On doubt, and unbelief

Prompted by a number of different people I know wrestling with doubt in their Christian faith, I've been thinking a little bit about the role that doubt and uncertainty play in our understanding of faith today.  I have heard a lot of folk speaking very positively about uncertainty.  I have myself at points been tempted to think that doubt is the mark of a mature faith, a faith that doesn't shy away from the tough questions.  On reflection, though, I think that's just wrong.  In most cases, I've come to think, doubt is a bad thing; in many cases, uncertainty is actually the sin of unbelief.

There are at least two forces in our culture which predispose us to think positively about doubt.  One is the culture of suspicion.  There is a long philosophical backstory to this, but the result is that we have been taught to view authority as being usually a mask for some sort of power play.  Questioning everything therefore becomes a virtue.  To accept authority is to enter into ia kind of slavery, to give up the right and necessity of autonomous thought.  No authority can be immune from this, not even 'thus says the Lord'.  In such a culture, doubt and uncertainty naturally come to be seen as healthy and virtuous.

The other, related, force is the value of personal authenticity.  In our culture, your highest calling and your greatest responsibility is to be yourself, defined somewhat vaguely as the person you feel yourself to be.  Because we value authenticity so highly, we would much rather have someone who is wrong but true to their convictions than someone who does the right thing for bad reasons.  In a culture like that, a story of doubt and uncertainty just plays better.  It sounds genuine.  It is easy to assume that those who don't express doubts are just concealing them, being inauthentic.

These two forces are not wholly bad.  Often authority is a cover for a power play, and 'thus says the Lord' can be just a device for exercising control.  Sometimes those who seem most certain in their faith are indeed hypocrites, who teach others by their example to bottle up their questions.

But I can't help noticing how keen the New Testament authors seem to be that we have certainty about what we believe, that we be confident in the one we've trusted, that we have a clear and growing knowledge of the truth.  There is no praise for doubt and uncertainty in Scripture!

So here's what I think.  The reasons for doubt and uncertainty are broadly the same as the reasons for sin: weakness, negligence, our own deliberate fault.  Weakness because sometimes we cannot understand, or because we are carrying wounds from an authoritarian church background, or because we are caught in the storms of life and thrown off balance.  Negligence because sometimes we don't do the work, because the answers are there in Scripture but we don't seek them out, because the certainty is to be found in prayer but we don't pray.  Our own deliberate fault because sometimes we nurture doubt and uncertainty to avoid the implications for our lives of the truth, or because we like the sense of superiority our sophisticated doubts give us.

I also think a lot of the sting of doubt and uncertainty would be removed if the church took seriously it's calling to be merciful to those who doubt - if questions were met with sensitive efforts to understand the backdrop to the question and to apply the truth gently.  This requires a context in which it is okay to express doubts and questions - just as church should be a context in which it is okay to confess sins!  And that in turn requires a solid confidence that God's revelation is true and his gospel is good.

Counting the Cost of Planting

The FIEC have put out an episode of their podcast entitled When Church Plants Don't Work, with Dan Steel.  Dan has done a lot of work on church planting, and the ups and downs thereof, and I think has some really useful insights as a result.  For the sake of fair disclosure, it's worth pointing out that I was the pastor of the church plant from Dan's church that didn't work out - so I also have some thoughts on the subject.

One of the most useful things in the chat on the podcast is the recognition that church plants 'fail' for a variety of reasons, and whilst there are many mistakes that we can learn from and try to do better in the future, there are also situations in which - it just didn't work.  That has to be okay as an outcome.  If it isn't, we will become highly risk averse, and ultimately we won't plant churches in the places that need them most.  It would help a great deal, as the boys on the podcast point out, if we were prepared to tell the stories of 'failure' as well as those of 'success' - and let me just take a little swipe at the cheery triumphalism of much evangelicalism that makes that impossible.

There is just one supplementary point I'd add to that, which is that recognising that 'failure' is a possible outcome needs much more serious counting of the cost for all involved in church planting.

I hope we know that there is a cost involved.  If a church is remotely functioning, then it is a family, and it is the community around which life is structured.  To leave a church, then, even to go and do something potentially exciting like planting is really costly.  Relationships don't need to be completely left behind, but realistically they will be attenuated when we're no longer worshipping together on a weekly basis.  Valued programmes will be left behind - perhaps youth groups or other things that the plant is not of a size to run.  It is, and should be, a wrench to leave a church.

But then if we're going to throw ourselves into planting, we need to be all in.  We need to build relationships in the plant on the assumption that we're going to be together for the rest of our lives.  We need to build rhythms of liturgy and discipleship that are intended to bed in over decades.  We need to build outward looking relationships with people in the local area which we hope will bear fruit, perhaps in many years.  What we can't do is keep our lines of retreat open.  If you allow awareness of the fact that the plant might not make it to cause you to keep one foot in the sending church, I think you probably make the 'failure' of the plant a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You have to be all in.

But that means that if it doesn't work out, it will be hugely painful.  It will be like the wrench of leaving the sending church, but worse, because instead of being the pain of being sent out into an exciting horizon, it will be the pain of dissolving a community you loved, a return tinged with disappointment and perhaps bitterness.  There will be wounds.  We need to count the cost of those wounds before sending people out - the cost of sending, but also the potential double cost of receiving back.

Who elected him?

A man was, briefly, arrested in Oxford yesterday for heckling during the proclamation of the King.  In response to the proclamation, he shouted a question: who elected him?  For this he was briefly detained and driven home.  I don't intend to comment on the rights and wrongs of this situation.  Not least, I am aware that the only account I've read is that of the republican in question, and it's quite likely there is another side to the story.  If you want to read a defence of his protest, from the point of view of freedom of speech absolutism, Steve has an article for you.  I don't entirely agree, but it might be a good place to start from.

I was thinking that I would instead write a little piece about how this protest in many ways captures the spirit of the age.  This is, after all, a deeply democratic age, in the sense that we want to believe that all power and authority starts with us, the demos, and is then passed on to whomever we choose.  That is why you get people saying 'not my king!' - they mean, I think, I didn't choose him, and I can't imagine any other grounds of legitimate authority.  This attitude does, of course, get us into trouble even with the democratic elements of our politics.  Some want to disown political leaders they disagree with (not my PM!) in the same way that others would disown the Monarch.  This is just the individualistic version of the democratic impulse - nobody can have power or authority over me unless I chose them.

There certainly is an extent to which this is the spirit of the age, but as I've thought about it I've been struck that this is really just the spirit of humanity.  The obvious verbal parallels in the story of Moses jump out at me - who made you a ruler and judge over us?  The deacon Stephen makes it very clear that this attitude was a rejection of the one whom God had chosen, and sees it as the archetypal reaction of Israel to God's authority.  Psalm 2 shows us that it's not just Israel, but all of humanity.  We will be in charge of our own destiny.  I will be my own ruler and judge.  Isn't this just the spirit of sinful rebellion?

I am not suggesting that there is a one to one relationship between political republicanism in the UK and spiritual rebellion in the human race!  There are all sorts of reasons (none of them good, in my view, but that's by the by) why one might be a republican.  After all, the answer which the proclamation gives to the protester's question - God, by whom kings and queens reign - is in the case of earthly leaders open to question.  But I do think there is something in the attitude that we ought to be wary of.

In the end, a King has been elected - by Almighty God.  The rule of King Jesus does not depend on our choice, or even our assent.  God laughs at our attempts to be 'spiritual republicans'.  Every knee will bow.