Dialogue with Doubt
I stumbled across this lecture by John Hall, a theology professor at McGill and I thought it had a lot of awesome elements. Let me quote his conclusion:
“In other words, faith is a dialogue with doubt. Doubt is not a stranger to the faithful. ‘Lord, I believe, help my unbelief’–this is the prayer of true faith. Faith in which there is no doubt is dead faith, said Unamuno. And that, I believe, is an accurate representation of Reformation faith. Christians are not people who are all absolute certitude and no questions: they are people whose confidence in God is always being worked out in the heat of day-to-day living. They must always renew their trust, because their living is also characterized by a good deal of mistrust, both of God and their neighbours. It is as they confess their doubt that they are able to glimpse again the mysteries that brought them to faith.”
“This also means that they are able to have discourse with those who stand outside the house of faith. They are ’set apart’ from the world, it is true; but they are also called to be ambassadors of Christ in the world; and they can only achieve that ambassadorial status if they are able to share, as human beings, the reasons why their worldly neighbours do not believe. The church exists in the world, not as a colony of pure believers, total believers, above all the others; it exists in the world as a community of those whose struggle of faith is also a struggle with worldly doubt. For that reason and that reason alone they are able to have discourse with their world. Doubt, therefore, though it is a negative quality, has a positive function. Without it, we could neither understand nor have communion with a doubting world.”
Perhaps that function is a bit too heavy handed, but I think it is a well-put point. By heavy-handed, I mean that thinking too heavily about the function of doubt could get us away from dealing with the doubt itself. Then we become self-conscious doubters doubting for the sake of communicating… But maybe I always put too many layers on things.
History and Christianity
The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright, Chapter 4
How about this for a reading for next week? I know it’s too long, but it’s taken me forever just to get it scanned and online in some form–if someone else could take a look and decide something, I’d appreciate it.
