Doubt

For the past ten years, no intellectual challenge to my faith has awakened so much doubt within me as what the philosophers call "the problem of evil." In short, it asks, "If God is all good and all powerful, why do such bad things happen in the world?" I took a full course on it in college and another full course on it in seminary and the question STILL haunts me from time to time. When I weep over the way women are being raped in the Sudan I admit that it shakes my faith in an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God. But today in my lenten reading I came across a quote that I found profoundly encouraging and would like to share it:

"I should think ill of any preacher who confesses himself untroubled by all those aspects of our experience summed up in what we call the problem of evil. I should expect him, if he were really a God-sent man, to be familiar with terrible visitations of doubt, to have moments when all the solutions of the problem of evil, even those which he himself has attempted, seem to him in vain; and I should expect those visitations to be more terrible for him than others. Being the man he is, he must needs have his times of perplexity, nay, his times of extremity. They are among the conditions of his service and he must be willing to bear them as a good soldier of Christ. He enlists upon the possibilities that await him, and when they come he must still say to himself, 'for this cause I was born and for this I came into the world.' No less is required of him by the traditions of the service. They were established in the Garden of Gethsemane." - L. P. Jacks

I find tremendous comfort in this and, in fact, it makes me suspicious of those pastors who seem to always have all of the answers wrapped up neatly in a nice, clean package. If seminary taught me anything, it taught me that when talking about God (that "darkness which is above the light" as Miester Eckhart called Him) nothing is as simplistic as we'd like to make it.

Instead, I would love to see a church in which honest, difficult questions are embraced rather than hushed. After all, if God is the God of all Truth, then He will be able to handle our questions. In the meantime, we can rest assured that questioning and doubting is a part of the Christian life and is as natural to it as a soldier taking enemy fire.