After I embraced the Christian way at 19, I enjoyed about 18 months of doubt-free Christian living. I read the Bible for long stretches, prayed a ton, talked to all kinds of Christians and listened to all kinds of preachers—all that, with nary a skeptical thought. Then, basically out of nowhere, the questions came hard and fast. In a matter of months, I went from doubt-free to nearly faith-free. My dark night of the soul lasted for 2,555 nights, give or take a few hundred—about seven years.
Because of my journey of doubt, I’m fascinated by intellectual Christians who don’t seem to struggle with questions. All Christians doubt in some way or another; but there are some Christians—philosophers, scientists, artists and intellectuals—who are exposed to a wide range of ideas that challenge their faith directly. Yet, for some reason, they never feel defeated by doubt.
It’s not that they don’t face the hard questions—they do, and they do it without anxiety. They consider perspectives that challenge their own; they even find those perspectives reasonable. Yet, questions never shake them to the core.
The Shadow of Doubt
When I was at the nadir of my doubt, I once went to dinner in New York City with a friend who was a teaching fellow in philosophy. That night, he talked about the range of questions his students had about God, about their staunch skepticism and about how he enjoyed discussing these subjects with them.
I asked him how he dealt with the pain of struggling toward faith in the perplexing mix of all those ideas.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, how did you get through the bleak times, when you were first confronted with all these ideas that conflicted with Christianity?” I spent a few moments summarizing my own struggle to believe.
“I never went through anything like that,” he responded. He told me about how he had grown up in a church with a pastor who loved the world of ideas and encouraged hard questions from his parishioners. Then, in college, he was part of a group that met with a couple of the school’s Catholic professors in a bar each week and explored the paradoxes and complexities of Christian belief.
Somehow, these contexts had helped him see questions not as threats, but as, well, fun. Questions were tough challenges, to be sure, but he had an undergirding strength that fixed his way of seeing the world. It didn’t make him dogmatic or any less intellectually flexible. He was as curious and open-minded as one could be, and was fair-minded toward others and other belief systems; but he had a quiet peace about the story of Christianity. He believed in it.
Beyond the Shadow of Doubt
I’ve since met other very smart Christians with this same disposition. Why is this? Why are some people troubled, or even destroyed, by questions about faith, while others handle skeptical claims with a joyful interest?
My guess is that it has something to do with the openness my philosopher friend enjoyed at his church and college. An intellectual openness and flexibility was modeled for him in a peculiarly Christian way. That same openness—and flexibility—should be part of the culture of all our churches, especially youth ministries. We might not be able, or want, to prevent young Christians from having a dark night of the soul, but maybe we can keep them from having 2,555 of them.
