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Doubt and Faith - Part 1

Doubt and Faith - Part 1

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It’s not possible to talk about doubt without talking about faith. During my growing-up years, the two were linked but in adversarial ways. If you had doubts, you didn’t have faith. The solution to doubt was more faith. You were judged if you had questions because doubt was often synonymous with questions. If you had a question, it meant you had doubts and, therefore, you didn’t have faith.


I had questions. Sometimes I think people thought I was just a smart aleck, but the questions were important to me. They mattered to me. Yet rarely did anyone answer them. Even the people who tolerated my questions had to have the last word. I wasn’t invited to work it out, talk it out, think it out—I was invited (challenged, really) to have more faith.


I struggled with hell. With evolution. With perfect holiness. With sexuality. I was a teenager growing up in a holiness church; I struggled with everything. The answer to my struggles was always to have more faith. Part of the difficulty with that answer is that no one ever explained to me what “more faith” was or how to get it. Since it can’t be quantified, how can I know if I have more? The answer to that was if you have more faith then you will have fewer questions. It seemed to me to be a “Christian” way of telling me to shut up.


Questions do not mean doubt. Questions mean curiosity. Questions mean I don’t understand. I’m confused. Can someone help me figure this out? I’m lost and can’t find my way.


Have you ever stood on a street corner in a strange city and asked someone to tell you how to get where you are going? What would you think if the reply was, “Well, just have more faith”?


To honor a person’s questions is to honor the person, to honor an honest seeker after truth. I think to honor a person’s questions is to honor his or her faith that there is an answer. There is a way beyond this place where I am stuck. One of the early convictions in the Church of God (Anderson, IN)—the faith group that is my home—was that we live open to the truth. How can we discover and learn if the context in which we worship is one that defines questions as faithlessness and, therefore dishonors the genuine seeker after truth?


Faith is living as if what I believe is true. Faith is not simply knowing stuff. Someone famous once said that the opposite of faith is not doubt; it’s certainty. Jesus, we often say, is the answer, but what does that really mean? I think it means that we are invited into a lifelong relationship with Jesus. We are called to walk with him into God’s future, trusting that he will not leave us or forsake us, and that in the process of living with, walking with, talking with, and asking of, the answers will be revealed.




Arthur Kelly

Arthur Kelly has served as a teacher and administrator at Warner Pacific University, in publishing and editorial work at Warner Press, and in the national offices of Church of God Ministries. He is a reader, journaler, coffee drinker, lover of conversation, and eager to engage students and others who understand life as a place for lifelong learning, following Jesus, and gaining wisdom.