Dealing with Doubt
a sermon based on John 20:19-29
by
Dr. David Rogne
In the later years of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson, the novelist,
was a person of radiant Christian faith. However, he didn't start out
that way. Raised in Scotland in a strict Calvinist family, he couldn't
wait to get away to college. Once he got away from home, he lived a
flagrantly bohemian existence, calling the religion he was brought up in
"the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on a man." Some of
us know what he meant by that. When he started writing, he called
himself a "youthful atheist." As he grew older, however, he came to
have doubt about his doubts. "The church is not right," he said, "but
neither is anti-church." Still later he came to say, "There is a God
who is manifest for those who care to look for him." In later years he
began to talk about his own "cast-iron faith." Here was a person who
knew what it was to make the journey from doubt to faith. It brought
fulfillment to his life.
Nineteen centuries before, another person had made a similar journey.
His name was Thomas. He was a disciple of Jesus. Most of the
references we have to Thomas in the Bible describe circumstances where
he was skeptical or doubtful about the outcome of something. And yet
the last words of Thomas recorded in the Bible are words of faith. He
falls down before the risen Christ and says, "My Lord and my God."
There is a strong tradition that Thomas got up off his knees and carried
the Gospel of Jesus Christ to India, where he died as a martyr, leaving
behind the Thomist Church which still exists today. I think that
Thomas's experiences are recorded for our comfort, for there is
something of Thomas in every one of us. Being familiar with Thomas's
story can help each one of us as we seek to move along the road he
traveled from doubt to dedication.
The first thing Thomas's experience suggests to me is that it is normal
to struggle with doubt. Thomas was always having to do that. When
Jesus indicated that he was going to go into the territory of his
enemies to minister to the gravely ill Lazarus, his friend, Thomas
doubted that any of them would get out alive. Later, in the upper room,
when Jesus spoke of going to the Father's house, Thomas doubted that he
understood. Then, following the death of Jesus, Thomas doubted that
there was anything left to believe in. In his disillusionment, he chose
to go it alone, to cut himself off from the fellowship. When the
disciples told him of their experience with the risen Lord, he doubted
what they were saying.
The thing we need to be aware of is that people of faith have often had
to struggle with doubt. This has been true of many of the Biblical
heroes. Gideon, who eventually led his people to victory over foreign
domination, started out on the path to victory with the question: "If
the Lord is with us, why have these difficulties befallen us?" He
doubted God's presence. Jeremiah, who is looked upon as a great
prophet, became so discouraged about God's availability that he called
God "a deceitful brook," "waters that failed," and then said, "cursed is
the day that I was born." And Jesus on the cross cried, "My God, my
God, why have you forsaken me?" He, too, was struggling to make some
sense out of suffering. Yet, all of these people are remembered as
heroes of the faith. They discovered that strong faith is born through
the agony of doubt.
We hear often about the faith of Christian heroes, but we do not hear
about their struggles. We know Martin Luther's confident words:
"A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing."
But he also wrote: "For more than a week Christ was wholly lost to me;
I was shaken by desperation and blasphemy against God." In his book
Confession, Leo Tolstoy wrote concerning the aloneness, emptiness, and
hopelessness he felt before his conversion: "There was a period in my
life when everything seemed to be crumbling, the very foundations of my
convictions were beginning to give away, and I felt myself going to
pieces. There was no sustaining influence in my life and there was no
God there, and so every night before I went to sleep, I made sure that
there was no rope in my room lest I be tempted during the night to hang
myself from the rafters of my room." Doubt about God left him in
despair.
In the light of such experiences, Harold Bosley, popular preacher of
another generation, wrote: "When someone tells me that he has never had
a moment of probing religious doubt, I find myself wondering whether he
has ever known a moment of vital religious conviction. For if one fact
stands out above all others in the history of religion, it is this: the
price of a great faith is a great and continuous struggle to get it, to
keep it, and to share it . . . . It is a serious mistake to think of
faith as a placid lake under the full moon. It is much more like the
ocean in storm, the swift current of the full river where one must stay
alert if he would stay alive. Faith is a fight as well as peace." It
is normal to struggle with doubt.
The second thing I learn from Thomas's experience is that if we are
going to deal with doubt, it has to be brought out into the open.
Thomas did that. In each of the events we mentioned earlier, he was not
afraid to acknowledge that he was skeptical. He had an honest mind
which said, "I can't help it, I have doubts." When the others told him
that they had met the risen Lord, he no doubt attributed it to
overactive imaginations, or to an hallucination. "I'll believe it," he
said, "when I can touch the wounds on his body."
Actually, it is far healthier for our religious life to admit our doubt
than it is to deny it. If we can't admit our doubts we become rigid and
un-teachable. I have discovered that people are often dogmatic in
direct proportion to their insecurity. The more they know their faith
is just a house of cards, the more intolerant they will be of a contrary
opinion. "True believers" are generally far more dangerous than
heretics. I once participated in a debate. I discovered that debaters
are far more interested in winning than in discovering the truth. In
one debate, I was assigned to defend the side of the issue which I
really opposed. I discovered that all I could do was to rant and rave
in an effort to fill the emptiness of my argument, for I had doubts
about the correctness of my position--doubts which I couldn't admit. As
a result, I couldn't even convince myself. Bluster does not overcome
doubt; doubt has to be brought out into the open if it is to be dealt
with.
Robert Pope is now pastor of a church in New Jersey. "I can recall two
things about my childhood Christianity," he says. "One is that I
couldn't bring myself to believe all those miraculous stories they told
me, and the other thing is that I couldn't wait to grow up so that I
wouldn't have to go to church any more." Mr. Pope had a skeptical,
scientific mind, but it was not acceptable in his church to express
skepticism. He became a mechanical engineer, rising to a position where
he had primary responsibility for one of the rocket engines involved in
the first soft landing on the moon. He continued to wrestle with his
doubts about the church, about God, and about himself. He eventually
found a group in which it was permissible to express his doubts. When
he brought them out into the open, he came to the conclusion that
Christianity is not necessarily intended to be the answer to all
questions: it is a way of life: a life not filled with answers, but a
life spent preparing for the questions. At thirty-five years of age he
left his successful career in engineering, entered seminary, and became
a minister. He says that he now uses the healthy skepticism of an
engineer's mind to help his parishioners honestly work through their
doubts as he has done.
Paul Tillich, the contemporary theologian, hit upon a similar ministry.
He once said, "Sometimes I think my mission is to bring faith to the
faithless and doubt to the faithful." It was his contention that faith
does not thrive where there is too much certainty. A little doubt can
help us to hold our beliefs in humility, and it is in humility that we
become teachable. To be helped, doubt has to be brought out into the
open.
The third thing Thomas's experience says to me is that, at its best, the
Christian fellowship helps us to deal with our doubts. Following the
crucifixion of Jesus, Thomas disassociated himself from the rest of the
disciples. The other disciples had managed to stay together, perhaps
more out of fear than loyalty. Nevertheless, it was to them that Christ
appeared, an appearance that Thomas missed because he was not present.
Undoubtedly, he was disillusioned, and felt that there was no point to
continuing the fellowship.
Others have made that mistake. When sorrow comes to us, when sadness
envelops us, we often tend to shut ourselves away and refuse to meet
people, and in so doing we deprive ourselves of one of the basic
resources of the faith: Christian brothers and sisters. Dr. D. T.
Niles, a significant Christian leader in the Church of South India, was
for a number of years, a pastor in Sri Lanka. One day he met on the
street a member of his parish whom he had not seen for some time. He
asked her where she had been. She answered that she had been terribly
discouraged of late and that God seemed far away, so she had just not
come to worship. In reply he said to her, "You are going to have times
of discouragement, everybody does. There are going to be times when God
seems far away. The trouble is that you have been trying to hold on to
God alone." When it is difficult to hold on to God with our own
strength, that is precisely the time when we need others to help us to
hold on.
That is what Thomas discovered. He had lost hold of his faith when he
became disillusioned. He found that when he was by himself, his faith
only became weaker and he missed out on the experiences others were
having. He may not have believed the experience they were telling him
about, but out of loneliness if nothing else, he rejoined the tiny
fellowship. Once he was back in their company, Christ became real to
him again, and his faith took on new meaning. Some things can happen to
us within the fellowship of the church that will not happen to us when
we are alone.
In Maeterlick's treatise on the "Life of the Bee," he remarks on the
need of the honeybee for community: "She will dive for an instant into
a flower as a diver dives into the sea that is filled with pearls, but
under pain of death it behooves her at regular intervals to return and
breathe the crowd as the swimmer must return and breathe the air.
Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favorable the temperature,
she will expire in a few days, not of hunger or cold, but of
loneliness." This is a way of saying you cannot keep a bee; you can
only keep bees. Nor can you keep a Christian; you can only keep
Christians. Harry Emerson Fosdick tells of a man who came to him when
he was pastor of Riverside
Church and asked for membership. The man said: "I am not even sure
what I think about God, but I should like to work out my spiritual faith
and life inside Christian fellowship, not outside." The church accepted
him on those terms. Three years later, he said to Dr. Fosdick: "No
words can estimate what this has meant to me; each year I discover
clearer insights, deeper assurance, and a life more and more worth
while." Here was a man who needed to believe, wanted to believe, and
benefited from believing. And he came to believe because he planted
himself within the community of believers. When we are disillusioned,
discouraged, hurt, in sorrow, that is the very time we should seek the
fellowship of Christ's people, for it is in that fellowship that we are
likeliest of all to meet Him face to face.
I
close with this. On a Saturday afternoon in August, 1944, Bishop Hans
Lilje was in his study putting the finishing touches on the sermon he
was to preach the following day in St. John's Church, Berlin. The
doorbell rang violently. He went to the door and there stood two men
from the Gestapo. They arrested him, and a few hours later he found
himself in a prison cell. He tells us that it took all the courage and
resolution he had not to lose self-control when the steel doors clanged
shut behind him. He felt utterly alone. Then he heard someone in a
prison cell across the courtyard whistling the melody of an old hymn.
He sprang to his window and whistled back, "O for a Thousand Tongues to
Sing My Great Redeemer's Praise." So it went, back and forth, each
answering the other with whistled hymns: a congregation of two,
supporting each other's faith. And in that mutual support they found,
mysteriously, that their tiny congregation was multiplied by the
presence of Someone they could not see. Amen.
