On Faith & Doubt: Looking into the Holes and Finding Christ

Faith and doubt seem like two things that should never be mixed. Christians place a lot of emphasis on faith. But rarely do we ever talk about doubt. When we do we usually talk about it negatively: "You shouldn’t question God’s will"; "Never doubt God’s love." For this reason, we tend to think of doubt as the opposite of faith. 

But is it? 

  

Today’s Gospel -- (John 20:19-31) -- seems to reinforce the idea that doubt and faith are opposites. The story begins with the disciples gathered together on the evening of the same day that Jesus rose from the dead. The doors of the house where they met were locked “for fear of the Jews” (v. 19). Suddenly Jesus appears to them, gives them his “Peace,” and demonstrates that he is alive by showing them the nail prints in his hands and his pierced side. Naturally, they rejoice when they realize that it really is him! ...except for Thomas. He wasn’t there.

 

When Thomas finally rejoins his friends they tell him that they had seen the Lord. Yet Thomas balks. He refuses to believe. Instead he issues a challenge: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (v. 25). For this reason, history has dubbed him “Doubting Thomas.”

 

Yet, perhaps, Thomas was not so much a doubter as he was a realist. Remember that just a few days earlier he had encountered reality like never before. His master had been arrested, sentenced to death, and crucified. Now he and his friends huddled in fear for their own safety. To add to their confusion, some women from their company had started a rumor earlier that day of an empty tomb, prompting two of them to investigate, but coming back with no answers. Now his friends were saying that they had actually seen the risen Jesus. How convenient that he was not there! Should it really surprise us that Thomas reacts with skepticism, much like a terminally ill person who has already accepted his fate might react to the news of a new miracle cure? 

 

When we stop to think about it, Thomas was not demanding anything more than the other disciples had already received. His friends “rejoiced when they saw the Lord,” but only after Jesus had shown himself to them. Yet, eight days later, when Thomas finally encounters the risen Jesus for himself, he ends up making the chief confession of John’s Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28). Looked at this way, Thomas emerges, not as a rebuked doubter, but as a model disciple, the one who echoes the opening acclamation of John’s Gospel - “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1).

 

Let me suggest, then, that Thomas’ problem was not doubt so much as it was disbelief. This is where many modern translations of the Bible confuse matters. The New Revised Standard Version translates Jesus’ words to Thomas incorrectly -- “Do not doubt but believe” (v. 27) -- which seems to support the idea that faith and doubt are opposites. But the Greek text says something quite different: “Do not be unbelieving but believing.” In other words, Thomas’ reaction was a matter of disbelief. Doubt and disbelief are two separate issues.

 

Commenting on faith in the Gospel of John, Luther Seminary professor, Karoline Lewis, states: “Always a verb, never a noun, believing for John is a statement of abiding in Jesus. To believe in Jesus is not an assertion of certain doctrinal commitments, nor is it something that is strong one day but wavering the next.” Might this mean that faith leaves some room for doubt?

The theologian Paul Tillich thought so: “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.” Tillich understood doubt as having a pivotal role in the spiritual life, helping us to grow into a mature faith by challenging naïve assumptions and childish notions.  

But popular theology says otherwise. We are told that the more faith we have, the fewer questions we will ask, and the more certain we will be. Is it any wonder that many give up on faith entirely as a burden that few can bear? Building on Tillich’s insight, popular author, Anne Lamott adds: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely.” Herein lies the crucial difference between disbelief and doubt. 

 

Disbelief is a kind of certainty; not the brute fact kind represented by an equation like 2+2=4. Rather, disbelief is a disposition towards something or someone that we may feel warrants our distrust. Doubt, on the other hand, admits that certainty eludes us, even while longing for answers to assuage it. Doubt rises up to challenge any supposed answer that does not satisfy its rigorous demands. For this reason it can sometimes resort to disbelief, like in the case of Thomas, particularly when confessional fidelity (often mistaken for faith) leaves little room for honest inquiry. But doubt can also partner with faith. In Tillich’s account, it is “one element of faith,” leading the believer to an authentic (read: honest) encounter with faith’s object. Indeed, doubt and faith are woven much closer together in the history of Christian thought and devotion than is often recognized. 

 

In other words, too many Christians measure their faith by a metric of presumption, not realizing that presumption is just another form of certainty. As a result Christians weigh their faith in terms of how committed they are to readymade answers for the “how,” the “what” and (especially) the “why” questions of things we cannot possibly ever know. Yet faith is not knowledge, at least not in an empirical sense. Rather, as Hebrews tells us, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” (11:1).

 

Readymade answers to difficult questions can never hope to withstand the waves of doubt that threaten to sweep them away, along with any houses that we might build upon their sandy foundations. Rather, as Lamott further observes, “Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.” Faith operates within the uncertainties of the now, looking forward to a more hopeful when. Faith goes beyond what can be seen, what can be touched, what can be known with certainty, even for someone like Thomas; even after Thomas sees and handles the risen Jesus for himself.  

 

In the final analysis, Thomas’ confession - “My Lord and my God” - is not the declaration of a scientist arriving at a conclusion after analyzing the results of an experiment. Rather it is a disciple’s confession; a disciple who, even after losing his way, is called back from the precipice of an “unbelieving certainty” to the confidence of a “believing relationship” - a relationship that proves more than adequate to strengthen one’s resolve to remain hopeful in uncertain times ahead. Is it is any wonder, then, that Jesus reserves the greatest blessing (v. 29) for those “who have not seen and yet have come to believe”?

Amen.