If You Had Faith, You Wouldn't Doubt

There were times I even sat at a desk, facing forward to the one who knew all the answers. Mostly though, I sat at a table with other little boys and girls. We colored pictures of and talked about Jesus and Peter walking on the water, of a Elizabeth pregnant with John the Baptist who leapt in her womb, of Lazarus being raised from the dead. I knew Old Testament stories too, of the harlot, Rahab, and her scarlet cloth, of Jonah running away from God and getting swallowed by a fish, of Jacob’s sacrifice of his only son, Isaac.

As I grew, the stories became more intricate teaching tools applicable to modern day. We learned how to interpret their meaning. We learned who God was, his characteristics, his will for our lives. I suppose I even hungered for this teaching, but it was in my hunger that I experienced moments of spiritual ambiguity, moments when my questions didn’t have clear answers.

The year after I graduated high school, I had the opportunity to take an entry-level theology class at my church. I didn’t question most chapters in this book, but I remember the one that I did.

One of the pastors of my church at the time taught on the canonization of the Bible, about how there were many religious texts considered for canonization and how many of the canonized books of the Bible are not complete. For instance, the book of Ruth (if I remember correctly) is only about half canonized.

I gasped. “So our Bible isn’t complete?”

“We believe the Bible is the complete, inspired, and infallible Word of God.”

“But it isn’t complete. You said yourself that the Dead Sea Scrolls weren’t even found until the 1940s and 50s. Who says the Bible is complete?”

He folded his hands on the table in front of him and gave me a fatherly smile. “The parts of the Bible which were canonized have been widely accepted as the inspired Word of God.”

I admit, I got a little exasperated--even then, even when I wholly believed what I believed was true. “Yes, but who says so?”
 

He explained that our Bible was canonized by a council of men who pondered and executed their final authority as to which scriptures were canonized. There were different councils for different Bibles, that is, the catholic Bible had a different council than the King James Bible and the versions that followed the King James and so forth. After he finished, he waited for my response.

I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest. “I don’t know if there’s a good reason why I should believe that the Bible is infallible,” I said. “I simply don’t see why I should believe that a council of men sitting in plush chairs around a heavy oak table deciding what the Word of God is, is a divine occurrence. In fact, it sounds nothing like a divine occurrence.”

I think he thought I was being belligerent, but all I wanted were answers--answers that satisfied me. I could tell he didn’t know what else to say. So he said the only other thing he could: “The subject of canonization all boils down to faith. Our church believes and has faith that God was present during the meeting of this council and that he inspired those men’s decisions. We believe that God was supernaturally a part of this human event, which in turn, made it divine.”

His implication was clear: If you had faith, you wouldn’t doubt.

In the following months, years, and even now, I still have doubts about aspects of Christianity. Truthfully, I have doubts about most aspects of my faith. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak from my own experience and the domino effect that doubt has caused. I’ve always been one to seek resolve. I tend to like movies and books with resolved endings. I seek resolve in all of my life experiences. I often can’t stand loose ends; I must tie them up like untied shoes, as if they’d trip me up in life if I didn’t.

The trouble I’ve found is that I’ve not been able to resolve most things in my life. My brother died when I was 16. I’ve had too many friendships end for reasons that I was unable to control. I couldn’t resolve my faith. I never became who I thought I would become. My world fell apart. And because of doubt, because I was never able to resolve it, I eventually feared it. I feared that my doubt would be the end of me. Eventually, everything I set my mind to do I my life became a direct result of my fear.

I think back to the story I learned of Peter walking on the water. Sunday school teachers told me that Peter walked on the water because he had faith. He started sinking when he doubted. No wonder I think my doubt will lead to failure. No wonder I become frantic for resolve. No wonder I fear it. Because I was told at a very young age that faith is good and that doubt is bad. I never learned how to deal with the idea of sitting with my doubt, allowing it to always be present in my journey. Perhaps I should.

Maybe It's About the Journey

I used to think we had so much in common in our pre-courtship days, in the days when we still wrote letters to one another from across state lines, in the days when we still had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. My now husband, Jeremy, spoke of God in mystical terms, in experiential terms, in philosophical terms. I looked at him from across various café tables, dreamy-eyed and transfixed. Mom told me that if I asked most Americans if they were Christians, they would say yes because Christianity has permeated our culture because of our country’s beginnings.

“Christian ideas are part of America,” she’d say, “but it doesn’t mean that most Americans are Christians, even if they think that they are.”

I often wondered how it was that people could not be who they genuinely thought they were. So I’d try to discover if Jeremy was a Christian by asking him everything but asking him directly. I’d ask what he thought of certain Bible passages, what he thought of God. He’d give me circular arguments and ultimately turn my questions back on me. I’d begrudgingly give him my answers (usually backed up by scripture passages and my interpretation of them) though all I wanted were his answers. Finally, in one of my last letters to him, I’d had enough of his question dodging.

“Philosophy is all well and good,“ I wrote, “but at some point you must establish what you believe. Tell me, what is the Trinity?”

He wrote me something of a formal essay back, giving me a squeaky-clean definition of the widely accepted doctrine of the Trinity. I should have been happy. I should have been thrilled. I at last had an answer that I could measure according to my Bible! But there was only one problem: his answer had no soul. His answer was nothing more than dead words scribbled on a page, lifeless and void of humanity. But to be fair, my question was too. I wanted to pinpoint his personal theology and all he wanted was to dialogue about it. I cared about correct answers. He cared about the journey.

Knowing Jeremy threw a wrench in the framework that I used to describe myself as a Christian. If I hadn't fell in love with him I could have forgotten our conversations all together. I could have passed him off as some sort of heretic, some ignorant heathen that I used to know, but it didn’t work out that way.

Maybe it was because I wanted so badly to justify my relationship with him that I embarked on my journey to find a different kind of truth. I wasn’t supposed to have a relationship with him after all. I was Fundamentalist. He was Episcopal. I was conservative. He was a liberal. I was anti-philosophy. He was a philosopher. I was left-brained. He was an artist. I was a Christian. He was a seeker of God. The Bible spoke against relationships with men like these. Or so I thought. In reality, it probably was exactly my pursuit of Jeremy that made me take my faith in a new direction. I’d like to think that I was more of a feminist than that that, but I wasn't.

Whatever the case, I'm here on this journey. It's been 9 years, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to articulate my destination. But lately, I’m wondering if this journey is even about the destination. Maybe this journey is simply about the journey.