Doubt is Faith's Wingman
This is a classic session we run every couple of years, and not just because I enjoy playing the promo for Top Gun and getting a laugh out of the claim that is “the most dangerous film of 1986.” Rather, it opens up important questions about faith and doubt. It is the first in a two-part series, the second of which is Wrestling with God
The important point I try to make on DFW nights is about various aspects of faith. You can think about it as having three aspects:
Noticia: knowing the facts about Jesus (hard to believe in something you know literally nothing about) E.g. that Jesus was crucified and that, at the very least, there was a mystery about what happened to his body.
Assensus: Believing the truth claims of the faith - e..g. that God raised Jesus from the dead, which leads to all sorts of other truth claims.
Fiducia: Putting one’s trust in this God.
It is important not to completely separate the three things. For instance, from the outside the assensus claim that God raised Jesus from the dead is both implausible (“the dead don’t rise”) and also hard to see why it should have any effect on me (“a conjuring trick with bones.”) However, developing fiducia faith helps to develop a sense of who God really is, and that God is a God who brings life out of all sorts of depressing situations of death and failure. And, if God is the God who brings life out of death, then resurrecting Jesus seems kind of characteristic of God.
Sidebar: After all, on what possible other basis could we make bold claims about what God could or could not, or would or would not, do? We really don’t know the mind of God, and questions about God’s nature are famously hard to answer (that’s why Scripture is very keen to reinforce the idea that we don’t know God’s name, and no-one can look on God’s face and live.)
It’s worthwhile thinking of faith in these three ways because “modern” forms of Christianity (especially those that come out of the Reformation and, as far as I understand it, certain forms of Roman Catholicism) are very invested in assensus faith, and effectively a bit less invested in the other sorts of faith. By which I mean: a lot of church life is very invested in ensuring you have the correct beliefs about God, but are not as strong on as the underlying framework of trust of fiducia faith.
So that gives us at least two different types of doubt: assensus doubt (doubt about Christianity’s truth claims - e.g. did God really raise Jesus from the dead) and fiducia doubt..
Of these, I think its fair to say that Christianity is most comfortable with assensus doubt. Since well before Descartes starting using radical doubt to try to figure out a place to base his philosophy, we have a whole tradition dedicated to engaging with doubt, in the sense of raising awkward, or just interesting, questions about the truth-claims of Christianity. After all, as soon as you have a truth claim, you immediately raise questions (why this truth claim rather than another.)
It is, after all, relatively easy to preach a sermon clarifying some doctrinal point or another.
Fiducia doubt, on the other hand, is something else entirely. When your whole lived experience makes the claim that your life is held in the hands of a loving and just God, it is going to take more than a persuasively argued sermon to “fix.” A journey through suffering is much more like being planted in the ground and being transformed. It’s much more like being swallowed by an enormous fish and spending three nights in the smelly darkness while the fish goes where it is going.
But, of course, one’s ideas can alter one’s experience, and vice versa. Hence the idea of three aspects of faith.