Faith is Better than Doubt

There was considerable interest in and comments/questions about my March 8 blog post titled “Doubt is Better than Certainty.” This post is also about doubt, but it is mainly about faith in God rather than certainty or doubt about beliefs. 

“The Shock of Faith” is the title of David Brooks’s opinion column published by the New York Times last December 19. It is a long, thoughtful, heartfelt article that is well worth reading and contemplating. (You can access it here [with a different title]).

Brooks (b. 1961) is a nationally known newspaper journalist and author as well as a regular on PBS NewsHour every Friday evening. He was raised Jewish, but he attended an Episcopal grade school as a boy. He says in his Dec. 19 post, he grew up “religious but not spiritual.”

When I first began to hear about Brooks, I thought he was too politically conservative and paid little attention to him. But his new book, The Road to Character, was the subject of a study meeting at Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City in September 2015. It was led by then-president Molly Marshall.

Attending that discussion gave me new appreciation for Brooks, and his political views, which continued to move toward a center-left position. The point of this article, though, is about Brooks’s ideas about faith, not politics.

Faith is “like falling in love.” This is one of Brooks’s thought-provoking statements. While there are problems with the widespread claim that people fall in love, that expression implies that romantic love is usually far more a matter of the heart (emotional) rather than of the head (cerebral).

Brooks’s article begins with his acknowledgement that he long “thought faith was primarily about belief.” But when faith finally “tiptoed into” his life, as he put it, it was “through numinous “experiences,” that is, through “scattered moments of awe and wonder” which hit him “with the force of joy.”

That’s what caused him to fall in faith. Even though he had been religious without being spiritual, Brooks says that position “felt empty” to him. On the other hand, he also found that being spiritual without being religious didn’t work for him. Religions, he says, “enmesh your life in a sacred story.”*¹

In that regard, Brooks cites important, instructive words of Rabbi David Wolpe: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”*²

“Have mercy on those who doubt” (CEB) are words in the New Testament book of Jude, verse 22. The issue there is not about doubt rather than certainty regarding beliefs, but doubt about one’s foundational faith.

If people who have fallen in love begin to have serious doubts about that love being “real” and reciprocal, the relationship has become precarious. That is what causes couples to “break up” or spouses to divorce. Just as doubt about love is a serious matter, so is doubt about faith.

Doubt is better than certainty concerning ideas or beliefs, for that doubt nudges the doubter to seek to learn more and to examine his/her beliefs. But faith in God (by whatever name is used for the Ultimate) is not basically about ideas or beliefs. It is about a relationship that can be destroyed by doubt.

Rachel Held Evans, the widely respected Christian author whose untimely death is still mourned by many, once said, “I recognize that faith is always a risk. No matter what we believe, there is always a chance we might be wrong. But the story of Jesus is just the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”*³

Evans’s faith was not primarily in the veracity of Christian beliefs. Rather, her faith was heartfelt commitment to Jesus Christ. She had doubts about many traditional Christian doctrines, but her faith/trust in Christ was stronger, and better, than her doubts about the certainty of those stated beliefs.

Since robust Christian faith is commitment to Christ, that faith becomes apparent not by what we say or give intellectual assent to. Rather, faith is expressed by how we live and what we do.

As Bill Tammeus says on the last page of his book on doubt, faith keeps “us focused on the goal of demonstrating what a world of peace, harmony, mercy, justice, and love might look like.”

Doubt can’t do that, so clearly (undoubtedly?), faith is better than doubt.

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*¹ Two of the short “chapters” in Bill Tammeus’s book The Value of Doubt (2016) are about whether one can be spiritual but not religious or religious but not spiritual. In the Comment section of my 3/8 blog post, Bill (who is on my Thinking Friends mailing list) referred to his book, and I had to admit that I knew about it but had not yet read it. Since then, I have been able to check out a copy of it from the local (MCPL) library, and I have been profiting from reading that delightful book. I highly recommend it.

*² David J. Wolpe (b. 1958) is a Conservative Jewish rabbi and now Emeritus Rabbi of the prestigious Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. In 2012, Newsweek magazine named him the most influential rabbi in America.

*³ Rachel Held Evans was born in 1981 and died a few weeks before her 39^th birthday. My June 5, 2021, blog article was about her (see here). The words cited above were part of her discussion about faith with a pastor in 2014. It can be found on YouTube (here); that video has had more than 17,000 views.