Faith & Doubt
John Ortberg
(Zondervan, 192pgs, $22h)
We Christians dont like to discuss our doubts. We dont even like to think about them. Having doubt is like insulting God, calling his integrity into question, admitting that we are weaker than we would like to think. So we suppress our doubts to hide our lack of uneasiness about some of the things we have been taught to believe. And there is little advice available to help us through those tentative times. But one of those helps recently came from theologian Alister McGraths 2007 book, Doubting: Growing Through the Uncertainties of Life. Doubt, according to McGrath, is not the same as unbelief and it is not necessarily the antithesis of faith. Doubt creeps in involuntarily, he says, uninvited. Unbelief, on the other hand, is a willful act, a deliberate choice not to believe. According to what I gathered from McGrath, we go from faith to faith through our doubts, not around them, making doubt an unlikely but necessary component to faiththat is, providing we work through our misgivings and do not embrace them.
Apparently, best-selling author John Ortberg has come to similar conclusions in his new book, Faith & Doubt. McGrath, who is a respected theologian, spelled it out in rational, logical terms, but Ortberg is a pastor and presents his case in more familiar terms, using a remarkable gift of disarming wit to approach a very serious subject. At times, between grimaces, I was surprised to hear myself laughing out loud. In the circles I have moved over the years, I sometimes felt it necessary to conceal my doubts because I feared being misunderstood or even censured. So, I kept my uneasy reservations to myself. But writers like McGrath and Ortberg are helping me come out of the closet. Ortberg in the very first sentence of the book frankly confesses, I will tell you a secret: I have doubts, and he admits to them despite the fact that he grew up in the church, went to a faith-based college, then to seminary, walked the straight and narrow, and never sowed any wild oats. It was not the externals of religion that troubled him, he was good at disguising his doubts; it was those inner uncertainties, the seeming paradoxes he encountered in living out his Christian faith. He had bet the farm on faith, yet at times nagging disbelief troubled him.
I not only related but found his candor refreshing.
It may seem strange that Ortberg would write about doubt following his previous book, If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat, which was all about bold, risking, walking-on-water faith. But, then, as I reflect on it, it is not so strange at all. Maybe it will not be to you, either, when you give him a hearing. It seems that when I make my boldest affirmations of faith that some unforeseen doubt creeps in to blind side me. This uncertainty, Ortberg says, can go wrong; it can lead to skepticism, cynicism and even rebellion. But uncertainty can also work for us by pointing out the flaws in your belief system. Uncertainty, when properly faced, can cause us to learn, to push ahead to a firmer understanding of truth, but most especially to be taught to trust.
and then we all leave and go home.
