Every Christian community I’ve been a part of has held a tenuous relationship with doubt. While some certainly allowed more space for doubt than others—usually with extreme caution and very controlled guardrails regarding what could and could not be questioned—doubt didn’t typically hold a high value.
Some communities implied shame with the way they approached teaching characters who doubted in the Bible: Moses’ questions at the burning bush, Barak leaning on Deborah, King Saul’s approach to pretty much everything, the disciple Thomas after the resurrection, etc.
Some took a bait-and-switch approach: doubt was “ok” as long as you landed where they did.
Some portrayed doubt as willing disbelief, or a mindless distraction sent from a cartoonish version of the devil.
More recently, some church leaders have even begun to preach against—I mean manipulate via fear—those who are currently experiencing doubt and faith deconstruction by dismissing them as chasing a fad, or treating them as if they’ve got some kind of spiritual plague. (If only we treated real plagues with the same fervor…le sigh).
Side note: if you’re thinking “Not my church!?” let me just stop you.
The entire world really needs churches and Christians to quit using that phrase.
Starting with “Not my church!?” is exactly what perpetuates harmful practices in churches, and breeds environments for darkness to multiply behind closed doors and in the shadow of large pulpits.
So yes. Your church.
In my experience, the consistent message has been clear:
Doubt is to be downplayed in the face of faith.
“Just have faith. God is in control.”
“When you truly believe, you won’t even need to question.”
“You can doubt…just not THAT.”
No matter the lip service paid from a stage, it seemed that doubt was ultimately designed to be stored in a separate container from faith.
At the same time, the kind of “faith” that was preached looked a whole lot more like a pursuit of certainty than actual faith.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the felt need for certainty. Trust me.
As a human, and a pastor, I feel that deeply.
But faith does not imply fact. And that’s ok.
This simple acknowledgment alone would push Christians face-first into humility with every discussion of what we do and don’t believe—or what we are and aren’t sure of—instead of letting our "faith" grant us permission to speak with pride and arrogance.
Faith is not merely a search for fact, either.
In my opinion, this strange “we can prove it!” mindset has really only effectively served to make millions of dollars for a handful of theologians, while making millions of regular well-meaning Christians comfortable with twisting the Bible into all sorts of jagged angles, all in an effort to reach some form of irrefutable certainty.
Again, I get it.
We want to feel good about what we believe. Confident, even.
Genuine doubt about goodness and God and love and the future can present a chilly, aching pain to deal with. This I know well.
Certainty is a much easier pill to shove, sell, and swallow.
But the library of the Bible wasn’t intended to be used as a science textbook, a history book, a constitution, or a Da Vinci Code novel to keep us scanning for end-times conspiracies. It was collected to give us a glimpse into the heart and potential story of humanity, as well as the heart of God as believed to be revealed in Jesus.
Faith isn’t a set of rules and statements and stories and doctrines to be memorized, like some divine algebraic formula.
Faith is a journey to be lived.
The brilliant, emotionally-intuitive author of Hebrews—whoever she or he was—laid out a simple, profound explanation of faith as being:
assurance built on hope,
and a conviction or decision to take steps toward the unseen. (Hebrews 11:1)
If it’s unseen, if it's hope, it’s not observable fact.
In this light, the typical evangelical approach to faith (at least as I’ve experienced it) seems more akin to a class full of students who both refuse to show their work, and think it irritatingly pointless to do so:
“Well it works, because the formula says it works, or the way I prefer to read it says it works, and that’s all you really need. Your doubts show you have the problem, not us.”
Or in some extreme cases: “I just don’t feel the need to question. That’s what true faith is.”
Is that what strong faith is? Not questioning? Not doubting? Just knowing?
The author of Hebrews understood the struggle within this concept, and followed up their definition by listing some of the more compelling faith “heroes” of ancient Hebrew writings.
Remember: Hebrews was NOT written to 21st century American Christians. It was written to 1st century Jewish Christians who left behind their families, religion, and community to follow the words of Jesus.
These people were deconstructing their centuries-old faith—some at the cost of their own lives—and weren’t sure it was worth it.
The writer assumed their readers knew these stories. In the original extended versions, nearly all of these heroes waded through serious doubt and difficult questions.
Take Abraham and Sarah. In their narrative, God prompted them to uproot and move to a new land in order to represent God to the world. In return for their obedience, this nomadic, aging, childless couple would have countless descendants—who would have land and a nation—and "the world would be blessed through them.”
So faithful obedience is what Abe and Sarah had, right?
Instantly and absolutely: God said it, they believed it, that settled it. Right?
Sure.
Except for when Abraham was told to leave all his kin behind, and he took his nephew Lot with him anyway.
And that time he lied and insisted that his wife Sarah was his sister to save his own hide in a foreign land.
And maybe when Abraham took their servant Hagar as a sex slave to have a child with because he didn’t believe he could have a child with his wife Sarah.
And then when they shamefully banished Hagar and Ishmael to the wilderness because their decision wasn’t as joy-filled as they imagined, and they figured that was the only way forward.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not seeking to vilify Abraham or Sarah. As someone who recently received very grim news from the fertility doctor, I understand desperation. Not THAT level of desperation, but I get it. (Gotta love Old Testament sexual standards, though.)
We can try to Sunday-schoolify these stories all we want. But if we look closely at the faith journeys of Abraham and Sarah—who would never hold nor see their own story written on parchment, and wouldn’t even experience MOST of their hopes coming to fruition—what do we see?
Certainty? Constant trust? Debates about proof? Heavens no.
We see doubt. Questions. Desperation. Uncertainty. Failures.
Layered upon hope. Anticipation. Possibilities. Improbabilities.
Their story is one big beautiful, horrendous, encouraging, nerve-wracking mess.
It’s not in their certainty that God meets them. It’s in their doubt.
Heck, Abraham and Sarah couldn't prove a darn thing. If they could, it wouldn't have been faith.
That's WHY we celebrate their faith journey, with all its dips and dives.
When faith is fact, there is no authentic space to experience real disappointment, and true moments of doubt are silly illusions at best.
Although that kind of faith may seem strong, in practicality it is quite brittle, as it cracks and crumbles at the first sign of difficulty, or when results doesn’t line up as promised. Which often forces its adherents to perform a variety of odd, dissonant, theological acrobatics to explain why.
The scaly side of the faith-as-fact approach is that no matter how righteous or good or godly someone is (or isn’t), or no matter what one does or don’t believe, there will still be times when what should happen doesn’t, and when what shouldn’t happen does.
Just ask John the Baptist in prison.
Or ask my female ministry friends who have endured blatant sexism by arrogant male leadership at their (and perhaps your) church in order to be able to serve, lead, and use their gifting and abilities in some capacity.
Or ask any couple who has faced infertility.
Or ask my former students who attend Oxford High school.
It’s in those kind of moments that faith-as-fact struggles to stand.
But...if faith is a journey, as the author of Hebrews suggests, then doubt doesn’t just get a day pass, it holds a permanent place in the process of faith. When genuine doubt is not shunned, but welcomed, faith shows immense strength in its flexibility, not its rigidity.
Doubt doesn't detract from faith. It strengthens it.
Abraham and Sarah doubted publicly and frequently, and their story is still taught and celebrated, messes and all.
They showed us that you can still move forward while taking your doubts with you.
So to the deconstructing and the doubting folks in my circles, I say this:
Doubt what you need to,
question what you need to,
and ignore anyone who shames you for it, or cautions you against it.
Just keep moving, keep building, and keep looking toward what you don’t see yet, because
Faith doesn’t begin when you stop doubting.
It begins when you start hoping.
Hoping that what you see now might not be all there is to see.
Hoping that even in pain and sorrow there can be progress and peace.
Hoping that even if you think the church has driven horribly off course, a better way forward could still be found.
Hoping that even in the unknown, good can still exist, love can still act, and new routes can be found.
Hoping that even in the unknown, good can still exist, love can still act, and new routes can be found.
No matter what you believe, or even what beliefs you've decided to let go, if you are willing to hold doubt in one hand, and hope in the other, you just might be surprised at what could happen when you take a step toward the (yet) unseen that you know is possible.
Who knows, people might even tell your story one day.
