This month’s Christianity Today has a very good little article by Rob Moll on the place of the great doubters in his own journey toward faith.
Moll recounts the importance of Albert Camus in his own rediscovery of faith. An in telling the story he reflects on the importance of doubt. He quotes Timothy Larsen studied 19th century atheists: “Some actually are really trying to answer questions. That’s why they sound so angry. They’re in a struggle for their own soul.”
Doubt. Anger. A struggle for the soul. And, often, a reembrace of the faith that was once left behind.
The place where I resonated so deeply with the article was its insistence that doubt need not be the end of the line, that the deconstruction of what was once taken for granted has the power to clear the way for a reconstruction of a new, stronger faith built on a more sure (if less glibly confident) foundation.
As I see it, such a biography that moves from faith to doubt to reconstructed, chastened faith is increasingly the story of the 20- and 30-somethings of the Christian world. I see it various ways played out in Donald Miller, in Rachel Held Evans, in Anne Lemott, and others.
I see it played out in smaller cycles in my own life, hence the recent spate of posts on my post-inerrancy view of life.
In fact, I see these patterns as bearing certain marks of health. They show that people are taking the imperfections of the world we live in with utmost seriousness. It shows that they are not willing to take pat answers that would dishonor the God who stands behind the world that was created good and redeemed in Christ.
And it shows that the God of Jesus is, in fact, the God who gives life to the dead.
Great reflection Daniel. The possibility of a deconstructed faith making way for a reconstructed faith has been an important motif in my faith-shaping view of Christ and the development of my walk. I immersed myself in the great atheists for a long period of time and saw my faith shaped in way that rejected much of the legalistic thinking in my own Fundamentalist background as I progressed into the more open space of academia where, as Paul mentions, “faith could be tested” rather than simply retained on the principle of belief or a chapter-and-verse approach to Scripture. Without the great atheists, my faith may have been a very simple foundation washed away with the great storms they bring in their bombast!