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.