Doubt has rather a paradoxical nature about it, certainly when it comes to our embracing or disclaiming it. On the one hand there is truth in Tennyson’s claim that there lives more faith in honest doubt – that it is our doubts as well as our convictions that produce our strongest systems of thought. Yet who could forget Shakespeare…

 

 

Certainly it is true that our doubts hold us back, and when Jesus separates the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25) the goats seem to be disparaged more for what they didn’t do than anything else. So doubt can get us into trouble, particularly if it leads to cowardice, inaction, furtiveness, stagnancy and hopelessness, but it is also sometimes a powerful tool of cognition in our enquiring about the world.

 

Jesus is categorical in His disapproval of doubt – He rebuked Peter for taking his eyes of Him and sinking in the water because Peter became anxious with doubt (Matthew 14:27-31). When talking about prayer Jesus says that if we have faith and do not doubt anything we will be given the power to do anything (Matthew 21:21). Thomas was told off for doubting when he should have known better (John 20:29), and St James says that when it comes to asking for wisdom he who doubts is like a wave of the sea being tossed and blown by the wind (James 1:6). Clearly there is a common theme here – the Bible speaks most frankly to those doubters who really should have known better or whose folly was impairing their vision. There are, naturally, many times in life when our doubts are not only perfectly reasonable, but necessary. If in a children’s play area I see a heavy overhanging branch with parts that appear rotten and doubt whether it is safe to be there, and my doubt transpires with the council removing it, I should not likely be accused of wrongdoing, even by our Lord Himself. 

 

So we see clearly that there is more than one way to doubt, and our general observation seems to be that when our doubt impugns the Lord it is bad, yet when it is used for rationalisation it is often a good thing. We must also give special consideration to the position of unbelievers here as well, for any who disbelieve would be foolish not to doubt when exploring the faith - after all, it is precisely the lack of doubt when doubt was needed that creates those horrible situations of credulity, impressionability and blind faith where people (often young people) do not question their beliefs enough (and those of others) and end up getting in to believing all sorts of nonsense.

 

Doubt is the fluid that certainty bleeds when we cut into it, and that is no bad thing. I remember doubting for several years whether Christianity was true, and looking back I know I have gained lots by spending so much time questioning everything; after all, who could really hear things like ‘we must take up our crosses and follow Christ’, and that we must ‘let our old selves die so that we may have life’ and not question them? Nobody sensible would come into such considerations lightly. I remember very well being struck by the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his wonderful book The Cost of Discipleship. He said:

 

Although I think Bonhoeffer is right that it is the same death every time by virtue of the fact that it is death in Jesus, there is, of course, a sense in which every death is different. And it is precisely those differences that elicit our rationale (and our Tennyson-esque ‘honest doubts’) in the first place. Each person is on a different journey and at different stages of that journey, working towards the common goals that are found in our dying in Christ – but there is no homogeny here, there are no interchangeable facts found in others that one can use to measure one’s own success, for our Lord is doing very different things in all of us. We are all, to use the Epicurean model, like trainee pilots – some will face mostly calm and tranquil skies, others will learn their trade by fighting the storms and tempests. For sure in many cases the more skilful and (possibly) better disciples will be the latter, but it is ‘the same death every time’ only in the sense that it is Jesus for whom we are dying, as it was He that died for us. In every other sense the death is very different and so are people’s doubts and relations.

 

When it comes to doubting the Christian faith, we have seen that Jesus Christ is the sufficient exemplar of His own doctrine – He created a paradigmatic model showing our potential for success by demonstrating the works necessary for being His disciples, but more important He demonstrated the grace for our calling Him Lord by defeating death. That is why the candid verses in the Bible about doubts are there to demonstrate that when we doubt the person of Christ or our walk with Him we are in effect missing something grand. There is no condemnation, in fact, in the book of Jude we are called to ‘Be merciful to those who doubt’, both believers and unbelievers, for we cannot understand their circumstances fully and haven’t walked in their shoes, so who are we to be anything other than merciful? We can by all means help them out of their doubts, for we know the power of the bad one when he sneaks in and turns the first hints of an honest doubt into some vehicle for stagnant pessimism – he pushes and insinuates anxiety into every pore if he thinks (as was the case with Peter on the water) it will take our eyes off Christ.

 

There is another sense in which doubt is good – it is almost opposite to what we have just said, it is in fact a doubt that exposes one of the devil’s favourite games in town – the false security of consensus; that is, not believing something because it is a widely held belief unless we employ a strong engine of doubt and questioning. It’s as the philosopher John Locke said, “Error is none the better for being common, nor the truth the worse for having lain neglected”. 

 

There is a further element to doubt, one that is often used in appearance with humility, where one is so modest that he retains an element of self-doubt because he knows his true state in relation to the glory of God. St Paul often employed this kind of humility, correctly identifying the maxim ‘By the grace of God I am what I am’ – it is only because of God that we have any of our abilities, so often one cannot help but doubt one’s own greatness in the midst of adulation, for in fact, it is that kind of self-doubt which leads to the very humility from which the eyes of those doing the admiring are almost forced upwards off the subject and onto the Divine. An example of this is captured with the great but extremely modest Isaac Newton, who said the following:

 

 

I think the secret to living a full life is of course living for Jesus Christ – but the practical help here is that everything we do in His name must be done with His will at the forefront of our imagination – for then we will remain humble, and everything we do we will treat as though it were an act important enough for Christ Himself. As William Blake once said ‘Imagination is surrounded by the daughters of inspiration’. And I doubt there has been a man alive who could be called great yet could claim he lived a life without much imagination. 

 

For those who are sullied by an abundance of doubt and insecurity that they just cannot shake off, I should like to offer a reminder (to myself as well as everyone else) that faith and tenacity are gifts from God that we must use wisely; we must view them as precious endowments and treat them with great care and attention. All of us have, by our lame attempts at discipline, misused those gifts from God in some way - we have all loved Him or thought of Him or worshipped Him much less than we should have. We have failed to put Him first when we wanted to satisfy our hopes, desires, needs, and aspirations – all of which, by the way, are examples of His gifts to us in the first place. It is a bit like a woman giving her best friend £100 and the friend spending it on seducing the giver’s husband. The betrayal is no different; for when we fail to appreciate God and instead credit the self, we are failing our own senses, we are using against Him that which He gave us. 

 

If we are to live life with the Divine as the primary part of everything we do, we must, as Blake said, ‘Hold infinity in the palm of our hand, and eternity in an hour’. We must sense in every unfulfilled dream that there is a greater Divine profundity offering us bigger connections with Christ. We must sense in anguish and disappointment that there are better things to come. We must sense in frustration that the parts of us to which frustration is attracted are really parts anticipating Heavenly things. And we must sense in beauty, qualities of the Divine that we do not yet know about in full. Everything in our earthly awareness both visually and perceptively intimates something incomplete; it hints of greater things. And even if you are a staunch unbeliever, this intimation will never be far from your thoughts. Heavenly glory is still behind a curtain, and one day Christ will draw it back and let the light of the Divine shine through. But this will be Christ, different from the first time; this will be Christ in all His glory. The spiritual world will remove all things that are not going to last for eternity. The incompleteness will be complete and any doubts we ever had will be turned to glorious certainties.