DOUBT

Any Christian who is intellectually engaged and reflecting about his faith will inevitably face the problem of doubt. This problem, I believe, must be very seriously addressed. Too often Christian leaders give lip service to the importance of the mind and the quest after truth, but have a sort of glib confidence that such a quest will invariably wind up at the truth of Christianity. But such a result is by no means guaranteed. During the 1960s, for example, when I was an undergraduate, many brilliant students passed through the doors of Wheaton College (Illinois), but those years were also characterized by widespread doubt, cynicism, and unbelief with regard to the faith. I came to Wheaton at the tail end of the sixties, and it troubled me deeply to see some of my classmates, whose intellectual abilities I admired, lose their faith and, to all appearances, reject Christ. This brought home to me in a powerful way how serious the problem of doubt can be.

And yet the church tends to shuffle this problem under the rug. How many sermons have you ever heard on how to deal with doubt in your Christian life? I know of only a couple of books on this subject. Perhaps because Christians aren't supposed to have any doubts, we smile and pretend that this problem doesn't exist. But it does, and nobody is exempt.

Some years ago, for example, while I was on sabbatical at the University of Arizona in Tucson, the pastor of the Baptist church my wife and I were attending stood up and announced to his congregation that he had experienced a great spiritual victory, which he wanted to share: for the past year he had doubted whether God exists, but now those doubts had been resolved and he felt a new confidence in the Lord! I was so surprised by this admission — who would have thought that this successful pastor of a burgeoning church had doubted that there even is a God? I greatly respected him for his honesty, for what his testimony communicated to his people was that they should not be ashamed of their doubts, when they had them, but could admit them and work through them and seek the help of their pastor, who had walked down that lonely road himself.

A Christian who is thinking for himself will confront doubts; and doubt, if not properly dealt with, can be tremendously destructive of one's spiritual life. You may confront objections to, or intellectual difficulties with, the Christian faith that you cannot answer, and these unanswered questions may lead you to doubt that Christianity is true. Those doubts then begin to gnaw away at the vitality of your spiritual experience: Maybe it's all an illusion, you think. Maybe I'm just kidding myself. Your devotional life begins to lag or grow dry, for how can you devote yourself to someone who maybe isn't there? Why go on deceiving yourself? That feeling then deadens you to speaking of Christ to others. As one seminary student who was struggling with doubt told me, "How could I tell someone else to receive Christ when I wasn't even sure myself that it was the truth?"

Pretty soon you're on a downward spiral that you can't seem to stop. But externally you continue to put on a good face and go to church. You can't admit your doubts to others — what would they think? And so a sort of secret battle rages within, destroying your spiritual life from the inside out, leaving you an empty shell. To make matters worse, you sense your own hypocrisy, and this only serves to add the burden of guilt to the load of doubt you already bear. What can be done? Is there any antidote to doubt?

Well, to begin with, we have to admit that there are no easy answers to the problem of doubt. There is no simple, quick recipe that if followed will make your doubts vanish like magic. You will probably have to work through your doubts in a slow and agonizing process. You may have to endure what saints have called "the dark night of the soul," or "the dark valley," before coming into the light again; but be assured that many, many great men and women of God have traveled that same path before you and have emerged victorious at the end. Your struggle is not unique, and there is hope of a happy ending.

But what can you do to speed your journey along that path, or better, to avoid it? Let me make four practical suggestions.

First, recognize that doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in a spiritual warfare and that there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Paul reminds us that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Eph. 6:12). Doubt is not just a matter of academic debate or disinterested intellectual discussion; it involves a battle for your very soul, and if Satan can use doubt to immobilize you or destroy you, then he will.

Unfortunately, the spiritual dimension inherent in the problem of doubt is often ignored by those involved in higher learning. When I was an undergraduate at Wheaton College, an attitude was prevalent among the students that doubt was actually a virtue and that a Christian who did not doubt his faith was somehow intellectually deficient or naive. But such an attitude is unbiblical and confused. It is unbiblical to think of doubt as a virtue; to the contrary, doubt is always portrayed in the Scriptures as something detrimental to spiritual life. Doubt never builds up; it always destroys. How could the students I knew at Wheaton College have got things so totally reversed? It is probably because they had confused thinking about their faith with doubting their faith. Thinking about your faith is, indeed, a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith.

We need to keep the distinction clear. A student came up to me once after one of my lectures and said, "How come everything you say confirms what my pastor has always taught?" Somewhat amazed, I laughed and said, "Why shouldn't it?" He replied, "Well, all of the other men in the department challenge my faith." My response was, "Look, I don't want to challenge your faith; I want to challenge your thinking. But I want to build up your faith."

My experience as a young Christian of seeing some of my college classmates lose their faith left a deep impression on me, and when I began teaching I resolved to do all I could to help my students stay in the faith while still exploring the intellectual issues about the faith. In particular, I resolved never to present objections to Christianity without also presenting and defending various solutions to those objections. One of my colleagues who did not follow this method was causing some concern among certain Christian students in his classes. "I was only trying to get them to think," he explained to me. "I was...