What Do We Do When We Question Our Faith?
“Now wait a second, you want me to give you what?”
I couldn’t help but blurt this out when they asked for help. Not because of what they were asking for help, but how they were asking for this help.
“I’d like” they confidently said, “to have a paper bag for how I feel right now.”
After they explained what they meant by paper bag I began to understand what they were asking. They were referencing a paper bag that cartoons or sitcoms notoriously use while hyperventilating and needing to calm down. In their case though, they were asking for a metaphorical paper bag. In essence, they wanted something to calm them down while they were panicking as they questioned their entire faith.
Living in a college town for nearly a decade, I watch people move from inherited faiths to independent faiths. It usually comes after a major trigger. Either they experience something, learn something, or no longer feel something they used to feel that throws them into questioning their entire faith.
Asking hard questions about your faith isn’t extra credit. It’s the course. Every faith goes through consistent lines of questioning, reframing, occasionally rejecting, and examining. But asking hard questions doesn’t mean you are questioning your entire faith. People can cognitively know that, but not always feel that in their hearts.
So what do you do when your heart doesn’t feel what people tell you to think in your head?
Well, in honor of our friend’s language I told you about a second ago, here are the three paper bags (or talking points) I would recommend to anyone who is sitting down with you questioning their faith.
Definition. Nature. Image.
The Definition of Faith
The definition of faith should relieve the hunger-games-like events that happen in our mind about competing beliefs or questions. Faith isn’t ideas but action. One of the writers I’ve recently read who said it the best was Andrew Le Peau who says, “Faith is much more aligned with something we do than something we think or feel. Faith is more about obedience than inner certainty.”1 In Zane words, I would summarize faith as being legwork just as much as it is head work.
We think, “if we have faith, we should always have cognitive answers?” Can God create a rock God can’t pick up? Faith, by definition though, isn’t having answers to explain God as much as it’s living into the life and realities of God. How you lived your life will always be a stronger answer to your faith than how strongly you can answer questions about your faith.
Nature
Nature, many times, reveals to us what’s a natural process in the world. A helpful parallel I reference is sharing our nature with trees. All trees have rings inside them. A tree’s rings mark age. Lighter rings represent healthy years. Darker rings represent harder years. Each ring a tree adds, the sturdier the tree becomes inwardly.
Just as a tree matures, our faith matures in a very similar way. God forms layers within us as we go through healthy seasons and hard seasons. We are not bear wood though, because we’re told we have a union with Christ, which means we are connected to the grace of Christ.2 The grace of Christ is like our tree bark. It holds us, protects us, and allows us the time to grow inside with what we proclaim on the outside.
In other words, you are free to work everything out inside of you because you have someone outside of you sustaining you.
Image
Finally, and this is a very common talking point to remember, people are the image of God not God themselves.
Have you ever thought about how outlandish it is that God chooses humans to point to the divine? The One Who Is Other has others embody and reveal God to the world? This is why Jesus is so compelling, because Christ shows us what God in the flesh can look like because often we don’t look like him.
God uses people. People at their worst though, use God. In the time I’m writing this episode, our world is plagued with Christains who are using God’s name to declare all sorts of things that are the opposite of God. Declaring white bodies are more valuable than other bodies. Endorsing the ways of the United States as God’s ways. It’s in times like these we remember just because people say they follow God doesn’t mean God follows them.
People reveal the image of God. But they are never meant to be God. We must keep this in mind when it comes to those who bring us to God. They are not perfect. They just point. There is a difference in believing in God and believing in the people who speak about God.
Having faith in someone to be God for you is an image they cannot 100% of the time bear for you.
Asking Questions Vs. Questioning
What seems to throw us into a panic in times where we question our faith is that we are fearful of being hollow. If someone asks a question we don’t know the answer to, we tend to feel fake. Like everything else can’t exist because we don’t have an answer to this one question.
Questioning your entire faith isn’t necessary along your faith journey. Asking questions about your faith, however, is necessary along your faith journey. Often, we mix up the two. To ask questions isn’t proving faith worthless, it’s actually engaging and strengthening your faith.
I want to leave us with the words of Scott Erickson when it comes to the pressure we feel when asking questions about our faith because it describes our ultimate end of why we even do it in the first place.
“It is for love that you have been broken open so a larger capacity of faith, hope, and love can be built inside of you.”3
After nearly a decade of being around people reworking their faith, this is my metaphorical paper bag. Asking questions, although challenging and uncomfortable, is one of God’s ways of opening us more to be able to carry more of God.
There is no need to question our entire faith. We should welcome questions though. Because when we ask them, we love better, explain our hope better, and show the world a faith that can stand up in the midst of our questions.
References:
1Andrew Le Peau, Write Better (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 215.
2This theology is created and formed through the New Testament’s phrasing of “in Him” which can be found in a number of places including, 2 Cor. 5:17 or John 15:4, as examples.
3Scott Erickson, Honest Advent (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2020), 56.