Faith After Doubt

I recently finished Brian McLaren’s book Faith After Doubt. It is a very honest account of the legitimate struggle that most of us have with doubt. As I have said so often, doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is part of faith. In fact, for that very reason, I might have preferred a title that more obviously placed them alongside each other, which is what I think the book does, rather than one that suggests they might be sequential, whatever the order.

As McLaren himself says: “Let’s grant one another permission to doubt. And let’s see the doubt in ourselves and each other not as a fault or failure to be ashamed of, but as an inescapable dimension of having faith and being human, and more: as an opportunity for honesty, courage, virtue and growth, including growth in faith itself.”

Of course, they will come in different measures at different times and there is a sense of progress as we recognize how that happens – but the ultimate aim is not that of doubt-free faith. McLaren expresses that point like this: “I do not regret my journey of faith and doubt, because I do not regret who I have become. Faith and doubt together have made me who I am. I wouldn’t want to live without either.”

He points out, and I find this very helpful, that what really matters is love, and it is not exclusive to either faith or doubt, or a mix. McLaren puts it like this: “Jesus dissented from the typical understandings of purity, loyalty, authority and liberty. Instead of neglecting them, however, he redefined them and in a sense recycled them in service of justice and compassion. For Jesus, justice and compassion were ultimately two facets of one thing: love.”

He also says: “In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus doesn’t teach a list of beliefs to be memorised and recited. Instead, he teaches a way of life that culminates in a call to revolutionary love. This revolutionary love goes far beyond conventional love, the love that distinguishes between us and them, brother and other or friend and enemy (Matt. 5:43). Instead, we need to love as God loves, with non-discriminatory love that includes even the enemy.”

That is pretty challenging; but it’s a challenge we need.