Faith Must Come with Doubt -or- Can you Stomach Jesus?

If you remember, “Bob’s Stomach” was the handle for an online restaurant critic, whose advice I followed in choosing a restaurant.  Though I didn’t know him, I chose to trust his advice on where to eat.  

In a sense, I blindly followed Bob’s Stomach, because I didn’t know him and because I rejected the restaurants he rejected, sight-unseen.

In another sense, I wasn’t following blindly at all.

I chose to follow the advice of Bob’s Stomach with my eyes open to all of the reasons why I shouldn’t--in full knowledge of the risks of following B.S.’s advice:

Bob’s tastes are not my tastes.

The restaurant could have just been having an off day when Bob was there.

Bob could be ornery, crotchety and hard to please.

Bob could have chosen a dish that wasn’t the restaurant’s specialty.

The server could have been work-shy or new--hardly representative of the entire establishment.

The possibilities leading to Bob’s wrongness are endless, and yet I decided to follow his lead anyway.

We come to know about Jesus Christ--all we know about God--in the same way: through third party witnesses.  The Bible; the apostles from age to age; God’s people in our faith communities.

But the story they tell is harder to swallow than the accounting of Bob’s Stomach.

We don’t really think about it today--myself included--but belief in Jesus Christ is preposterous.

The Christian faith doesn’t make sense.  The Church asks us to consider that the infinite God, creator and ruler of the cosmos, had a ‘child’ as old as God, who was later born a human.  Sounds like the stories of Greek mythology, like Hercules or something--only in the Christian story, the son is fully human and fully God, a logical joke: the glass is not half full or half empty, the glass is entirely full and totally empty.

Any sensible person would find it laughable and offensive.

But there is more.  God is not only a human being, Jesus, but a human being that lived a life that fell far short of the glory of God.  Jesus lived on the fringes of society; he associated with the lowly and the sinful.  Jesus was rejected by most, and in the end was put on trial as a criminal...and died.  Who, today, would look for God on death row?

What God would come to earth in abasement?  If God were to come as the most powerful and just king, or the most beloved and conscientious celebrity, God would be terribly humiliated.  But to come as a rather normal person, a controversial person...

But almost no one in the churches is offended by Jesus.  Why not?

It is NOT a lack of common sense.  

Christians are not offended by Jesus because they really don’t think about how nuts it is.  And rightly so, I suppose, because a lot of people who think about it end up falling away from the faith.  

But True Faith always comes with doubt.

Not the throw-up-your-hands-and-forget-about-it kind of doubt.

The kind of doubt that you wrestle with...that you work on and that works on you.

The suspension of disbelief is a way to avoid the problem.  Mere acceptance--without thought or explanation.  It is the will not to disbelieve, a negative movement.  And we call this faith.  To me, this option is the most offensive of all.  Why?  Because this negative choice of “faith” is really ignoring God to bypass the onslaught against rational thought.  All of a sudden, faith becomes something in which the mind does not participate.  If it doesn’t make sense, or is hard to understand, then it simply must be “a matter of faith.”

I have gone to friends on a number of occasions to talk about problems in my life.  Sometimes these very well meaning friends listen as I lay out my dilemma, and right away they have some form of answer: “I understand.”  “The same thing happened to me.”  “Here is what you need to do....”  “Have faith.”  “It is what it is.”  My issue is swept away.  My problem may be pretty superficial and ridiculous, at least on the surface.  But if something “simple” is disturbing me, then it is likely that a deeper issue in my soul is at the root of it all.  And the deeper thing...the deeper understanding of myself that I am craving to lay hold of by freaking out...is never investigated, never touched upon.  

When we suspend our disbelief because an article of faith does not “make sense” we do the same thing.  We throw up our hands and say: “It is what it is.  Let’s not try to understand what cannot be understood.”  And we miss the deeper things that God is trying to impress upon us.

I hate most of all the answer: “You aren’t supposed to understand it.”

Maybe I will never understand.  I am prepared for that, believe it or not.

But to therefore refuse to try...to refuse to explore and consider...

I believe that the mind and the heart can learn something of use out of every inexplicable experience or situation.  There may not be complete understanding, there may not be a solution, but there is always an opportunity to grow in some way, if the attempt to resolve the unresolvable is made.

The number one thing I learn from the ridiculousness of the claim that Jesus is fully God and fully human is this: I must choose.  That is, I must passionately choose God.

A logically inconsistent claim (a paradox), destroys all possibility of proof.

Where there is no proof, where there is no certainty, humans must make a choice.

This is what it means to be human, in fact.  We very seldom have all the information we need, and yet we are constructed to make a choice anyway.  There are times that we must act, whether we know what to do or not.  And it is a very human thing to learn to live with that choice and its consequences.

That is the beauty of the Church’s Christological doctrine (doctrine about Jesus’ equal divinity and humanity): I will never learn enough in order to figure it out, but I will always be pushed to choose--Yes or No.  

I can try to understand it with my mind, but I will always fail.

I can try to understand it with my heart, but I will always fail.

My understanding will falter, my love will falter.

And so, I am left to choose...

I can only say “Yes” or “No” in bold confidence.

I can only will to believe--will to fear, trust and love God--with infinite resignation.

If Jesus is just God, then I can love God from a distance without any mess.  

If Jesus is just human, then my mind can understand.

No problem.  The will need not become involved.

But if Jesus is both, I am forced to a choice:

Believe it or Not.

The trouble is that there are plenty of reasons not to believe it.

And so, if I believe, I must choose to do so with passion.

We need the Biblical witness so that we know and feel what we are choosing when we choose Jesus Christ.

Faith is not blind.

Faith is stepping out into our blind-spots, in full confidence that God is already there.

How wonderful it is that faith must come with doubt, that our we can choose God without knowing everything.

Either try the restaurant--taste and see.

Or do not.

At the end of the day, the choice is still yours.

Ryan Howard