Sermons
Making Room for Doubt
April 7, 2024
For nearly two millennia, Thomas has been disparaged for his doubt. And for almost the same time, doubt itself has been disparaged in the Christian life. Itâs either one or the other, faith vs. doubt, for the Christian.
I can remember struggling with doubt when I was a boy. I heard that God wanted my faith. I was taught that doubt as the opposite of belief was something bad, something to be avoided and overcome. For the Christian, it was either faith or doubt, never both faith and doubt. The presence of doubt was evidence that I didnât truly believe, believe enough, have faith enough to be savedâor so I thought.
Our story in John seems to support this view.  Thomas was away from the other disciples when they first encountered the risen Lord. For Thomas, it was too good to be true. So you can see why he was so skeptical. âUnless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believeâ (John 19:25). I want to see the evidence.  I want to see him.  I want to touch his wounds myself.Â
Careful what you wish for, Thomas. A week later, Thomas is with the disciples at home, again behind shut doors. Jesus stands among them again and says, âPeace be with you.â Jesus knows about Thomasâ incredulity. Jesus is there for Thomasâwho was probably beating himself up all week for not being home when Jesus showed up the first time (I would have been). âPut your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt, but believeâ (John 19:27).  And then Thomas answered, âMy Lord and My God.â âBlessed are those who have not seen,â Jesus says, âand yet have come to believeâ (John 19:29).  And, so, there it is. We can see how weâve come to disparage doubt and desire belief.  Belief is our consolation for not having Jesusâ wounds to touch. And who wants to be called a Doubting Thomas?
But is the criticism warranted? Is there really no place for doubt within the life of faith? Are they polar opposites?  My own dualistic, either-or thinking on this subject began to collapse in a theology class, not in seminary but in collegeâa secular, public university in New Jersey, of all places. It started on the day I heard Professor Hiroshi Obayashiâa teacher I highly respected, a Christianâsay, âWe should always maintain a healthy agnosticism.â Humility of knowledge is essential. We need to live somewhere between faith and doubt, to be able to say what we know and what we donât know and will never know.  Slowly, I learned that doubt was extremely important in my life as a Christian. Not the doubt of the cynic or skeptic, but the kind of doubt that keeps things open, open to discovering something new and different, open to the possibility that what one thought was true might no longer be true or was never true and so you have to lean into a new way of knowing the world or yourself or neighbor or even God, a way that leads you deeper into truth. This is the kind of doubt that we need more of in the churchâagain, not the cynical, skeptical kind, that tiresome and destructiveâbut the kind that leaves us curious and open. A holy curiosity. Doubt led Thomas to eventually say, âMy Lord and my God.â Itâs knowledge born of conviction. And conviction is born in the tension between faith and doubt. Doubt has a role to play; it, too, can lead us toward conviction. Doubt can lead us home. Thatâs why, years ago, I found myself saying in the invitation to the Lordâs Supper, âCome in your faith, and come in your doubt.â The Holy Spirit is at work in both. Doubt can lead us to the truth.
Thomas has much to teach us. It was James Loder (1931-2001), former professor of practical theology at Princeton Seminary, my mentor, and friend, who helped me see Thomas as someone deserving of our thanks. A little about Loder. He had an enormous influence on my life. Jim was one of the reasons I transferred from Yale Divinity School to Princeton. I took every class he offered, went to him for counseling (he was the first to encourage me to pay attention to my dreams), he gave the charge at my ordination, and, later, my doctoral dissertation was on Jimâs theology of the Holy Spirit. He was an extraordinary soul, brilliant, full of love, and you could see that love in his eyes.
In the Epilogue of Loderâs book The Transforming Moment, weâre given a tribute, a word of praise for Thomas. Jim wrote, âIt is to Thomasâ great credit that he knows a problem when he sees it⌠I see Thomasâ famous dubiety not so much a problem of whether [Jesus] lives, but if He livesâfor that presents the problem.  [Thomasâ] doubt is rooted in a profound sense of the implications of such a claim and an unwillingness to take that step seriously.â  âItâs a problem,â Loder says, âto have the presumably dead Jesus, radically reversing the universal tendency of matter to disintegrate, appear before you in a form of tangibility youâve never seen before.  It is a problem so great that it may violently awaken you from a deep Newtonian slumber [of cause and effect] and put you into the world in a new wayâyet without any sense of directionâŚperhaps, all you know to do is wander off and go fishing.â  For, Thomas âsees all too clearly that if [Jesus] lives, the apparent and assumptive world we have always tended to take for granted is not actually definitive of us after all.â[1]
Now, we could just say we believe and be done with it and go about our lives.  This is what Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) called bad faith, âJust say you believe in God, then you wonât have to think about it anymore.â[2] There are a lot of people guilty of âbad faith.â Loder reflects, âOh, yes, I knowââBlessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.â Cynically, one can say, âThank goodness he said that.  I havenât seen anything and I donât want to, so I can say I believe, and by this saying, I can be better than Thomas and still not have it make any difference!â
âOf course,â Loder suggests, âif Thomas had really wanted to avoid the implications of the claim his companions were making, if he had really wanted to avoid changing anything, he made a big, tactical mistake.  He should have just walked away, left the scene so as not to be associated with a marginal person who thought that way.â
But it made a difference to Thomas.  It made a difference because his doubt and his search for proof were evidence that he actually cared enough to know the truth. The Hungarian-British philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), a brilliant mind who influenced Loder, said, âWe know more than we can tell,â and that we come to know that something âmore,â when we care enough to know.[3] As we saw in last weekâs sermon, we come to know through love.[4]  Theologian Wendy Farley has said, âWhen we conceive of Christianity as beliefs, love fades into the backgroundâŚ.â[5]
Thomasâ doubt was an expression of the investment he made in knowing Jesus, of how much he cared. Thomas had âthe courage to say so, and the tenacity not to let go of it until he had an answer.â  Thomas âbelieved the empirical test was necessary but found, like so many after him in all fields of human endeavorâŚthat the truth always exceeds the proof.â And itâs the doubt that pushed him there. Thatâs because, as Loder said and as he knew firsthand in his own life, âYes, sooner or later, when you get passionate about this you will walk headlong into the resurrected incarnation.  When that stunning moment occurs or when that astounding realization gradually dawns upon you over a considerable length of timeâŚwhen you say âMy Lord and my God,â without actually having to touch Him after all, you know you have been struck an immortal blow, you have been permanently wounded by the sheer awe and wonder of this grace.  Once wised up, you canât wise down.â
So, hereâs to Thomas. Hereâs to doubt. Hereâs to being curious, courageous, and caring enough to pursue and explore and fathom what we mean when we say with conviction, âChrist is risen! He is risen indeed.â
Sources
[1] James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard, 1989).  All the references to Thomas are found in the Epilogue, especially 213-215.  For more on Loder, see Kenneth E. Kovacs, The Relational Theology of James E. Loder: Encounter and Conviction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
[2] Cited in Loder, 214.
[3] Polanyi explores these ideas in his seminal work Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), and The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
[4] Always Beyond Our Grasp, March 31, 2024: https://catonsvillepres.org/sermons/always-beyond-our-grasp/.
[5] Wendy Farley, Gathering Those Driven Away: A Theology of Incarnation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 216. Emphasis mine.