Discipleship #11 - Why It’s ok to Doubt

This is an edited version of an article I posted on my old blog in 2015

“It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.” [Dostoyevsky quoted in Harold Victor Martin, Kierkegaard, the Melancholy Dane (1950)]

A key responsibility of a Christian leader and teacher is to present the truth of the gospel confidently. However, if the church leader is honest, they will admit to doubts. How many churches have a healthy culture that allows people to express their doubts?

All Christians will be endangered by doubt, and we must realise that this is normal. We will ask ourselves questions about the relevance of our theology and even the existence of the object of our theology (God). Karl Barth defines doubt as ‘swaying and staggering between Yes and No.’ Doubt may arise from spiritual attack, church disunity, ongoing secret sins and the cognitive dissonance that results in self-righteousness or just a lack of love for other people. It can also arise from personal suffering or unanswered prayers, making God’s presence feel distant, or from intellectual challenges that raise questions about the Bible and Christian beliefs. Even witnessing hypocrisy or moral failure in the church can shake a believer’s confidence, but doubt doesn’t have to mean the end of faith—it can be a path to deeper understanding and trust in God.

Churches that don’t allow space for individuals to externalise or discuss their doubts can cause distress. There’s nothing that irritates me more than hearing about Christians who have been dismissed by their pious pastor or overly religious congregation members as ‘liberal’ or ‘flakey’ because they admitted to doubting this or that.

At Merri Creek, we want people to be open about their doubts. It's not a sign of being a bad Christian. Nor is it a disqualification for ministry. Instead, it’s a sign that you’re a human being living in the ‘now but not yet’ (Romans 8:18-30); it is the reality of worshipping an invisible God. In the recently popular film Conclave, the lead character Cardinal Lawrence, played by Ralph Fiennes wisely says,

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. And let him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

Only in Heaven will faith and doubt be gone, “For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

However, in your doubts, keep holding on to Jesus. There is a danger, as the Apostle James writes that we will be “like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6). The “wave” occurs when we let the doubts dominate our thoughts.

So, how can we manage our doubts? It might sound counterintuitive, but when a person tells a Christian friend that they, for example, doubt the bodily resurrection, have shifted away from orthodoxy on sexual ethics, or question the teaching of the Apostle Paul, they have a better chance of persisting with their faith in the long term than if they kept their doubts private. Externalising doubts enables us to process our thoughts in a supportive Christian context.

On the other hand, when we suppress or hide our doubts and never speak them out loud to someone in our Christian community, there is a resulting cognitive dissonance. This dissonance is between (1) the mask we put on – which is the confident faith we think we are supposed to show to other people; and (2) the truth behind the mask – the very real doubts we privately harbour about our faith. Thus we experience a psychological clash: we are torn up inside, end up feeling depressed or disillusioned, and have an existential crisis.

In an attempt to resolve this dissonance, we say to ourselves: “I’m living a lie to my Christian community, I’m pretending to believe what they (supposedly) all believe, I’m in a different theological place to my congregation, I don’t feel like I belong here anymore.” Once people start thinking this way, they often gradually slide out of church. They come less and less. Perhaps they check out other churches that might affirm their doubts or changing theology. Sometimes they find another community that is not a church.

This could have been avoided if we had openly discussed our doubts with someone in the safe environment of a loving and humble church community.

Australian social researcher Hugh Mackay writes:

Certainty denies the very essence of faith. It is the impenetrability of life’s mysteries that encourages our leaps of faith not merely into the unknown, but into the unknowable. That’s why doubt is the engine that propels and sustains faith. We believe (in anything) precisely because we doubt. This is the great paradox of faith: we yearn to know but cannot know, so we construct or accept, ready-made from an established institution, a set of beliefs that satisfy our need to make sense of what’s going on. If it’s not religious belief, it might be astrology, the free market, feng shui, superstition, science, a particular psychological or philosophical orientation – Buddhist, Freudian, Jungian, humanist – or a moral code we believe will make for a good life and, by extension, a better world … But if we knew as objective facts the answers that faith supplies, there would be no need for faith. And if faith – that mystical, clouded, elusive yearning – is corrupted by the arrogance of certainty, it ceases to be faith and becomes mere delusion … The religious truth-seeker, the pilgrim, yearns to see with the eye of faith but constantly falters. The plea from the father of a sick child healed by Jesus, quoted in Mark’s gospel, captures the idea perfectly: ‘I believe; help my unbelief’.

So it is perfectly reasonable and healthy to be a believer who acknowledges their doubts. The highly regarded Emeritus Professor of philosophy from Oxford University, Richard Swinburne, explains that the relationship between faith and doubt is about probabilities. Scientists and engineers work in this faith–doubt paradigm: they create a rocket, for example, and send it to the moon, taking a risk with the lives of the astronauts and billions of dollars of tax payer’s money. They do this having faith in their calculations and the quality of work of the engineers: they believe that it will ‘probably’ get to the moon and back without the astronauts being killed.

A similar argument can be made about faith in God. Just as the scientists and engineers believe their rocket will probably work – the believer trusts that their faith will probably work. The scientists and engineers move beyond believing that their theories work to believing in their theories by building the rocket. Similarly, Swinburne says we need to consider the difference between believing that there is a god verses believing in God. Believing that there is a god is believing that this state of affairs is true – but you might not respond to this belief. Religion goes beyond this because it requires you to believe in something.

Believing in God means trusting and relying on God. This belief directs your actions – you are guided by your God and your religion. If you were an atheist, then it would be foolish to let religion guide your life.

If you were somewhat unsure but also somewhat persuaded, then you might think: ‘If Christianity is probably true, and it matters to me to live a good life, a worthwhile risk for me to take is to invest my life in this religion. I can let it guide my life. I will put my trust in the God of the Bible.’ Swinburne says that this is your calculated risk for a better life – the better life of a Christian disciple who worships their creator serves other people in dependence on God, participates in the Christian community, and lives to serve other people – not to mention the better life in eternity with God.

So faith and doubt are natural bedfellows. Don’t feel ashamed or worried if you doubt. This is perfectly normal for any believer who is honest with themselves.

An exercise to help you is to write down all your doubts and share one of them with a Christian friend you trust.

Doubt is not the enemy of faith; it is often the very soil in which faith deepens and grows. To wrestle with uncertainty is to engage honestly with the mystery of God, just as the father in Mark’s gospel cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief.” Faith is not the absence of doubt but the decision to trust amid it. When we bring our questions into the light—within a community that listens, loves, and walks alongside us—we allow them to refine rather than erode our beliefs.

So, don’t let doubt isolate you. Instead, let it push you deeper into authentic faith, which is not built on the illusion of certainty but on the confidence that even in our wavering, God is steady. Faith is not about having all the answers but about having the courage to keep seeking, trusting, and walking toward the One who holds us, even when we stumble.