What do I do with my doubts?

Most Christians doubt at some point, and most do it in silence, convinced that they are the only one and that admitting it would be a betrayal.

That silence is what does the damage.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith

The opposite of faith is unbelief — a settled refusal to trust. Doubt is something else: an unresolved question held by someone who has not let go.

Look at who doubts in Scripture.

John the Baptist. He had leapt in the womb at Mary's greeting, had baptised Jesus, had heard the voice from heaven and had said "behold, the Lamb of God". Then he was imprisoned by Herod, and from that cell he sent his disciples to ask: "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Matthew 11:3).

Jesus does not rebuke him. He sends back evidence — the blind see, the lame walk, the poor have good news preached to them — and then turns to the crowd and says that among those born of women none has arisen greater than John (Matthew 11:11).

He answered the doubt and commended the doubter, in the same conversation.

Thomas. Refused to believe without seeing. Jesus offered exactly the evidence he had demanded (John 20:27).

Asaph. "My feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked" (Psalm 73:2-3). An entire psalm about nearly abandoning faith because life was manifestly unfair — preserved in the church's hymnbook.

The father in Mark 9. Asked whether he believes, he says: "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). Both halves in one sentence. Jesus heals his son.

Habakkuk. Opens his book by accusing God of not listening: "O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?" (Habakkuk 1:2).

And Jude gives the church its instruction: "have mercy on those who doubt" (Jude 1:22).

Four kinds, four responses

Treating all doubt the same is why most attempts to help fail. Diagnose first.

Intellectual doubt

"I am not sure this is true." Questions about evidence, contradictions, suffering, science, other religions.

What it needs: answers, and the discovery that the questions have been asked before by people much cleverer than you and have not destroyed the faith.

What to do: read. Keller, Lewis, Craig, Habermas — this library exists partly for this. Find the specific question rather than living with generalised unease. Talk to someone who will not panic.

What not to do: suppress it. A suppressed question does not go away; it goes underground and grows.

Emotional doubt

"I do not feel anything." God seems absent. Prayer bounces off the ceiling. Worship is going through motions.

What it needs: to be told that feelings are not the measure, and often, to be examined for something physical.

An enormous proportion of what presents as spiritual doubt is exhaustion, depression, grief, chronic illness, or a season of intense stress. Elijah, in the depths of despair after Carmel and asking God to take his life, was first given food and sleep (1 Kings 19:5-8). Before the theology, a meal and a nap.

Spurgeon, who battled severe depression his whole adult life, wrote about it publicly at a time when no preacher did — and insisted that a man's faith is not measured by his frames and feelings.

What to do: sleep. Eat. Exercise. See a doctor. Keep the practices going. Tell someone.

Moral doubt

"I do not want this to be true." There is something you want to do, or are already doing, and the faith is in the way.

This is the least discussed and one of the most common. Aldous Huxley admitted it about himself with unusual candour: that he had motives for wanting the world to have no meaning, chiefly because a meaningful world interfered with his sexual and political freedom.

What it needs: honesty. Ask yourself directly whether there is something you would have to give up if this were true.

What to do: name it. You cannot deal with a doubt whose real cause you are not admitting.

Circumstantial doubt

"How could God let this happen?" Bereavement, betrayal, injustice, unanswered prayer, a church that hurt you.

What it needs: lament, not argument.

The Psalms are full of this and the Bible does not tidy it up. Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no resolution: "you have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness." That is the last verse. God put it in the book.

What to do: say it to God, in those words. Do not clean it up for him. Read the lament psalms. Let people be with you. Give it time — this kind of doubt usually resolves in years, not weeks.

What to do in the meantime

Write it down specifically. "I don't know if any of this is true" is unmanageable. "I can't reconcile the Canaanite conquest with the God of the Sermon on the Mount" is a question with a literature attached. Precision shrinks dread.

Tell one person. This is the step almost everyone skips and the one that matters most. Choose someone who will not be alarmed. Doubt kept secret grows; doubt spoken aloud is usually smaller than it felt.

Go back to what you are sure of. Not everything is in doubt at once. Usually one thing has collapsed and taken the appearance of everything with it. What do you still think is true? Start there.

Return to the resurrection. Christianity rests on one historical claim. If Jesus rose, the rest follows even where it is unclear. If he did not, nothing else matters. Doubt is more tractable when it has a single load-bearing point rather than a whole structure.

Give it time. Doubt has seasons. Almost nobody resolves it in a week, and the pressure to resolve it quickly usually produces either a false certainty or an abandonment, both premature.

What deconstruction is and is not

The word covers two very different things.

Genuine correction. A person raised in a controlling church, taught things not in the Bible, or given a version of Christianity fused with a political programme, begins to sort the faith from the packaging. This can be healthy and sometimes necessary. Jesus did it to the religion of his day constantly.

Abandonment. The same word is also used for leaving the faith entirely.

The difference matters. If what is being dismantled is a false or damaging version of Christianity, that work should be supported — and the person should be helped to find the real thing rather than concluding that the version they were given is all there was.

If you are in this, the question worth asking is: am I rejecting Christ, or am I rejecting what a particular community did in his name? They are not the same, and conflating them is a real loss.

The permission

"I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24).

That is a man with a desperately ill son telling Jesus he has some faith and not enough, and asking for help with the shortfall.

Jesus did not tell him to come back when he had sorted himself out. He healed the boy.

You do not have to have it resolved to come. You have to come.