Faith in the Shadows of Doubt

Francesco Solimena’s “The Personification of Faith”

The first time I saw this painting I was with a group of hospital chaplains during my summer internship. We were meandering through the Norton Simon Art Museum, and then I saw this painting and stopped in my tracks and thought, “Yes, that is what faith in an unseen, transcendent God is like, what faith embodied in a world of travails looks like.”

It may very well be easier to write about the troubling nature of faith when doubting and easier to write about the bleak, cloudy character of doubt when gifted with faith. Or is it the converse? In any case, having personally experienced both for prolonged periods of time, today is a day to speak of both, albeit in a brief blog post I will do justice to neither.

To doubt, to be caught in the throes of unbelief, or even to renounce religious faith altogether, particularly Christian faith, may turn out to be a testament to taking faith seriously and thereby a testament to greater faith than the faith so often jangled about in strands of Christianity that boldly vocalize triumphant Christian life void of struggle and unbelief. The lands of doubt and faith may turn out to be contiguous; they may even overlap. They may even be caught up in one another.

One of my heroes, S. Kierkegaard, expressed the rather paradoxical relationship of faith and doubt when he said, “Whether I have faith can never be ascertained by me with immediate certainty – for faith is precisely this dialectical hovering, which is unceasingly in fear and trembling but never in despair; faith is exactly this never-ending worry about oneself, which keeps one alert and ready to risk everything, this worry about oneself as to whether one truly has faith – and look! precisely this worry about oneself is faith.”

Decades later F. Dostoevsky expressed his own life of faith in the midst of doubt when he said in a letter to a friend, “I will tell you that I am a child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt, I am that today and (I know it) will remain so until my grave. How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I can find against it.” He goes on to indicate that “God sends me sometimes instants when I am completely calm; at those instants I love and feel loved by others, and it is at these instants that I have shaped for myself a Credo where everything is clear and sacred for me. This Credo is very simple, here it is: to believe that nothing is more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, reasonable, and more perfect than Christ.”

Though doubt and unbelief may persist, remembering and treasuring such clear and sacred moments may very well be a way to trek through the valley of the shadow of doubt and then (eventually…) come out the other side.

Like that picture of the personification of faith in the Norton Simon, faith may very well involve all sorts of experiences and reasons to doubt, tenacious tugs in numerous different directions, but indeed it is such experiences that faith entails and will, if perseverant, make faith all the more healthy and strong. The quality of such faith may very well increase with every shadow and quagmire that it endures.

But Christian faith is not merely faith in an unseen, transcendent God; Christian faith is not faith in shifting sands and arbitrary dogmatic formulations; it is faith in the revealed God, in the incarnate God. But where, on days of doubt when we so desperately need to see in order to believe, is God? Where is God today? We might begin pointing at the church and different things the church is doing; after all the church is the body of Christ. However, this may very well leave us feeling more comfortable with unbelief rather than belief, for the church can be a rather messy and horrific place. Looking to the church may leave us hoping “it” isn’t true, for it would be the worst hypocrisy the world has ever seen. Where then do we look to see the incarnate God if not to the body of Christ, the church?

The church is not as it should be. Like the world, the church can be a troubling predicament. The church is by no means removed from the world, and as such the church suffers from similar woes. But this is not, in moments of doubt, reason to abandon the church. Much to the contrary. It is reason to plunge into that community that has been called to hope for and participate in the reconciling work of a poor carpenter. It is towards this horizon of healing and peace that the church is to press, plunge, and leap. Through the shadows and quagmires, the church, bruised and bloodied by unbelief and reasons to doubt, is to press toward this horizon always hoping and praying, even (and especially) in times of unbelief, “Come Lord Jesus!”