Doubt isn't antithetical to faith

First Podcast Episode - With Miroslav Volf

Some people think the opposite of faith is doubt. We even use them as antonyms. “I have faith,” we say, when we want to feel certainty.

In our culture, we tend to view moments of doubt and uncertainty as negative, corrosive, and even dangerous.

I’ve had my own moments of doubt, especially when it comes to faith. I’ve wondered if there is a higher power, or if the prayers I’m offering make any difference. We all go through periods of uncertainty, so much so that it can hold power over us in ways we can’t understand. 

You know, the idea of a mid-life crisis always used to make me laugh. Middle-aged men trading their spouses and families for shiny, red convertibles always seemed absurd to me.

Then, I hit mine. Not the red convertible kind, but one of my own. Last November, on a walk with my dad, in all his infinite wisdom, he kicked my mid-life crisis into full swing. 

He said, “You’ve worked really hard and accomplished a lot already. But now it’s time to switch gears. Before, you would ask what you could do with your life. Your goal was to create opportunities. Now, you should be asking yourself a different question: What do you want to do with your life? What’s your vision?”

It was a powerful conversation that has stuck with me over the past year. 

And this single question has helped me grow a lot in the past several months, both in terms of how I approach my life and also in developing clarity for the type of person I am and want to be.

Mid-life crisis complete, right? If only life were so easy…

In the first episode of Wisdom & Practice, I sit down with Mirsolav Volf, the Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and one of my favorite Croatian theologians. Mirsolav shared that he regularly challenges his ideas and values as part of his practice.  He welcomes doubt because to him, engaging with these ideas, however foreign or strange, enables him to learn more about himself and God in the process. For Miroslav, engaging with doubt makes his faith stronger.

I loved our conversation and hope you do, too. I’ll paste a snippet of it below and link to it here.

PS - Here’s a photo of us in the studio in Aspen, signing our books for one another :)

I cannot just discard faith as if a dish was placed before me and I tasted it. That's even not wise to do with dishes, right? Because your taste can grow and suddenly you come to appreciate the complexity of a dish that you otherwise would not have liked at all.

But how much more is that the case with faith? So in that sense, I trusted the practices to carry the faith because I trusted in the tradition. Now, that was at the beginning when the doubt was kind of unsettling, really. But I personally think that doubt is a dimension of faith.

That's why it's called faith.

Doubt accompanies faith, it's not opposed to it. The moment in which we properly understood doubt is a moment that lets one recognize that faith is actually faith and not some kind of a watertight certainty. And I think we don't have those certainties.

We don't have those certainties in secular life. We think we do, but we don't. We don't have them in science, and we don't have them in all ordinary life. Ordinary life is an act of faith.

Even now, I make it a practice to read what I think are compelling critiques of the Christian faith. For me, this was Nietzsche….

Nietzsche, maybe for 35 years or 40 years, has been an accompanying voice in my journey of faith. In the evening, before I would go to sleep, there was Nietzche always there, and I would read regularly. And that was the voice of a doubt that is there. A voice of a doubt that was intelligent in a sense, not in this superficial sense of pure knowledge, but in a sense of being existentially invested and informed. And that has actually kept my faith alive. I think my faith is more mature, and in some sense, more beautiful than it was before. I'm more attached to it. I

think it's just this extraordinary, precious jewel that I look and I see from different sides, and I'm in love with it in some ways. It hasn’t become kind of old. It’s not a garment that has been frayed and is no longer interesting. To the contrary, it’s alive. 

Listen to the full conversation here. And feel free to subscribe, rate, and review :)

Also, if you enjoyed this idea and want to read more, my friend Nadia Bolz-Weber just wrote a beautiful essay about faith and doubt in her substack, The Corners. You can read it here. Nadia’s awesome (and will appear in a later episode of Wisdom & Practice), and I highly recommend subscribing to her newsletter.