Deconstructing Faith

Faith... it would be hard to imagine anything more foundational to any faith tradition than faith itself. But I honestly hadn't thought too much about the way I defined and experienced this concept until recently.

In practice, what I regarded as faith wasn't faith at all. Knowing the unknowable seems like faith, but once you are certain, you no longer need faith. The mystery is gone.

Walking by faith is a journey through the unknown to a God you know. When you think you have all the answers, you don't ask the questions that allow you to grow. You limit who God is and who He is accessible to. As Christians, we have too often tried to lock a transcendent God into a Christian culture of our own making.

Rachel Held Evans says it better than I ever could:

"I used to think that the measure of true faith is certainty. Doubt, ambiguity, nuance, uncertainty - these represented a lack of conviction, a dangerous weakness in the armor of the Christian soldier who should 'always be ready with an answer.'

With the best of intentions, the generation before mine worked diligently to prepare their children to make an intelligent case for Christianity. We were constantly reminded of the superiority of our own worldview and the shortcomings of all others. We learned that as Christians, we alone had access to absolute truth and could win any argument. The appropriate Bible verses were picked out for us, the opposing positions summarized for us, and the best responses articulated for us, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle through two thousand years of theological deliberations and debates but could get right to the bottom line on the important stuff: the deity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the role and interpretation of Scripture, and the fundamentals of Christianity.

As a result, many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with the answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore. So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong.

In short, we never learned to doubt.

Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it...

Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles... without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them.

I’ve learned anything... it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot. I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it..."