The Refining Fire of Doubt - as excerpted in "Give Us This Day"

 

The Refining Fire of Doubt

"Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God."

I can't remember now if I only learned about Rachel Held Evans when she died or if I'd learned of (and admired) her shortly before. No matter. From what I've read of her writing and learned about her character, she was a brilliant and wonderful woman.

Years ago, I helped put on a Catholic retreat that changed my life. One of the things I most loved about it was the ecumenical nature of the thing. I'd been born Catholic and fell away from the faith as a teenager (as kids are wont to do.) The initial resurgence of my faith in high school (I guess it was really a “surgence;” I'd never properly understood Christianity) was facilitated by some Protestant friends. As a result, ecumenism has always been crucially important to me.

Our small retreat team of maybe eight guys was roughly half Protestant or non-denominational. I'd been assigned to speak on the topic of “Christian Community” and the ecumenical nature of my personal story figured prominently in my “witness.”

I came across this excerpt of Ms. Held's in a Catholic prayer book I consult daily: a Protestant woman's writing in a Catholic publication. Right down my alley. Despite her Protestantism, I consider her to be “St. Rachel,” in the Catholic sense of the term. Right up there with St. Peter, St. Patrick and St. Therese of Lisieux. And for that matter, St. Martin Luther King.

Here, she rightly indicates that the moment you think you know everything should be your first clue that you don't.

* * * * * *

Many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore. So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong.

In short, we never learned to doubt.

Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter is a virtue.

Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often ask them.

If I have learned anything over the . . . years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot.

Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unraveled

Rachel Held Evans (d. 2019) was a best-selling author who wrote about faith, doubt, and life in the Bible Belt. Her books include Searching for Sunday, Inspired, and Wholehearted Faith.

A Rueful Laugh at a Golden Calf

 We look back on some ugly moments in history – for instance, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany – as if they were mysterious specimens captured in amber.  We see they’re so grotesque and ridiculous that, of course, they could never happen again.  No sane people would allow such history to repeat.  Until it does.

We’ve seen it happen over and over again: whether the aforementioned Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pol Pot or any number of bastards from a bellowing past.  This time the would-be dictator is Donald Trump, a man so abrasive and divisive that we said he couldn’t possibly do anything but crash and burn as a candidate.  Of course, one by one, he destroyed the clown car of Republican primary opponents he faced and cruised to his party’s 2016 nomination.  And then to the presidency.  

All through the absurdity of his candidacy – best described as the constant immaturity of a five-year-old on a sugar high – were snapshots of an increasingly empowered sociopath: the racially charged “birther” gambit; descending that escalator to call Mexicans criminals and rapists; the TMZ “pussy-grabbing” interview; the constant and overt racism, misogyny and base rudeness; and on and on.  Speaking of “base,” no word could better describe the millions of cretinous people who saw in him a reflection of their own miserable selves.  Hillary Clinton was right. They are “deplorables.” Unfortunately, saying so was the confirmation of a sad axiom of politics: one is often penalized for telling the truth.  

That’s not to judgmentally paint all his followers as people of only cretinous character.  I’m sure many of them are otherwise decent folks with mortgages, nice children, reasonable concern for the future and love for America – however twisted.  

But they coalesce around a commonality of the worst of the human psyche: selfishness, unconcern for the “other,” hatred of immigrants and an abject failure to conceptualize that their own forebears were once immigrants too.  They have a pre-disposition to favor the use of torture and mistreatment of that despised “other.” And they embrace what was once a closeted racism that Trump has made okay to consider a virtue.  

We find that the small government, low tax character of their Republicanism was a sham.  They freely embrace the Trump-imposed tariffs that Republicans have always detested – that is, the heavy hand of the government upsetting free markets. Free enterprise be damned – as long as ethnic hatred of the Chinese can be given vent.

And that’s just it.  Their common organizing principle isn’t politics at all.  As conservative Matthew Continetti might put it, it’s “pessimism, nativism and grievance.”  And I’d add racism, small-mindedness and an underlying hatred toward their enemies – real or perceived.  

Likewise, one of their other organizing principles is what they call Christianity. But the version of it we usually see on display from these religious privateers isn’t really Christianity at all.  It’s a toxic combination of conniving power, prejudice and self-righteousness – practically a stereotype of what one might imagine as the makeup of the modern American Pharisee.

It’s as if the love, mercy and forgiveness that Jesus insisted upon would cause them to “primary” him out of their party. It would be replaced by the actual golden Trump idol they created for the 2021 CPAC convention (and displayed again in 2022.)  Which serves as a reminder that these people are collectively too obtuse to understand what fools they are; a biblical metaphor for their disillusions stares them in the face – one to which they’re completely blind – even proud of.

Moses and Jesus, both, would be pissed.  But why should they care?  Those guys are just a couple of Jews, anyway . . .