Excerpted From
Why I Still Believe
By Mary Jo Sharp
One of the most difficult hurdles in my spiritual journey was that my doubt was directed toward a person, though I was largely unaware of it. My relational doubt began with a distrust of people—specifically those who professed allegiance to Christ. In hindsight, I can see that my skepticism toward Christians had transferred to a distrust of Jesus himself. Having experienced authoritarian leadership and anti-intellectualism early in my commitment to a local church, I had very little positive influence upon which to model a relationship with God. It is similar to those who struggle to believe in God the Father because of a difficult relationship with their own earthly father. (Ironically, I had a good father, though he rarely mentioned God unless telling a joke.) However, at the time, I would have insisted I was interested solely in discovering objective truth. Unlike those raised in the church, I felt I had no prior commitments to uphold and could see clearly through a lens of total objectivity.
Can you see my hubris? What a mess! While I believe I was genuinely looking for the truth about God, I fell into the trap of thinking I could investigate faith based on “just the facts.” For instance, when I initially grappled with the question of Jesus’ resurrection, I treated the endeavor like an academic research project. I told myself, “The facts suggest that either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not; logically, both cannot be true. I will simply follow the hypothesis with the most explanatory power, wherever the data leads.” Yet, as many discover, navigating doubt in a faith journey is rarely that clinical or simple.
I held an idealistic view of my search, failing to realize that I wasn’t investigating an abstract idea or an impersonal hypothesis, but a person. If I concluded that God was real, I wouldn’t just be accepting a set of facts; I would be faced with a relationship. This distinction matters because while I wondered if belief in Jesus was intellectually merited, I still carried a lingering distrust of people—and Jesus is a person. As Joshua D. Chatraw and Jack Carson discuss, many believers find themselves surprised by the complexity of doubt when it becomes personal rather than just theoretical.
A friend of mine illustrates the relational side of doubt in his own work and life. Dr. Gary Habermas devoted his doctoral work at Michigan State University toward analyzing the evidence for the historical nature of Jesus’ resurrection. He collected and read all the scholarly writing he could find concerning the resurrection, around 2,400 sources at that time. In assimilating the material, Gary used only the facts that could be stated without belief in the Bible as inspired or reliable (this was in part due to the demands of his dissertation committee). He calls this method “the minimal facts argument.” He discovered that there was a wealth of evidence pointing toward a resurrected Jesus 2,000 years ago. Through debates, teaching, speaking and writing, Gary has been defending his belief that the resurrection is historical ever since, around 40 years.
Though Gary’s life is full of speaking engagements and scholarly writing on the facts of the resurrection, he openly discusses, and even writes about, the doubt he experienced in suffering through his wife’s stomach cancer and consequent death. Even though he was convinced through his own dissertation research that Jesus died and rose from the dead, when faced with such a great burden as the death of a loved one, the questions began to overwhelm him. Did the truth of the Christian faith have anything to say when you’re not dealing with just a set of facts but with a devastating emotional experience? Why would God allow such suffering for Debbie, Gary and their family? What did he believe about Jesus in light of his wife’s death?
As Gary struggled to even want to find the answers to his own questioning, he came to a game-changing realization. If God is real and he raised Jesus from the dead, then God has demonstrated that he is trustworthy and in control, even when Gary doesn’t have “all the facts.” He writes:
“He [God] created the world, raised his Son from the dead, made a path of salvation for us, answered our prayers and prepared heaven for us. So why do we find it so difficult to trust him in our present circumstances?”
Based on what he already knew about God, Gary could trust God even in the things he did not know. For him, though, it wasn’t an easily won trust because the circumstances were so devastating, and God never answered him on why his family was suffering. Now, don’t forget, Gary was already convinced of the truth of the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact. But he still needed to apply that truth to his relationship with God.
After learning about Gary’s experience, I felt as though I’d been hit smack in the noggin by the reality-check fairy. What have I been doing? I’ve been investigating God as a set of facts without acknowledging my distrust of persons! Even if I come to the propositional belief that God is real, I may not trust him. I wasn’t acknowledging this aspect of the search for answers. I’d learned to distrust persons, and God wasn’t exempt. So, though I’d like to think that my search for answers could be all calculation and no counseling, it just wasn’t true. In addition, over the years of discussing belief in God, I’ve only personally engaged with one person who changed his mind about God after accepting the intellectual arguments, only one “Mr. Spock” who felt he had to logically accept a different viewpoint when he recognized his own viewpoint was refuted.
I struggle with the atheist-versus-theist posturing. Both sides claim to be logical. Both sides say that their factual evidence leads to the logical conclusion … as if that’s the only thing going on here. Yet what should I say of the reality of the situation? If God is real, God is not reducible to a set of empirical facts. If I choose to trust God, it is the kind of trust, or faith, I give to a person with whom I have a relationship. This is not the kind of trust I would give to a scientific hypothesis or to an abstract idea such as justice. There is no personal element in these things. However, the Christian view of God is that he has personhood. He is a person. Therefore, doubt and trust are appropriated to him in a similar way that I appropriate these things to people. To be an honest doubter, I must understand the object of my doubt. In this case, there is no object, but rather a subject: the person of God.
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Excerpted from Why I Still Believe by Mary Jo Sharp. Copyright © 2019 by Mary Jo Sharp. Used by permission of Zondervan. Zondervan.com.