Hard Questions: Doubt

Nobody talks about it in church. Or if they do, they talk about it in a way that makes it clear doubt is a problem to be solved — a temporary condition on the way to certainty, something to pray through and get past. But a lot of people sitting in pews on Sunday morning are carrying doubt they've never said out loud, because they're not sure the church can handle it.

Here's what I want to say to those people: the church should be able to handle it. And if it can't, that's the church's problem, not yours.

There's a man in the Gospel of John who has become the patron saint of everyone in that situation. His name is Thomas, and the church has been calling him "Doubting Thomas" for so long that it's hardened into something like an insult — shorthand for weak faith, for the person who needs to see it to believe it.

Read the story again. Thomas doesn't leave. He stays in the room with the other disciples a full week after the resurrection, even after they've told him what they saw and he's told them he doesn't buy it. When Jesus appears, he doesn't lecture Thomas about the importance of faith. He offers his hands and his side — exactly what Thomas asked for.

Recent New Testament scholarship has pushed back on the "doubting" label with good reason. Larry Hurtado, in his landmark study Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2005), notes that Thomas's demand for evidence is answered positively by Jesus, not condemned. The Greek word translated as "doubt" in verse 27 — apistos — is closer in meaning to "unbelieving," and what Jesus says at the end is not a scolding of Thomas. It's a word for everyone who comes after — the generations of readers who won't have the option Thomas had, and who will have to find their way without physical evidence. That's most of us.

Thomas ends the story with the highest Christological confession in the entire Gospel of John: My Lord and my God. The one who demanded evidence becomes the one who confesses most fully. John put that there on purpose.

The church has had a complicated relationship with doubt throughout its history. Certain Protestant traditions have treated it as spiritual failure — a deficiency of faith to be overcome. Some strands of progressive Christianity have swung the other direction, making doubt itself into a kind of virtue, as if uncertainty were the destination rather than part of the journey.

The Episcopal tradition sits somewhere more honest than either of those. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral — the four-point framework that defines Anglican and Episcopal identity since 1888 — does not demand doctrinal uniformity as a condition of belonging. The Book of Common Prayer holds together people of genuinely different theological convictions within a shared liturgical life. What the tradition has always asked for is not certainty but engagement: showing up, praying together, wrestling with Scripture, participating in the sacraments, living out the promises of the baptismal covenant. Doubt can coexist with all of those things. Often it deepens them.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal priest and theologian, draws a distinction in Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne, 2014) that gets at something important here. She separates belief — intellectual assent to specific propositions — from faith, which she describes as trust. You can carry real uncertainty about specific doctrines, she argues, while still staking your life on something larger. Belief is what you think. Faith is what you live inside of. The two are not the same thing, and collapsing them does damage to both.

Frederick Buechner put a sharper edge on it: "Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith. It keeps it awake and moving." Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is what keeps faith from calcifying into something too small and too certain to be true.

There's a category of Psalms that the church has mostly stopped teaching: the lament. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments — raw, unresolved prayers of grief, confusion, and accusation directed straight at God. Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no resolution. Psalm 22 opens with My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? These are not prayers of triumphant, settled faith. They are prayers of people who are struggling and saying so — not to each other, but to God.

Jesus quotes Psalm 22 from the cross.

The tradition of bringing doubt and anguish directly to God, rather than polishing it into something more presentable, is ancient. It is threaded through the Hebrew Bible, through the Psalter, through Job — who spends most of his book demanding that God answer for what has happened to him, and whom God, at the end, commends for speaking what is right. The church somewhere along the way decided that faith required a certain kind of composure. The Bible never said that.

So: is it okay to doubt?

Yes. The Thomas story doesn't end with Thomas being corrected for asking hard questions. It ends with him saying something nobody else in the Gospel has said. The doubt didn't disqualify him. It was the door he walked through.

What this tradition asks — what I ask — is not that you arrive with your questions answered. It's that you bring them with you. To the text. To the community. To God, who in this story at least, shows up for the people who are honest about what they need.

Where are you with this today? Maybe doubt has been your secret for a long time — the thing you carry into church and set carefully aside before anyone notices. Maybe you've been waiting until you have it sorted out before you let yourself belong somewhere. You don't have to wait. The doubt you're carrying right now isn't evidence that you're doing this wrong. It might be the most honest thing about you. Bring it. God has been meeting people in exactly that place since the beginning.

Sources and further reading: John 20:19-31 (NRSV). Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2005). Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne, 2014). Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (Harper & Row, 1973). The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886/1888). The Book of Common Prayer (1979), Baptismal Covenant, pp. 304-305.