Michael J, Kruger has some helpful advice for those dealing with (or helping others to deal with) doubt.
Here’s his advice, mainly in paraphrase form.
1. ‘Doubting is normal.’ It is a normal part of the Christian life. The Scriptures are full of instances of doubt. So is church history. To doubt is not to reject your faith. The Christian says, with the worried father in Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”…
If the church were Christian, then, according to Philip Gulley, ‘inviting questions would be valued more than supplying answers.’
Gulley says that he has come across ‘many’ Christians who are content to rest their faith on some decision, made years before, to ‘invite Jesus into their heart’. They have no desire desire to explore, question, or deepen their outlook beyond that. They are encouraged in this apathy by intellectually lazy pastors, teaching dogmatic truth as a package that must be accepted in its entirety without demur.…
So, finally, to the ninth and last chapter of Peter Enns’ book.
The need for certainty (according to Enns) fosters a number of unholy and unhealthy traits, such as: the ‘vigilant monitoring of who’s in and who’s out’, preoccupation with debating and defending the faith, over-valuing of logical arguments, and unquestioning conformity to intellectual authorities.
Such a faith does not promote trust either in God or others. It provokes, rather, by fear and anxiety. Trust does not grow in an atmosphere of dogmatic certainty. …
In chapter 8 (‘Cultivating a habit of trust’), Peter Enns bares his heart. We learn that in his forties, he went through a bad time. His daughter had developed an anxiety disorder so severe that she had to be sent away to a boarding school far from home. A seemingly co-incidental and almost trivial incident struck him as a ‘God-moment’ that helped him to see that we do not have to know and understand before we commit to God in faith.…
It is a well-known fact that prescriptions for antidepressants have double over the past ten years.
I’ve been reading a short article in the Daily Mail (June 30, 2017).
Various reasons have been put forward to explain this, and there’s probably truth in many of them: many women, for example, are struggling with the pressures of trying to raise a family, hold down a job, and look after ageing relatives.
Another factor may be that mental health conditions are more frequently recognised these days, and there is less of a stigma attached to seeking help.…
‘God Wants You Dead’, exclaims the title of chapter 7 of Peter Enns’ latest book.
Many of us, says Enns, feel doubt creeping up on us, and then start to feel guilty about it. So we fight it. And then, when we find that the doubt won’t go away, we end up living lives of ‘quiet and wretched desperation’.
But doubt is not the enemy of faith, but only the enemy of certainty. In fact, doubt is the friend of faith, because it takes us away from the security ‘knowing what we believe’ and towards trust. …
If we limit faith to correct thinking, we find ourselves unprepared and ill-equipped for what life throws at us. But faith-as-trust enables us to listen to our ‘uh-oh’ moments, and even to grow and mature in our walk with God.
What do we do, for example, with the God of the Bible, with his impatience (Gen 6-9) and violence (Deut 20:10-18; Rev 14:14-16)? How is this any better than today’s ideologically- and religiously-motivated violence?
What do we make of the world-view of the Bible, so completely different from what we now know from modern science? …
OK, so Peter Enns anticipated the objection I raised in response to chapters 3 and 4 of his book.
In chapter 5, he acknowledges that some people might think that some of the psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job are exceptions to the rule. They express doubt, it might be argued, but the rest of the Bible promotes assurance.
Perhaps, responds Enns, but not assurance about what we believe, but whom we trust.
Enns pleads that he is not opposed to ‘knowing’, but, rather, he is opposed to ‘preoccupation with correct thinking’.…
The book of Ecclesiastes goes even further than the psalms in representing this point of view. Life – the life that God has given us – is a sick joke (Eccle 1:13-15). We run around in circles, and have nothing to show for it, for it all ends in the absurdity of death (Eccle 3:19-21). After twelve chapters of more-or-less unrelieved despair, the take-home message is this: trust God and keep his commandments anyway (Eccle 12:12f).…
In chapter 3 of his book, Peter Enns considers those parts of the Bible that give voice to doubt, rather than certainty.
He looks first at those psalms in which the writer complains that things have gone terribly wrong, and that God seems to have gone AWOL. They express, in other words, a crisis of faith. Psalm 88 is a notable example. Enns feels that he and others have been shielded from such expressions of doubt, and even made to feel guilty for having such feelings themselves.…
