, with their finely honed crap detectors see right through such phoniness.
Church at its best is where we can be honest about our doubts and questions.
Together, as faithful, doubting Christians, we can explore the many fine minds who have tackled these issues, we can share our own experiences of finding God in the depths, and we can pray for ourselves and each other as we wrestle with the uncertainty and ambiguity in life. Together we can echo the words of the father in Mark’s gospel who asked Jesus to heal his son – ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’.