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Holy Anguish: Ministering to Doubt
Tension between
Faith and Experience If the call of God can be seen as a journey to our final heavenly home, it ought also be seen as a journey that continually traverses the agony and the ecstasy of the cross of Christ. Our sojourn through life involves a continual tension between what we experience in daily living about who and what we are, and what we understand by faith. It is the tension between the dual realities of sin and grace: between living as a sin-corrupted citizen of this fallen creation, yet a righteous member of the Kingdom of God. Faith requires a vision by which we might become reconciled to the experiences of living in a fallen creation. And in the cross of Christ, that vision can be found. Our vision of the manner in which God is redemptively at work in the world and in our life could be helpfully described by the idea of "salvific worldliness" as best seen and climaxed in the cross of Christ. The world of our experience takes in the shame, agony and seeming abandonment of God in the cross. We see evil openly at work producing its fruit of injustice and suffering in the one who hangs between two thieves. Yet, to faith is given a vision of the merciful Creator who turns the tables on the powers of evil to accomplish his saving purpose. Oddly, we notice however, that he does not banish evil. Rather, he uses it to accomplish its own defeat. An incredible exchange is made. God places the world's evil on the righteous Jesus, and his righteousness is imputed to us. A sham atonement for trumped-up sins becomes a real atonement for the sins of the world. Through the world's greatest injustice, God justifies the world. God's Word provides for us a saving picture of the cross, and faith receives it. It also bestows the righteousness of the cross - and faith receives that as well. Our sense experience of the cross tells us one thing, our faith another. Our vision of the cross embraces the tension of both. And what corresponds to tension for us, is method for God. Salvific worldliness is not simply the mystery of an infinite God at work with finite means, it is the tension of a holy and gracious God accomplishing his saving purposes in a fallen creation enlisting even corrupted means. As God's supreme call of his Son to the cross presents us a vision with a tension between what is open to experience and what must be held by faith, so also does living in God's call as his adopted sons and daughters. Christian life in the old creation is God's call to the full range of possible experiences one can encounter from being in the world together with the full inheritance of God's salvation. But neither our old world experiences of our fallen existence nor the blessings of Christ given to faith cancel the other out. Perhaps Luther's "in, with and under" language may be appropriate here. We hold our divine citizenship and all of God's blessings of salvation in, with and under our temporal citizenship and all that its fallen character can bring us. What flows from our temporal citizenship is fully given to our senses, but what flows from our divine citizenship is given to faith. The life of Christ climaxed in the cross is the ultimate expression of this tension. As we have been called to live in Christ, that tension which is penultimate frames out the big picture of Christian life. Two things must be clarified, however, about our vision of Christian life in the cross of Christ. First, we must keep in mind that the life we are describing is temporary and provisional. Life in the cross is lived with an Easter faith. The one who suffered and died, rose again and ascended to the Glory of the Father. The suffering servant is now the exalted Lord who is poised to crash our experience with the full splendor of our inheritance. The empty tomb anchors our faith with confidence about a better day that is coming when the inheritance of faith becomes the life of experience. Salvation for God's children who are living in the cross is now, and not yet. Secondly, the tension between the life of worldly experience and the truth of faith is encountered in the daily living of the believer by oscillating back and forth between them. Sometimes we are captivated by the impact of living as citizens of this fallen world only then to be thrown back onto the promises of faith. Holy Anguish We grow up in ordinary homes, reflecting the ethos of our time and place, and they make their mark on us. We become fully participating citizens of the here and now. We struggle with our sexuality and loneliness, and perhaps we marry. A new household is formed with babies' spilt milk and messy bedrooms. Our teenagers can walk out the door and we know that almost anything can happen to them - and often it does. We experience joys and sorrows with our spouse, our children and our circle of friends. Quarrels and misunderstandings punctuate our relationships with loved ones as well as good times had by all. Our work life moves like the tide between excitement and boredom, success and failure. We can be hired, fired, promoted and forgotten. People who matter to us suffer injury, addiction and disease. So can we. They will get better or they will die. So will we. And more often than we would like, we sense compelling evidence that our government, our economy and our church denomination are going to the dogs. We experience life as bitter/sweet: our cup is somewhere between half empty and half full. We long for much more than daily living provides. For that reason, the voice within can hammer us with a painful conclusion: the life we are living falls woefully short of our longings for what it ought to be for would-be citizens of the Kingdom of God... But, this is only half of it. We also experience our slice of life as it has passed through the "grim reaper" of the Law that is lodged in our hearts. And perhaps for many of us schooled in the Scriptures, the cutting edge of that Law is razor sharp. The voice of the Law is continually telling us that we are falling short of the vision as well. If we are called to a life of fear, love and trust in God; if we are called to a faith which expresses itself in a life of service with reordered loves - then, the Law cuts us with its bitter verdict that we aren't, we don't and we can't. Experiences such as these are ordinary and can be expected, but they drive us to a state of helplessness and hopelessness. It is just like taking in Christ on the cross with all our senses. There is the hammer of our fallen world that beats on our sense of membership in the family of God; and the blade of the Law that assaults our righteousness through faith. Doubt and despair can become our unwelcome companions. Luther called this experience of helplessness and hopelessness, Anfechtung. Anfechtung is a profound anguish. It is an assault upon us by the world, the flesh and the Devil that can often reduce us to a state of doubt about who and what we are in Christ. It tempts us to despair of God's promises, it challenges our confidence and it puts our faith to the test. Yet as Luther also recognized, this is a holy Anfechtung, an instrument of the gracious God, and part and parcel of living in the cross of Christ. Here we catch a glimpse of Salvific worldliness again. God is the one behind our Anfechtung and he uses it to crucify our fleshly complacency and self-confidence. And then he uses it to send us running back the other way to the security and confidence of the Word of promise that is given to faith. From faith, we see the righteousness of Christ that is ours; and from faith, hope is renewed in the coming glory of the Kingdom. With faith's vision made ever new in the Gospel promise - again and again - faith is strengthened, the New Creation is renewed and the call of the Christian's vocation is revitalized. Here is the central heartbeat of Christian living. The experience of old world living that produces a holy anguish, and the transforming power of faith fed by the Gospel: in tension - tacking back and forth between them - this is the call of God to live in the cross of Christ.
As Luther well realized,
Anfechtung can produce doubt to assault faith as we live in the tension
between sin and grace. Doubt can arise from too much tension in our walking in
the cross, and it can arise from too little. Our experiences of life come
already robust and they usually make their full-blown impact on us by just
living life in the world. But faith is different. There is a certain
becomingness to faith as it is acted out and put to work in the daily life of
the believer. It is born of the Word and the Spirit, but must grow and mature.
In this sense our awareness and expression of faith are always being developed
by the Word and the Spirit, on the way to the full stature of the image of
Christ. In this segment we want to focus our attention on doubt as it can occur
in the Christian walk and how God through his Word seeks to overcome it by
strengthening and building up our faith. Before we get into a discussion of what doubt is, we want to mention some things that doubt is not. First, doubt is not a more casual way of describing unbelief. Because of a poor translation of the text in John 20, we have pinned the label, "doubting Thomas" on Jesus' disciple. Thomas was not a doubter of the resurrection prior to the dramatic scene in the upper room. He just flat disbelieved it. A more accurate rendering of Jesus' words would be: "do not disbelieve, but believe." Neither the word nor the idea of doubt is in the text. Our word "doubt" comes from the Latin word, dubitare. It means to be "double-minded," or to be "in two minds" about something. Belief and unbelief are single-minded perspectives; yes and no. We can think of doubt as the equivalent to a simultaneous "yes/no." There is an uncomfortable tension about doubt and the more important the issues involved, the greater the tension. It is like standing with one foot in one rowboat and one foot in another. Doubt over things that matter presses us to resolve the tension into either belief or unbelief. Thomas moved from unbelief to faith through his encounter with the risen Christ. But, doubt was never involved. Secondly, doubt is not something that is intrinsic to faith, as if faith in a biblical sense were simply an inferior, uncertain substitute for knowing something. Faith is not affirmation with doubt or uncertainty. Rather, faith incorporates knowledge with trust and confidence. We experience doubt in our Christian walk not because it is inherent in faith, but rather because our faith is either malformed or malnourished. And in such condition, it is vulnerable to either too much or too little tension from our experiences of fallenness in daily living.
As our awareness and expression of
faith can suffer from a variety of problems, we must recognize that doubt which
can assault our faith comes in different forms. We are suggesting that doubt
should be viewed as a symptom: something is wrong with faith. Different
problems that faith can experience are manifested by different kinds of doubt.
Doubt needs to be seen by the Christian as both threat and opportunity. If
ignored and neglected, doubt has the potential to destroy faith. Yet, if
understood and tended to properly by God's Word, faith can be matured and
strengthened dramatically.
We want to briefly survey three common varieties of doubt and the problems of faith that they manifest. Our discussion draws on an excellent study of doubt by Os Guinness entitled, In Two Minds; which unfortunately has been out of print for many years. The first type of doubt is perhaps the most insidious and destructive because it is rarely seen as a form of doubt. It springs from a slow growing ambivalence about the value of our inheritance in Christ. Its most recognizable manifestation is an attitude - ungratefulness. Here the Christian walk of faith is not encountering too much tension with the experiences of fallen existence, rather there is too little, or perhaps, none at all. This subversive kind of doubt is well exemplified by the two sons in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Both sons had lived their whole lives in the father's house, enjoying the fullness of its blessings. Progressively, the prodigal son becomes discontent with a growing conviction that life would be better lived, out in the exciting world. Believing to have cashed in his inheritance, he leaves for the glitter of the world, but there receives a startling vision. Slavery in his father's house is preferable to the despair of his present fallen existence. Returning home with his new vision, he is surprised at his welcome and overwhelmed with gratitude to live again as a son in his father's house. And we see in the complaint of the brother the same ingratitude, but not quite in as advanced a stage. Christians who have grown up in the household of faith, and lived in strong Christian homes are prone to this kind of doubt. It is so easy to take it all for granted. Many silently suffer an impoverished faith, lacking a vision of the magnitude and stark contrast between sin and grace. Not that grace has been in short supply. Indeed, as in the parable, all of the comforts of the Gospel have been present since before one can remember. But, our vision of the abundance and scope of grace is linked to our vision of the pervasiveness and depths of sin. What is in short supply is a full-orbed awareness of the depths of one's sin and the extent of depravity in the old world. From blunted Law and sheltered living, the vision of our fallenness becomes vague and shallow. Thus, the immensity of grace is missed and its value discounted. Seeing little in what has always been there, faith is in danger of being cashed in for whatever fallen commitment may seem to offer more. In such a state, one is not overwhelmed by Anfechtung, rather little holy anguish is experienced at all. This is doubt with ingratitude. It is the failure to appreciate the tension in "but by the grace of God go I." And the incredible joy from hearing "once you were no people but now you have become God's people" is missing. What is so destructive about this form of doubt is that Christians who suffer from it, rarely are aware of its presence or even that it is a form of doubt. There is no experience of crisis to sound the alarm. Nothing but calm complacency. Perhaps many whom we count as dying or "dead wood" in our congregations are silent sufferers of doubt with ingratitude. Maybe we can even perceive shades of an ungrateful spirit in ourselves as well.
What is of course needed, is a good
strong dose of God's holy anguish. The hammer of fallen existence and the
piercing blade of the Law need to come crashing down on our self-confidence and
complacency, exposing our ingratitude for what it is. And shaken by the
magnitude of our helpless sinful condition, we need to be sent off running -
running to the waiting outstretched arms of a gracious father, who again for the
first time, wraps us in the precious robe of righteousness bought and paid for
by his only begotten Son. And now with a healthy tension, we hear God's call
anew - and, gratefully - take up life in the cross of Christ.
If doubt can assail us from too little tension, it can surface from too much as well. The faith which we express in our call to be a child of God is shaped by our awareness of its character and content. To be sure, the faith of Christ's Church is but one faith and it is none other than the faith of the prophetic and apostolic Word. But our awareness of that faith is always limited and sometimes, unknowingly, we just get it wrong. Our incomplete and perhaps faulty picture of God is, nevertheless, what shapes our awareness and frames out our expectations of God and his promises for daily living. If fallen existence brings us experiences and challenges that contradict our expectations of God and his promises; the tension between faith and our experiences of life can become excruciating, and a real crisis of doubt can result. We could call this, "doubt from a defective picture of God." This second type of doubt can often be manifested by a real crisis of trust. Expecting God to act in ways that he doesn't, or not act in ways he does, can shake our confidence and produce a whole range of faulty conclusions about what he must really be like. The recognition of Jesus as the incarnate Son of God was slow to develop in his disciples. Their picture of Jesus was incomplete and sometimes faulty. Seeing the Lord sleeping in the back of the boat during a fierce storm, the disciples doubted his concern about their welfare. What can even a great prophet know or do during such perilous circumstances if he is asleep? While probably bailing water, they had a twofold crisis; one in the worthiness of their boat, the other in the worthiness of their Lord. The disciples suffered doubt from a faulty and incomplete picture of Jesus. Likewise, if our storms of life or conscience are not balanced off with an adequate picture of our Lord - his power and his promises - then we too can suffer a real crisis in confidence. Trust, however, is not the root of the problem. The problem is in what we believe, not in how we believe. Indeed, the greater the trust in a faulty picture, the greater the crisis. Admonishments to "just trust the Lord" by well-meaning friends will simply make matters worse. It would be like pouring salt on an open wound. What we need is the wise counsel of one well-schooled in the Scriptures, such as our Pastor. Patiently examining our picture of God, learned instruction from God's Word can reform our faulty understanding and fill in serious voids. When the appropriate area of our picture is remedied, our crisis of doubt will dissipate as quickly as it began. Faith is significantly matured and a healthy balance of tension between our experience of fallenness and what is given to faith is created.
Our example has a happy conclusion.
Nevertheless, there is cause for sober reflection. How many people baptized in
the Lord have walked away from the fellowship of faith in bitter anguish;
nursing the conviction that God, at some crucial point in their lives, simply
did not come through for them? With faith, they neither got it right, nor were
they set right. Their awareness of God and his promises was not up to their
experience of the fallenness in life - the tension for trust was too great - so
they walked... How many in our midst who have not walked, are
nevertheless silently nursing the wounds of doubt from an anemic understanding
of the Lord and his promises? We see the importance of catechesis in the Church
- of getting our lessons and getting them right. A biblical faith is in tension with the fallenness of the world, but it is not in tension with the truth. John constructed his Gospel around seven miracles of Jesus, ending with the resurrection appearance to the skeptic Thomas. He then stated the purpose of his Gospel to the reader: "These things were written that you might know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you might have life in his name." The apostolic Church proclaimed God's mighty acts through Jesus as powerful evidences that undergird the promise of grace. If faith is to stand the intellectual challenges that our world can raise, then it must have a firm foundation. If our reasons for faith are weak, doubt can plague us when its truthfulness is rigorously questioned by the reasoned arguments of unbelief. We call this third variety, "doubt from weak foundations." This was the problem with John the Baptist when he was left alone with his questions in Herod's prison. He sent his disciples to Jesus with the question; "are you really the one to come or should we look for another." This is the central truth question of the Christian faith. Who is Jesus of Nazareth? It is instructive to note how Jesus ministered to John's doubts. He simply went about a days-worth of ministry and then turned to the disciples and said: "Go back and tell John of the things that you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the good news is preached to the poor." Foundational to the apostolic preaching of Jesus was the testimony; and of these things we are witnesses. Many a Christian parent has said silent prayers as their children packed off to "Secular University" fearing that their faith might crumble. The fear in some instances is well-founded. Our confident trust needs more than just accuracy in the "whats" of faith. It also needs a firm foundation in the "whys" of faith: why it should be regarded as true. If we do not know "why" in behalf of the Gospel and the Christian world-view, then we do not know "why not" in behalf of some substitute. The tragedy is that may a Christian has graduated from the Church's confession while studying to graduate from "Secular U." Unaided intellectual doubt can be resolved into unbelief. The Church and its educational ministry needs to take seriously the apostle Peter's imperative: "Always be prepared to give a defense for the hope that is in you when called upon..." We cannot answer that call and make that defense to the unbeliever until we have first made it to ourselves. The Church needs to educate in the "whys" along with the "whats" of faith. But we may ask, how firm a foundation is needed? Our goal should be an intellectual foundation that is commensurate with our degree of intellectual development and the sophistication of the challenges to our faith that our place in the world brings. With such a foundation, intellectual doubts will fade and a confident expression of faith can replace timidity. Steven A. Hein is the Director of the Concordia Institute for Christian Studies. He was formerly Professor of Theology (24 years) at Concordia University-River Forest, IL. What's New / Resources / Services / Links / Home |