C. Michael Patton has some good thoughts on how doubt works
in people’s lives and how this is operative in a number of people moving away
from the faith as they reach their twenties. Patton’s focus is primarily intellectual in nature. He does recognize there are other kinds
of challenges. He states the
challenges this way:
Intellectual
challenges: Often, the doubt comes from intellectual challenges. Challenges to
the Bible’s reliability. Challenges from science. Challenges to the very need
for a belief in God.
Experiential
challenges: These type of challenges come from God’s actions (or lack thereof)
in our lives. This is exemplified by prayers that don’t get answered, the
apparent silence of God in a person’s experience, or a tragedy out of which you
or someone else was not rescued. These experiential challenges are normally the
catalyst which eventually ignite intellectual challenges.
As the rest of Patton’s discussion makes clear his primary
focus is on the intellectual challenges and how to best address them from an
early age through a good grounding in the “intellectual viability of the
Evangelical faith.” All of this is
good and ought to be affirmed. In
what follows I want to broaden Patton’s thought to include other
perspectives—especially focusing on the “experiential challenges” to faith.
J. P. Moreland and Klaus Issler have written a wonderful
book entitled In Search of a Confident
Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting God (IVP, 2008). In this book Moreland and Issler tackle
these categories of “intellectual” and “experiential” challenges in an
insightful manner. They begin by
making some important distinctions that are helpful:
First,
one must distinguish among (1) unbelief
(a willful and sinful setting of oneself against a biblical teaching), (2) doubt (an intellectual, emotional or
psychological hindrance to a more secure confidence in some teaching or in God
himself—I believe something but just have doubts) and (3) lack of belief (I don’t believe something but know I should and
want to—I need help).
Second,
as we shall see, not all doubt is explicitly intellectual. There are deep affective, psychological
issues involved as well. For
example, if you had attachment issues as a child and were not regularly
connected to warm, strong, loving parents, you may have difficulty believing
that God the Father is tender and kind.
If so, then what is essential for developing greater confidence in God
includes participating in healthy relationships and engaging in spiritual
formation exercises, perhaps also being involved in therapy.
Third,
confidence is not an all-or-nothing affair. If one doe not have confidence in something, he or she may
lack trust to varying degrees. The
same may be said for having trust in something. (pp. 21-22)
These are important distinctions that people need to be made
aware of for their spiritual health.
The pangs of doubt are not an indication of sinfulness that needs to be
suppressed. Confidence in God is
something that ebbs and flows because it is a relational category. We are in relationship with God and we
have the ability to grow closer to him or move away from him. Failure to understand these distinctions
leads to problems in the church, as Moreland and Issler point out:
Thus, we now have a stifling, stagnating
situation in the evangelical community: People do not feel safe in expressing
doubt or lack of belief about some doctrinal point—even the question of whether
they actually believe in God. The result is that people hide what
they actually believe from others, and even from themselves, all the while
continuing to use faith-talk to avoid being socially ostracized in their local
fellowship. Because we do not fully understand assensus (and fiducia; see below), we have
unintentionally created a situation in which people do not know how to
distinguish what they believe from what they say they
believe. Thus, they substitute community jargon for authentic trust.
This is a powerful point! The language of faith (“community
jargon”) is not the same as faith.
Unless we recognize the potential dangers of this our churches will not
be healthy communities of authentic faith.
To effectively address this situation, we
must create safe, honest, nondefensive fellowships in which people are given
permission to be on a faith journey, with all the warts, messiness and
setbacks that are part of such a journey. We must also address
general and specific intellectual doubts, provide insights about the affective,
emotional hindrances to growth in confidence in God, and become more
intentional about bearing credible witnesses to each other regarding answers to
prayer and other supernatural experiences that strengthen faith. (p. 22)
That last sentence lays out three
categories to be addressed: (1) intellectual doubts, (2) emotional hindrances,
and (3) the need to share with one another God’s active presence in our lives
through answered prayer and other supernatural experiences. We must beware of attempting to focus
only or, even primarily, on the intellectual issues to the exclusion of these
other areas. Later in the book
Moreland and Issler make these important comments:
If you had to guess, what would you
identify as the most prominent source of doubt in America today? Is it certain discoveries of
science? Incredulity about some stories
in the Bible? The intolerance of
Jesus’ claims to be the only way?
These are not even close.
In his study of doubt and defection from Christianity, sociologist
Christian Smith claims that far and away the chief source of doubt comes from
God’s apparent inactivity, indifference or impotence in the face of tragedy and
suffering in the respondents’ lives and in others’ lives, and the apparent lack
of God’s interventions and help in the toil and fatigue of daily troubles.
Notice that this is not simply the
traditional “problem of evil.” It
is the “problem of evil” personalized.
It is the “hiddenness of God”—his seeming indifference and
aloofness—that is the main issue.
In light of his study, Smith claims that
spiritual experiences are a major source of development in trust in God and
strengthening of that trust: “Very many modern people have encountered and do
encounter what are to them very real spiritual experiences, frequently vivid
and powerful ones. And these often
serve as epistemological anchors sustaining their religious faith in even the
most pluralistic and secular of situations.”
With two qualifications, we believe Smith
is onto something very important.
First, spiritual experiences in themselves can be dangerous and
misleading, so they cannot sustain on their own the weight of religious,
especially Christian, conviction.
However, given a framework of objective biblical revelation (e.g.,
Jesus’ promises developed in the last chapter) and a biblically pregnant view
of God-confidence that includes the various factors covered in this book,
experiences of the triune God, his love and mercy, and his responses to prayer
are powerful sources of encouragement and confirmation of reliance on God. Second, since Christian growth is a
communal and not merely an individualistic endeavor, we would expand Smith’s
frame of reference from personal experiences of God to include hearing of, even
experiencing, his presence and actions vicariously in and through the lives of
others. (pp. 133-134)
In light of this there is needed more than
simply traditional apologetics—as needed as this is! What is needed is an integration of the intellect and the
experiential. Our youth must be
taught how to think (apologetics, theology, philosophy, etc.) and how to
experience God (what to expect, what happens when God feels distant, how do I
develop an interactive relationship with an invisible Being?). There is the need for what once was
called “spiritual direction.” Moreland
and Issler move us in the right direction with their book. May we heed the message.
