doubt on Firm Belief

Doubt is really the felt tension that exists between a belief you have and a contrary claim you do not yet believe…Simply put, doubt is that experience of one of our beliefs seeming like it might be f...

To a twentieth-century mind the notion of a virgin birth is intrinsically and preposterously inconceivable. If a woman claims–such claims are made from time to time–to have become pregnant without sex...

When we aim at certainty when it comes to our Christian beliefs, it sets us up for failure. …Imagine someone with a lot of time on their hands who painstakingly constructs a five-foot-high house of...

Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Context to the Letter While we don’t have a robust understanding of the context of Hebrews compared to, for example, many of Paul’s let...

Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something e...

I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will ...

Lauren F. Winner tells a story about her friend Julian. When she was 12 and going to be confirmed, she had a crisis. She told her father, the pastor, that she wasn’t sure she could tell the church tha...

We should aim for rational confidence in these sorts of pursuits because certainty is a mere will-o’-the-wisp. Finite minds simply can’t pull it off. Though the distinction between aiming at certainty...

Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God,...

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

My faith life, like that of every one else, fluctuates. There are ups and downs and hot spots and cold spots and boredom and ennui and all the rest can be there. And so I’m not asked on a Sunday morni...

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.

Most Christians can deal with inevitable doubts as long as there is room for doubt. But when a system is enforced that leaves no room for doubt, benign uncertainties can mutate into faith-destroying m...

Have you ever noticed that the phrases in our culture favor doubt over faith? The famed missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin pointed this out when we speak of “Honest doubts” and “blind faith”. ...

There’s no shortage of the religiously faithless who seem eager to tell us what faith is. Many of these characterizations of faith are reminiscent of Mark Twain’s precocious schoolboy who quipped, “Fa...

There is a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy and Charlie Brown are walking home from school. Charlie Brown tells Lucy that he got straight As. Lucy responds, “I won’t believe it unless I see the report ...

Faith and pessimism are incompatible. To be sure, we are not starry-eyed idealists; we are down to earth realists. We know well that sin is ingrained in human nature and in human society. We are not e...

Never doubt in the dark what God showed you in the light

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...

Michael Polanyi brilliantly points out that we cannot doubt something without simultaneously trusting in something else. Eve began to doubt God—more importantly her relationship with God—at the same m...

The root of our English term doubt has to do with duplicity. It is being divided or doubled up in our thinking. But this isn’t a matter of simply being confused or unable to make up our mind or ...

God, our rock and refuge, there are plenty of things that we allow to erode our faith in you. When life gets stormy, we let our uncertainty cloud our trust in you. We think we know better and start re...

Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is can't believe. Unbelief is won't believe. Doubt is honesty. Unbelief is obstinacy. Doubt is looking for light. Unbelief ...

Lord, sometimes it’s so difficult to place our trust in you. You make incredible promises to us in your word. You say that through your power, we’ll be able to do even greater things than Jesus did in...

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Honest doubts, then, are open to belief. If you are really asking for information and good arguments, you might get some.

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.