Last week I ran into an old friend at the grocery store. We were in grad school together, and I hadn’t seen him since then. Seeing him last week brought on a flood of memories of late night paper-writing and pizza-eating. But what I remembered most in that moment was a particularly rough season my friend had encountered back in school. Being a seminary student, he felt as though there was no room for doubt, so when it hit him, he was utterly devastated and came to me for advice. I don’t think I helped him at all back then.

     It wasn’t until later that I came to understand a little more about doubt. What I realized is that doubt is not the opposite of faith anymore than hate is the opposite of love. (How could hate be the opposite of love when the hater is just as consumed with the object as the lover? No, apathy or indifference is the opposite of love.) Doubt is a kind of halfway house between unbelief and faith, but it is not definite unbelief. If you look at the literal definition of doubt, it means to be in two minds. I love this quote from Os Guinness: “To believe is to be in one mind about trusting someone or something. To disbelieve is to be in one mind about rejecting them. To doubt is to waver between the two, to believe and disbelieve at once, to be in two minds.”

 The knowledge that doubt is not unbelief could have saved my friend a ton of heartache. Perhaps he could have even seen and looked forward to the positive effects of doubt in that it often compels us to delve more deeply into the roots of our faith. In fact, I would go so far as to say that doubting the reality of Christ, His death, and His resurrection is the beginning of certainty.

     The truth is the Bible is full of real men of God who doubted at certain times in their lives. You can read about men like Thomas or John the Baptist and see that Jesus never condemned the doubter. He condemned flat unbelief, but never the agonized skeptic.

     So, How’s my old grad student buddy doing, you may be wondering. God’s grace is sufficient, and I’m doing fine.

© 2005, Ben Young.