“You just need to have more faith.” Nearly every believer, when faced with a need for healing or provision, has heard this ‘encouragement.’ We are told that if we have just a small amount of faith, the size of a mustard seed, we can move mountains. But, we pray and mountains don’t move. Our prayers for healing or provision go unanswered and we wonder if we had enough faith. We blame it on whatever amount of doubt or uncertainty we felt when we prayed and try valiantly to push aside our doubts and make ourselves certain that what we ask for we will receive. When we pray, we find ourselves in a posture of prayer that is reminiscent of the Cowardly Lion in the movie The Wizard of Oz, “I do believe! I do believe! I do! I do! I do believe!”
We view doubt as the enemy of our faith, not realizing that it is simply a reflection of our human frailty and as such, is a very real part of the human experience. We long for certainty, but find that doubt creeps in despite our most valiant efforts to keep it at bay. We then focus on our doubt and uncertainty rather than our mustard seed size faith and grow discouraged with both our lack of faith and unanswered prayer. If we allow ourselves a moment of honesty, we realize the monumental task of ridding ourselves of all doubt. But, does faith mean the absence of doubt?
To be clear, doubt is not skepticism, though we have equated the two. Skepticism is a decision to doubt everything unless there is overwhelming proof that warrants acceptance whereas doubt is often a sense of unease about the way in which our experience, reason, feelings, and faith relate. Neither is doubt unbelief, though we have often mistaken one for the other. Unbelief is an act of the will rather than a difficulty in understanding. While faith and unbelief are mutually exclusive, faith and doubt are not. In fact, according to poet Khalil Gibran, “Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.”(1)
Doubt is not saying, “I do not believe.: Neither is it saying, “Prove it to me.” It is saying, “I believe. Help my unbelief.” It behooves us to understand that doubt is the natural response to the cognitive dissonance that arises when we are asked to believe something that is contrary to both our experience and the evidence gathered by our natural senses. I would submit that a person’s faith is as strong as the degree to which he is willing to honestly embrace his struggle and wrestle authentically with his doubt. Faith is best expressed in the context of doubt, not in the absence of it. It is when we take a step forward in the midst of doubt and uncertainty, that we are walking by faith. In his sermon, “Temptation in the Wilderness,” George MacDonald says it is faith’s “noblest exercise to act with uncertainty of the result, when the duty itself is certain, or even when a course seems with strong probability to be duty.”(2)
We tend to believe that our faith is only as strong as our certainty, but is that true? Brian Zahnd, pastor of Word of Life Church, asserts that “Whatever faith may be, it’s certainly not certainty. Certainty is an edifice built on empirical proof. Faith is a journey on the Road of Unknowing.” This need for certainty is rooted in the Enlightenment, not in biblical teaching. Author and theologian Gregory Boyd, writes, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”(3)
This certainty-seeking model of faith creates needless anxiety in the children of God. It is a model that has inherent problems. We tend to place our faith in our certainty rather than the person of Jesus, and consequently have made an idol of our certainty. Our faith needs to be based on our covenantal relationship with God. We are His children as therefore have access to all that is His. This relationship endows us with authority and, according to Paul, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead. We need to pray from this reality, rather than the degree of certainty we feel.
Another difficulty with this model is that it creates a false image of God. We read Jesus’ words, “According to your faith,” and believe it means that the more certain we are that God will do something, the more apt He is to do it. This is like God is saying, “If you are convinced I’ll heal your child of cancer, I will. But, if you’re not, I won’t.” That’s not God! This is a psychological version of a carnival strength-tester game. You are, in essence, trying to hit your faith mallet as hard as you can so you can send the faith puck up the faith pole to get as close to the certainty bell as you possible can. This is a game that causes untold grief and frustration to those who are genuinely seeking answers to prayer and desiring to walk by faith. It’s a sadistic game that a loving Father doesn’t play, or ask His children to play.
Jesus compares faith to a mustard seed that grows. When faith is equated with certainty, it creates an atmosphere that stifles growth. Doubt is a natural part of this growing process. Giving ourselves the permission to acknowledge and wrestle with our doubts is essential to the maturing of our faith. In those moments, we need to realize that our faith is indeed real, but may need to grow. When we accept uncertainty as part and parcel of the growth process of faith, we give ourselves freedom to practice. We are more prone to seek opportunities to exercise our faith because failure and uncertainty is no longer a thing to be feared. The result is a faith that is stronger and more mature than even the most valiant efforts at certainty could never develop within us. Faith will become an increasingly prominent part of our experience and its exploits will become more pronounced.(4)
When we are encouraged to strive for a feeling of certainty, questions are squelched, red flags are ignored, and reason is discarded. Reason becomes the enemy of faith rather than a God-given tool meant to assist our decision making. This requires us to hold to our faith in an inflexible way. Thousands have died in wars because both sides were absolutely certain they were fighting for God. Senseless deaths could have been avoided if those involved would have allowed themselves the benefit of doubt. In other cases, those seeking healing have watched their loved ones die because they believed that seeking treatment indicated a lack of faith. There are times it would be good if people would occasionally choose the discomfort of doubt over the comfort of certainty.
Our quest for certitude often prevents authenticity and honesty. Fear that doubt and unbelief will hinder our prayers often causes us to push them to the back of our minds rather than bring them out into the open. We place ourselves in a state of denial as to the existence of any uncertainty. But God sees our hearts and whatever doubt or uncertainty lies there. The story of Job teaches us the value God places upon authenticity over certainty. Job loudly and vehemently expressed his doubt and frustration with the events of his life and God’s role in them. His friends continued to hold to their certainties about God. In the end, it was Job who was said to have not sinned. It was Job whose righteousness was held up as an example to all. His friends, despite their certainty, had not spoken that which is right about God, like Job did. If we want honesty in our walk, we need to allow ourselves to be honest with doubts rather than avoid or deny them. If we seek authenticity in our faith, we need to look deeply into those questions that haunt our souls, wrestling with them as long as need be, rather than squelching them in an attempt to be as certain as we can. “We have to wrestle with doubt to arrive at real faith. Certitude can’t be bothered with all that. Real faith has room for doubt — understanding that the effort to believe is the very thing that makes doubt possible. Real faith is not afraid of doubt, but the faux faith of certitude is afraid of its own shadow.”(5)
Philosophical ponderings may give us permission to doubt, but what the Bible says is far more important to the believer as he wrestles with the place of doubt and uncertainty. In his epistle to the Jews, the Apostle James tells us to “ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”(James 1:6-7 ESV) When we read this, it seems clear that there can be no doubting when we ask for something. But, when we look at the context of these words, we realize that James isn’t making a blanket statement about anything we may ask. He is referring to a specific request: wisdom. “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.”(James 1:5, ESV)
The Greek word translated “doubting” is a form of the word “diakrino” which means “to distinguish, to judge.” It has the connotation of wavering between two opinions. This verse is in the middle of James’ encouragement to those who are facing persecution to be joyful in the midst of it because it will result in the growth of their faith. Most of their persecution came at the hands of those who remained loyal to the Old Covenant. First-century Christians constantly faced the temptation to turn back to the Old Covenant and many wavered between two beliefs: The Old Covenant based on the Law, and the New Covenant based on faith. Their loyalties were sometimes divided. James is encouraging them that in the midst of the persecution because of the New Covenant, don’t waver between it and the Old. Place your faith in God alone, not in the Law. The New Living Translation renders it, “Be sure your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.” Read in this way, James is not describing someone who is doubting whether or not God can do something, but someone who is not sure where his loyalties lie; he is not referring to someone who is wavering on God’s desire or ability, but on where he will place his faith, from where will he seek the wisdom he needs.
We would be remiss in our discussion of faith if we did not look at the biblical definition of faith found in Hebrews 11.“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1, ESV) The New Living Translation gives an even greater sense that faith means certainty: “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen.”(NLT) The word translated confidence and assurance is the Greek word hypostasis. All patristic and medieval exegesis presupposed hypostasis was to be translated substantia, a Latin term meaning substance, or reality. When Hebrews 1:3 is speaking of what Jesus reveals about God, hypostasis refers to God’s essence, or substance”. At the urging of Melanchthon, Martin Luther rendered hypostasis as “sure confidence.” rather than “substance.” This introduced an entirely new concept into the understanding of Hebrews 11:1 and gave hypostasis a meaning that has little to do with the original Greek understanding of the word. As a result of rendering hypostasis to be confidence, faith is now viewed as a personal, subjective conviction. This interpretation has governed Protestant exposition of the passage almost completely, but it is an understanding that is untenable. The starting-point of exposition must retain its original Greek usage elsewhere. Darby’s literal translation and the King James Version translated hypostasis to mean “substantiating” and “substance” which clearly maintains the Greek philosophical understanding of the term in a more accurate manner.(6) Today, we have substituted a feeling of confidence or certainty for the essence of faith rather than the substance that gives confidence.
The second part of this definition uses the word elegchos, which is translated ‘conviction’ in the English Standard Version. Elegchos has the sense of “proof” or “means of proof” with a view to convincing. It has not the subjective idea of a personal feeling of conviction, but rather the objective sense of evidence that leads to conviction. A faith that works up a feeling of conviction is not what the author of Hebrews is describing, but rather a conviction that arises from evidence of the faithfulness of God to His promises. While this does indeed signify a sense of confidence, it stops short of the feeling of certainty I’ve discussed thus far.
When we read Hebrews 11:1 with the understanding that hypostasis means “substantiating” or “substance” rather than a feeling of confidence, and elegchos as conviction that arises from evidence, we come to realize that faith is exercised by “imaginatively embracing God’s promises as a substantial reality(hypostasis) that in turn creates a conviction(elegchos) that it will be so, which motivates us to act in ways that we hope will bring what we imaginatively envision into reality.”(7)
“You just need to have faith.” We need to trade in our certainty-seeking model of faith for a faith that recognizes that doubt and uncertainty are a natural part of maturing. It is a seed that grows, not a fully developed plant. We need to forsake our faith in certainty and place in in the person of Christ. Our faith is in a Person with whom we share an intimate relationship; a Person who is involved in every aspect of our lives and desires good things for us. We need to leave the shaky ground of subjective feelings of confidence and stand on the solid ground of objective evidence that God is faithful and His promises are sure. Every season of life will present us with opportunities that have the potential to strengthen our faith. Rather than wasting our time trying to squash our doubts and convince ourselves of certainty, we can bring our doubts and uncertainties to the throne. “I believe, Lord. Help my unbelief.”
Endnotes:
1. Boyd, Gregory. (2013). Benefit of the Doubt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books., p. 23
2. Macdonald, George. (1897). The Complete Works of George Macdonald. (Kindle version).
3. Boyd, Gregory. (2013). Benefit of the Doubt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books., p. 23
4. Chant, Ken. (2012). Faith Dynamics. Ramona, CA: Vision Publishing. p. 21.
5. Zahnd, Brian. (2016, August 9). Certitude: A Disaster Waiting to Happen (web log comment). Retrieved from http://www.brianzahnd.com/2016/08/certitude-disaster-waiting-happen/#more-5775.
6. Kittel, G., Friedrich, G. (Ed.) Trans. by Geoffrey Bromiley. (1972). Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. (Vol. VIII). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co. p. 586.
7. Boyd, Gregory. (2013). Benefit of the Doubt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books., p. 213
7. Boyd, Gregory. (2013). Benefit of the Doubt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books., p. 213