Faith.In.Life

#Deconstruction

Questions Vs. Doubts

This past week I came across Dr. Bobby Conway who has a website and books called “Does Christianity Still Make Sense?”  He grew up a skeptic / non- believer, became a Christian, then a pastor, but then started having grave doubts about the Christian faith.  He shares about how he was looking for answers to hard questions as a non-believer and when he was in his youth, Christianity seemed to have all the answers.  He became a pastor, but then experienced extreme doubt over his conversion and if Christianity was true.  He then says: 

“What if I had simply settled on the Christian option as the answer to my questions, but had not considered the other religions?  Might they offer just as good of answers and possibly even better answers?”

And then later he points out:

“There is a difference between a question and a doubt.  A question is simply looking for an answer.  While doubt has an extreme emotional connection to it.

To which we will very quickly find that this idea is nothing new under the sun.  There have been many who have gone before Dr. Conway who struggled with the same thing.  I first encountered such a concept in reading C.S. Lewis.  I first read his book “The Problem of Pain” which explores the classic question of “If God is all powerful and all loving, why is there suffering and pain in the world?”  The skeptic will answer the question by saying that since there is suffering and pain in this world, then God is either all powerful but does not care (not all loving) or God is either all loving but is unable to do anything about pain (not all powerful).  I found the book incredibly helpful having read it just after undergrad, and I remember encountering one of my first pastoral care situations where a family lost their father to a long lasting cancer.  The widow was then left with three young daughters where the oldest was in my high school youth group at the time while the youngest was still in elementary school.  I was heart broken for their situation and didn’t have any words that I could say, so I remember quoting Lewis’ own words (although I don’t know what I quoted).   I pray it was helpful for the family at the time, but even I look back at that situation and realize I was trying to answer a question with some type of logical answer.  I know that I failed to address the extreme emotional doubt they had to have in their heart.   

I failed to read a follow up book C.S. Lewis wrote until much later in my training called “A Grief Observed.”  While “Problem of Pain” was very good, it did not hold a candle to the second book talking about the same question, but this time it was rooted in a very real reality, pain, and extreme doubt Lewis had to encounter when he himself lost his wife to cancer.  In both “A Grief Observed” and in letters Lewis exchanged with some of his peers we see a much more raw Lewis who has been quite literally cut to his core.  He, at times, comments about the sheer effort he had to put forth to get up in the morning and simply go about his day and his letters especially will move one to tears.  

In the same way, I first read and was introduced to Timothy Keller through his book “Questions for God.”  The book was very practical, and was largely meant to interact with the skeptic or non believer to give logical answers to some of the hard questions.  Later on, he wrote a fantastic book that I reference often, “Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering.”  I read this book not long after my wife’s dad died and we ourselves were walking a hard road.  In that book Keller even warns the reader that if they are walking through pain and suffering which brought you to the book in the first place, to skip sections one and two, and start with section three.  That is where Keller tries to give a much better application to answer the tough questions.  Keller’s book opened my eyes to how much pain and suffering happens in the world, and would even challenge the most mature Christian in how we come to terms with why God would allow suffering in this world.  

Many who followed Keller soon learned that he himself was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer that would later take his life.  At that point he had retired from his lead pastorate at New Redeemer in New York, was eventually forced to move off the church planting off-shoot, Redeemer City to City, until finally he only communicated with his audience through blogging as he was not healthy enough to continue publishing long works.  One doesn’t have to read very much of his blogging to see a man who is quite literally a shadow of who he once was.   From not only speaking to the masses to only having his blog, but also as he lost weight across the cancer treatments.  And yet, in the midst of his extreme suffering, he constantly reflected on just how beautiful Jesus was, and how much more his longing for God was.  His quiet times and even times with his wife became places of worship where hugs and tears were shared together.  He even at one point comments how much he had believed in God’s truth and comfort - even preached it - before his diagnosis and extreme suffering only to find that he now was truly encountering God on a  regular basis.  

Both Lewis and Keller first started out with questions, but eventually each of them encountered extreme suffering that had to turn their questions into doubt.  Each of them grow in their faith only to find that the answers to their questions may have only scratched the surface that is the depth of who God is.  However, in the process of #Deconstruction you may have genuine Bible believing Christians who thought they had answers to so many of life’s big questions only to find that either the answers were not sufficient - or maybe the answer wasn’t what mattered the most.  That is, in the midst of suffering, even Keller points out that there is no amount of rational thinking that will somehow bring you out of the pit.  In the onset of pain, suffering and grief there is not going to be a helpful answer to the question “God, why would you allow this to happen?”  The Bible teaches us that God can work good in bad situations, but whatever good he might work or whatever comfort he might offer is going to take time and perspective to experience what he has in store.  But, even if there is an incredibly logical answer to our why questions when you are in the midst of the pain and suffering do the logical answers matter?  There will be times when logic will cease, and as emotional beings our visceral responses will become unavoidable.  

And certainly, for this, there is a season for everything - even a time to weep.  

Yet, it seems to me, that more often than not, when we as people experience pain and suffering we will use the visceral response to inform what we believe, hoping to create a logical conclusion.  In doing so, we have created some of the worst theology and ideology I have ever encountered.  I will give you two examples.  The first encounter I had with bad theology was with the Chaplain I worked under during my student internship required for my seminary education.  This Chaplain had served the same hospital for years.  I imagine over that time he encountered too many deaths to count.  He also believed in universalism where everyone goes to Heaven regardless of what they believed.  Now, I don’t know whether his experience or his theology came first, but in my mind if a person is experiencing suffering and death on a regular basis it would be easy to believe that everyone is going to Heaven even if their own belief system didn’t teach such a concept.  This example though is a micro-expression of the greater movement that has tried to justify universalism.  I am perplexed by the amount of thought exercise that has been done to justify the notion of universalism primarily based in a human understanding of what is fair, just, and (from our perspective) right.  Even if the thought process is based on the Bible, the train of thought is based on their own translations of the Bible to justify their belief system (rather than take what the Bible teaches and apply it to our reality). They place themselves in a circle where their own thought process determines their belief system, rather than allow an outside objective source to speak into their finite reality.

The second example lies in the notion of #Deconstruction.  In the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast episode called “An Existential Road Trip” we hear Tripp Fuller interview another podcaster, Dan Koch”  They talked about Paul Tillick’s work on Existentialism, Theology, and psychology. In the podcast they move to the topic of death and this is the transcript:

Let’s talk about death.  Death is an absolute truth:  We will all die.  Everything that lives on this earth dies.  Finitude is a fundamental fact of this worldly existence and a lot of people try to avoid death.

They then go on to talk about a Christian who prayed for someone with cancer, but the person was never healed and eventually died.  The event inspired a song in which the lyrics read:

In the morning when you finally go and the nurse runs in with a red envelope and the carnal leas to the window.

In the morning, in the winter shade on the 1st of March, on the holiday, I thought I saw you breathing.

All the glory that the Lord has made and the complications when I see his face in the morning in the window.

All the glory when He took our place.

But He took my shoulder and he shook my face.

And he takes and he takes and he takes.  

Tripp goes on to say:

So the way I would frame this song lyrically from what we’ve been talking about is that the speaker here has a Christian faith on which to draw, to kind of make sense in some way of the suffering.  He’s like bringing in substitutionary atonement, like the glory when he took our place.  But also he takes and he takes and he takes.  It’s really more a song about doubt.  Fundamentally, its about the experience of doubting his faith in light of this great loss, right?

Tripp may very well be accurate in his assessment of the song, and I would even encourage the exploration of our existence in the midst of death and suffering.  However, if this is an exploration of substitutionary atonement. it creates a false conclusion based in the reality of our suffering.  In this case the person ponders the nature of Jesus giving up his life on the cross, All the glory when He took our place, but then somehow suggests that Christ’s sacrifice is not once for all because with each death that followed are the lives that he takes and he takes and he takes.  This is not the hope that the Christian worldview teaches, but rather, what is a more accurate assessment of our broken human condition.  As you continue to listen to the podcast, though, they continually suggest that as we exist and encounter pain and suffering it should also make us question the beliefs we were raised up in.  While they might claim that you are to question any beliefs you have, they are especially questioning any type of Christian or Evangelical beliefs.  

Again, it sounds edgy, even educated, but ultimately creates a false conclusion of the very thing they are trying to disprove.  The main thrust of the Bible is that yes, in this world you have troubles, and for a time you will experience terrible things which could include persecution and death.  But, Jesus has overcome the world, he raised from the dead, and our present suffering cannot compare to the hope that is in the age to come.  As I was listening to this podcast I had one question running through my mind “What is your only comfort in life and death?”  While the podcasters may not be able to answer this question, the Heidelberg, which is based on the Bible, most certainly does by saying:

That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death— to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.