Hope In Doubt

A good article on doubt by Lee Strobel -Why Doubt Can Give You Hope (via Relevant):

I know I’ve gone through bouts of doubt that felt like they could be lethal to my faith. How about you?

Perhaps you’ve questioned whether God has really forgiven you or whether He can keep forgiving you when, as a Christian, you’ve failed to do what you knew He was telling you to do. Or you’ve wondered whether the Bible can be trusted. Or you can’t reconcile the world’s suffering with a loving God. Or you’ve read an article by a skeptical scientist or liberal theologian that kicked the legs of your faith right out from under you.

The issue isn’t whether you will catch the doubt virus; we’re all infected to some degree. The real question is this: How can we prevent that virus from turning into a virulent disease that ultimately ravages our faith? Or perhaps this is a better question: How can we respond to our doubts in ways that will help us emerge even stronger as a result?

As incredible as it sounds, a bout of doubt may turn out to be one of the healthiest and most hope-inspiring experiences you’ll ever go through.

Let’s put the doubt virus under the microscope where we can expose it to scrutiny and destroy some of our misconceptions that give it undue strength.

First Misunderstanding: What Doubt Really Is

Many Christians think that doubt is the opposite of faith, but it isn’t. The opposite of faith is unbelief, and that’s an extremely important distinction to understand.

In his book In Two Minds, Os Guinness said, “Doubt comes from a word meaning ‘two.’ To believe is to be ‘in one mind’ about accepting something as true; to disbelieve is to be ‘in one mind’ about rejecting it. To doubt is to waver between the two, to believe and disbelieve at once and so to be ‘in two minds.’”

Guinness also pointed out that in the Bible, unbelief refers to a willful refusal to believe or a deliberate decision to disobey God. But doubt is different. When we doubt, we’re being indecisive or ambivalent about an issue. We haven’t come down squarely on the side of disbelief or belief; we’re simply stuck over some questions or concerns.

So go ahead and breathe a sigh of relief. Those words might be just what you needed to hear to begin neutralizing the anxiety that the doubt virus has been generating inside you, robbing you of the hope your Christian faith ought to give you.

Second Misunderstanding: Doubt Is a Sin to Be Forgiven

Not only is doubt different from disbelief, but, contrary to popular opinion, doubt is not a sinful offense. God doesn’t condemn us when we ask Him questions.

Don’t you think God would rather have you be honest with Him about your doubts than have you profess a phony faith? He knows what’s going on inside us anyway; it’s absurd to think we can mask our doubts from Him. An authentic relationship means telling the truth about how we feel, and that’s the kind of relationship God wants with us.

Third Misunderstanding: Doubt Inevitably Does Damage

Another common misconception is that the doubt virus is always detrimental to our spiritual health. However, the truth is that God can use our doubts to produce positive side effects.

Apologetic Quotes

10 great apologetics quotes from "The Poached Egg":

One lesson we must learn from Misquoting Jesus is that those in ministry need to close the gap between the church and the academy. We have to educate believers. Instead of trying to isolate laypeople from critical scholarship, we need to insulate them. They need to be ready for the barrage, because it is coming. The intentional dumbing down of the church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ. Ehrman is to be thanked for giving us a wake-up call. - Dr. Daniel B. Wallace

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance. - William Dembski

Everybody has a point of view they think is right and everybody judges at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeon-holed as the judgmental one, but everyone else is judging, too. It’s an inescapable consequence of believing in any kind of morality.
- Greg Koukl

In the face of this modern nihilism, Christians are often lacking in courage. We tend to give the impression that we will hold on to the outward forms whatever happens, even if God really is not there. But the opposite ought to be true of us, so that people can see that we demand the truth of what is there and that we are not dealing merely with platitudes. In other words, it should be understood that we take the question of truth and personality so seriously that if God were not there we would be among the first of those who had the courage to step out of the queue. - Francis Schaeffer

One of the most disastrous illusions of the internet age is that an amateur plus Google is equivalent to a scholar. A search engine offers information, more or less relevant according to the skill of the searcher. But it does not sift that information; it does not sort fact from fancy, wheat from chaff. It does not explain which facts are relevant and which are beside the point. It does not weigh the merits of competing arguments and tell the user where the balance of evidence lies. A bright amateur armed with the internet may at best be better informed than he would otherwise have been, and he may occasionally catch a real scholar in a factual error. But it will not turn him into a scholar himself. There is no such thing as effortless erudition. - Dr. Timothy McGrew