Why faith needs doubt
Quick! Word association! Don't think just respond.
What's the opposite of night?
What's the opposite of love?
My guess would be your responses were "day, hate."
Okay. Now… bonus round…
What is the opposite of faith?
More than likely you said something along the lines of "doubt."
And that answer makes sense! It sounds right! After all, look at this verse from James 1:
5 If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6 But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
Seems clear. You can either have faith, or you can have doubt. And if you doubt, God will be displeased.
Doubt & Deconstruction
The problem is… so many of us have doubts. We have questions. We don't believe the earth is 6,000 years old and we're not confident the world will end with an antichrist and a rapture.
We're not sure how to believe in the inerrancy of the Bible when we read verses that seem to condone rape or genocide.
We have questions. Dare we say it… we have doubts. And many of us grew up in religious cultures where our doubts were seen as either a problem to be corrected or as a threat to be neutralized.
For so many people this has led to a deconstruction of their faith that led them away from the church and Jesus altogether.
This is what happens when we're told doubt has no place in the life of faith.
But what if that's not what the Bible teaches at all?
Does Jesus hate doubt?
There's a story in Mark 4 where Jesus and the disciples are out on a boat in the middle of a storm, and Jesus is somehow sleeping in the middle of it. The storm gets worse and worse, the waves get higher, the water is now coming up on the boat…
And finally they run to Jesus in a panic and wake him saying "Jesus don't you care if we drown?!?!?!" So Jesus gets up and calms the wind and waves, then turns to the disciples and says "why were you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?"
At first this seems like another "faith v. doubt" story, right? But I don't think that's right.
I think it's very telling that Mark tells us the disciples say "don't you care…"
The problem, I think, isn't that the disciples were afraid. It's not that they were overwhelmed. It's not that they asked Jesus for help! The problem was that their fear led them to doubt Jesus' heart and intentions toward them.
In other words, their doubt about their circumstances wasn't the problem, it was their doubt in Jesus' HEART for them that was the problem.
All throughout the Bible you see God's people doubting, but the question then becomes when they feel doubt, what do they do with it?
And what the Bible encourages us to do over and over and over again is to trust that God's heart for us is good, and bring our doubts to him.
Think about the man who begs Jesus to save his kid and says "if you can…" but when Jesus says "if?!" the man replies "Lord, I believe! Help me with my unbelief!"
Or think about Jacob, who wrestles with an angel throughout the night and refuses to let go. After, Jacob's name is changed to "Israel" because Jacob wrestled with God and didn't give up.
God names his own people after a story of wrestling with God.
What if God 100% gets that doubt is just… part of being human. What if his problem isn't with our doubt, but what we tend to do with it?
Faith can't exist without doubt
I would go so far as to say this: doubt isn't the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith. Think about it! If you're 100% certain about something, then it takes zero faith to act on it. Faith can only exist in the PRESENCE of doubt.
Doubt is only a problem when it keeps us from the presence of God.
When we bring our doubts to Jesus and wrestle with them together, that's actually — more often than not — the way that greater faith exists!
A church with room for doubt
If this is true then, our churches should be a place that makes space for doubt, and teaches people to wrestle with God in search of answers! We wrestle with the Old Testament, struggling to figure out how Jesus could say that the summation of the entire OT is "love God, love your neighbor." We wrestle with how science and faith can inform, not threaten, each other. We wrestle with what it means for us to bring our sexuality to God, and live in the messy reality of seeing where that takes us!
This is central to how we see doubt and faith at The Porch Church. We want our small neighborhood church in Southeast Aurora to be a place where we hold certain those things that are core — for us, our benediction and the Nicene/Apostles Creed — but even in those things acknowledge the wrestling of doubt that leads to faith.
We are a church full of young families and tons of kids, and from an early age our children's ministry teaches our kids to think critically and ask questions. Our student ministry leads kids directly into the big questions, and invites them to work it out in community.
We're a church that makes room for doubt, not because doubt is a virtue but because it is inevitable!
But if we believe that Jesus' heart toward us is good, then we bring our doubts to him. We wrestle with God through the night.
And as we do that, we find a faith stronger than we thought possible.