Dr. Timothy Keller, senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church speaks at Movement Day Global Cities at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City on Thursday October 27, 2016.
Doubt, lack of certainty, skepticism. Call it what you will. The experience is inevitable in the Christian faith.
We all get to points in our lives where we just don’t “know what we believe anymore.”
When we enter that period, our first priority is not to get out of it, fix it, and bring it all back to the way it was.
Once the doubt hits, there is no going back to the way things were.
Our only choice is how to live, and for people of faith I see three choices:
1. Make believe nothing happened and everything is OK. Stay in the game, bury your thoughts, and keep on as usual.
2. Think of that period as a temporary bump in the road, and if handled properly, you will safely wind up back where you were, perhaps with even greater resolve.
3. Accept that period as an opportunity for spiritual growth, an invitation to take a pilgrimage of faith without predetermined results.
In Evangelical and Fundamentalist circles, choices 1 and 2 reign: “Stop making waves and get with the program” or “My period of doubt was simply a momentary lack of faith on my part, but now I have clearer reasons for why my faith is just fine as it is.”
For me, choice 3 is far more intellectually appealing and spiritually satisfying:
“I’m not sure what has happened and I’d give anything to go back to the way things were. But I know that can’t be. Instead I choose to try and trust God even in this process, to see where the Spirit will lead, even if I don’t know where that is. I need to let go of thoughts and ‘positions’ that gave me (false) confidence and begin the journey toward learning to rely on God rather than ‘my faith.'”
The trick, as many skeptical Christians have found out the hard way, is finding people to talk with about their doubts without being made to feel like they just “don’t get it.” As a college professor I deal with these types of inner struggles in my students on a regular basis.
What is triggering this post is Nicholas Kristof’s recent interview of Tim Keller in The New York Times, “Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller.”
Kristof is asking questions of Keller about the challenges to being a Christian the 21st century. You can read the brief interview for yourselves and draw your own conclusions (aren’t you glad I’m giving you permission?), but I would have answered the questions quite differently from Keller, ironically (perhaps) for pastoral reasons.
I grant the constraints and artificiality of an interview (Kristof notes that the “conversation has been edited for space and clarity”). Even so, if I were genuinely struggling and skeptical about my standing in the Christian tradition, Keller’s answers would have sounded more dismissive than pastoral, more in quick “fix it” mode with ready “answers” than truly listening to the legitimacy of these recurring concerns.
Despite Keller’s protests, the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus invite genuine intellectual skepticism, not simply because of the nature of these events, but precisely because of the Bible’s varied and even confusing reports of them. The resurrection accounts differ considerably from one another and cannot be merged — they were not meant to be. The virgin birth is known only to Luke and Matthew — Mark and John don’t mention it and Paul, though given ample opportunity, never even alludes to it.
Simply reading the Bible raises the concerns and, intellectually speaking, they are not easily solved.
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SOURCE: PeteEnns.com
Peter Enns, Ph.D., is Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University.
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