Lest Anyone Should Boast
Sometimes the journey to faith leads through doubt and denial—but it is not any less of a gift.
By Emily Carter
I am entering my final year of seminary, having encountered in my life many Christians who struggle intellectually to believe traditional tenets of Christianity, such as the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ or God’s willingness to forgive those who turn to Him. This struggle in the hearts of people who desire to seek and love God can cause fear and anger and disrupt the believer’s relationship with God and with others. We are often taught that doubt signifies a lack of faith, a personal failure. My own wrestling with doubt over fifteen years has led me to expect emotional and intellectual struggle to be a normal part of Christian life. In my experience, faith is a gift and not an accomplishment. We are able to walk with God because of an incomprehensible coming together of God’s grace, the loving witness and support of other Christians, and our own receptiveness and determination in light of our limits—not in denial of them.
The evangelical church and school I attended from a young age urged me to put faith in Jesus at the center of my life. Three dimensions of this faith included: the cognitive one, by which we believed something to be true; the volitional, by which we decided something; and the emotional, by which we felt something. Cognitively, I was expected to believe that Jesus is the Son of God who died for my sins, and that He would forgive them if I accepted Him as my Savior. All people were believed to be sinful, and only Jesus’ perfect sacrifice on the cross could save us from hell and deliver us to eternal life with Him. Volitionally, I was supposed to decide, at one definite moment as a free individual, to begin relating to Jesus as my Savior. Through this decision, I would be saved from sin and from hell.
Emotionally, I was expected to experience a relationship with Jesus, to feel love, joy, and gratitude flowing from the certainty that He has forgiven my sins. In this model of faith, the volitional dimension depends on the cognitive, and the emotional on both. Cognitive belief in a number of traditional Christian theological propositions, including the reality of sin and the possibility of salvation, enables a person to make an informed decision to enter a personal relationship with Jesus. That decision triggers an intensely emotional conversion experience and begins a life of vivid religious emotion. The intensity of the emotional dimension in turn reinforces certainty in the cognitive one. For my evangelical community, true faith consisted of right belief and right feeling, marked by an unambiguous conversion experience. The community constructed a strong division between insiders, who were assured of salvation and could expect to spend eternity in Heaven, and outsiders, who were not and could not. The evangelical emphasis on a personal decision to accept Jesus communicated to me, perhaps unintentionally, that my salvation depended on my own effort. God’s work was done, and now it was my turn to act.
As a child, I was always treated as though I were already an insider. Messages affirming God’s love for me accompanied warnings about hell as an eternal punishment for other people who failed to accept Jesus as Savior. I was assumed to cognitively accept the beliefs I was taught about Christianity, to have voluntarily accepted Jesus, and to emotionally experience a relationship with Him, despite my not yet being baptized and despite my inability to point to a moment at which I accepted Jesus as Savior. I was initially receptive to this worldview. As a small child, I believed that Jesus died for my sins in the same way that I believed that I lived in Washington State—these were descriptive statements about the world, endorsed by all the adults in my life as true and straightforward.
I wanted to love God, to know joy and gratitude, but these feelings did not arise.
But as I grew up, my soul grew troubled. As early as fifth grade, I began to doubt. I realized that I could not point to a date on which I had accepted Jesus as Savior. I began to experience a very different kind of religious emotion than the kind I was encouraged to foster. Deep dread emerged as a pressure bearing down on my chest. I could not feel God’s presence. I wanted to love God, to know joy and gratitude, but these feelings did not arise. I did not experience the emotion which was supposed to be evidence that I was saved. My failure in the emotional domain raised fears about the voluntary one. I wanted Jesus to be my Savior, but I took my feelings to be evidence that I had not adequately accepted him into my heart, and I didn’t know how to do so. I feared that I was destined for hell—for eternal torture and separation from the people in my life and from God. I cried out for God to fix me, but He remained silent, and I remained fearful. The homosexual desire I began experiencing in middle school, despite my community’s insistence that such desire constitutes hostility to God and evidence a person is unsaved, compounded my sense that I was secretly an outsider beyond the reach of God’s love. My absence of a relationship with Jesus called into question God’s existence, and I lost certainty in my cognitive faith. I feared, at the same time, that God was not real, and that He would send me to hell.
I turned desperately to apologetics, hoping that I might encounter rational arguments which would convince my mind of God’s existence and free up my will to accept Jesus and my heart to feel the consequences. But in struggling with my cognitive failure to believe, I fought the symptom rather than the basic problem. My community seemed to expect that belief in Jesus would lead to a decision for Jesus, and a decision for Jesus to feelings about Jesus. I dealt with disordered feelings about Jesus by focusing all my energy on my belief in Him, rather than on sitting with, sharing, and trying to understand my emotions. My faith crumbled, not because of the superiority of atheist argumentation, but because my faith had a weak emotional foundation. Disordered emotion disturbed my cognitive belief, an effect which ran unchecked given my community’s lack of support for complex religious emotion. I grew exhausted and gave up hope, leaving the Church in high school.
For five years, I called myself an atheist, immersed in an unbelief distinct from doubt. As a doubting child, I struggled mightily to shore up my cognitive belief that God existed, while as an unbelieving teenager, I found it obvious and untroubling that God did not exist. As a doubting child, I lived an emotional life overwhelmed by fearful uncertainty, while as an unbelieving teenager, I surrendered to giddy relief, released from struggle and fear. I felt that no good God could remain silent in the presence of a child seeking Him, that no good God would allow the persistence of suffering. In my rebellion, I thought that if a God existed, I must be morally superior to Him. I no longer viewed myself as broken and inadequate, but rather as righteous and brave.
I felt loved and accepted by these Christians, and also by something beyond them I was not yet able to recognize as God.
I rediscovered the Church during college. As graduation drew near, I was lonely and directionless. For the duration of my college career, I had been attending programming put on by the interfaith chaplaincy office, because I enjoyed the fellowship and the exposure to different worldviews that I found there. In my final year, I spent increasingly more time with the local Episcopal parish’s campus ministry. I rejected the religious content of the beliefs they held, my cognitive engagement with it being limited mostly to comparing and contrasting their theological and ethical propositions with the evangelical ones I found more familiar and more objectionable. As I began attending the parish and went on pilgrimage with the campus ministry, I was pulled in deeper by feelings I was barely ready to admit to and did not know how to explain. I felt loved and accepted by these Christians, and also by something beyond them I was not yet able to recognize as God. These feelings arose before I recognized them, and I began to recognize them without knowing their source or implications, without having a worldview which accommodated them, and without having the ability to express them.
I began relating to God emotionally even as I clung to my cognitive unbelief, and I continued exploring faith and the Church. I identified intensely with the lost sheep and with the prodigal son. In response to positive religious emotion, I poured my attention into Christian community and into theology. I felt God’s love when I received the Eucharist. I was baptized a follower of Christ. I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. I undertook an Episcopal young-adult service year. I entered the ordination process in the Episcopal Church. I entered seminary. These steps felt right and good even though I had no theological or metaphysical framework within which I could make sense of them. At each step, I was welcomed, and people were patient with my questions and my uncertainty.
One late afternoon during my first Christmas break in seminary, I lay on a bed in my friend’s guest room, reading The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr. Today, if I had a copy of the book in my hands, I could point to a certain sentence. When I began reading that sentence on that winter day, I did not believe in the literal death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. When I finished reading it, I did. The sentence’s content was neither especially persuasive nor especially informative, but it set off a cognitive change in how I interpreted my religious emotion and in what I believed to be true about the world. Long after beginning to love God and to experience God’s love of me, and long after deciding to follow Jesus, my cognitive beliefs finally placed me within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. This shift was a gift from God to a person already walking toward Him—not a virtuous exertion on my part, and not a saving act which transferred me from damnation to salvation.
Salvation depends on the goodness of God, not on our effort.
From time to time, I continue to wrestle with the same sort of doubt that plagued me as a child. Dread pushes down on my chest, and I feel disconnected from God’s love. I do not feel positive emotions toward God, and I am tempted toward uncertainty about whether He really exists and loves me. My negative emotional experience calls up a number of negative cognitive propositions: God is not real; God is real, and I am going to hell; homosexuality is wrong, and I should leave my partner. In a simple way, I know not to trust the content of these propositions, because the same mechanism delivers logically contradictory content. A feeling which tells me in one moment that God is not real, and in the next that God will punish me, is not a trustworthy feeling. It is helpful for me to think of this experience as an evil attack by something outside myself, which I can choose to resist in order to pursue a deeper relationship with my God. I do not know whether I am imagining this claim to be true or actually believing it. What matters is my decision to resist doubt out of commitment to the God who is true to me.
I know now not to trust my doubt, because I have grown in understanding of what religious emotion means. Faith is not about my enjoying pleasurable emotional states. Emotional closeness to God is an unearned gift that comes and goes. God can be at work in a life before it arises, through it, and through its absence, just as God saved me and drew me in before my baptism into the Church and before my belief in the Creeds. By faithfully praying, gathering with other Christians, and receiving the sacraments, we can cultivate our receptiveness to religious feeling and awareness of the deeper truth it points toward. Faith is about that deeper truth, and a person’s decision to orient their life toward it.
Salvation depends on the goodness of God, not on our effort. Creeds and systems of religious authority can help us to better know God, but God is not contained within them. God was at work in my life both before I became a Christian and in my becoming a Christian. Words failed to capture my experience of faith when my slow conversion began. Words still fail to capture faith, and words will always fail. I do believe that God the Father created the universe and human life; that a man named Jesus was somehow also God and proclaimed freedom from sin, suffering, and death during his ministry in first-century Palestine; that Jesus was crucified by the Roman state, physically resurrected from the dead, and taken up from this world; that God the Holy Spirit spoke through the Hebrew prophets and is at work in all the Church and beyond it; that God promises to show up in the sacraments of baptism and communion; and that we will in some way experience a final judgement and eternal life. I believe these words are true, and I also believe they are a poor human attempt to wrap our minds around something way beyond us, something on which our hearts have only a slightly better grasp.
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash.
Emily Carter is pursuing a Master of Divinity at Yale Divinity School. She enjoys caring for chickens and exploring the outdoors.
