My theological quote for this week has to come from an episode of The New Adventures of Superman in which a character called Tempus is explaining his plans to dominate the world – to HG Wells. Wells responds with the words, I refuse to believe that anything so evil could be so simple.’ To which Tempus replies, That is the Protestant in you speaking.’
There are many levels on which we could explore that unexpected nugget. (The reference to Protestantism will sadly have to wait for another occasion.) Confronted with something seemingly obvious HG Wells insists on doubting its truth. He assumes that things must be more complicated. His doubt is based on his intellectual assumptions. Doubt is an appropriate theme for today for we have seen another kind of doubt in the mind of John the Baptist. In this morning’s Gospel John the Baptist has heard all about what Jesus is doing, yet he sends messengers to ask, Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Perhaps the effects of his imprisonment are causing John to doubt what he had previously believed about Jesus? Or perhaps the miracles of Jesus were not to him such obvious signs of divine intervention as they might seem to us. Perhaps Jesus was a more ambiguous figure to his contemporaries than we had imagined.
Doubt can function at various levels; some forms of doubt are less honest than others. Doubting Thomas refuses to believe in the risen Christ without the evidence of his own eyes. Is he the prototype of the honest doubter, or the self centred individualist who can never trust the word even of those he knows best? How do we distinguish good doubt from bad in ourselves?
There is that kind of doubt which masks the inability to make up one’s mind, or to commit oneself. We may find something seemingly crucial in the Bible or the Creed which seems hard to believe or even to understand. It worries us and, however many times it may be explained to us, we keep coming back to it no explanation seems to satisfy us and we don’t have the energy or patience to sit down and think through our real problem. And so we remain in a kind of believers’ limbo. And somehow this kind of doubting leaves us on the margins of faith we can’t go any deeper or any further in. Doubt becomes a familiar habit.
By contrast there is the kind of doubt which seizes on a problem and wrestles with it reading about it perhaps for many years; we may find ways of explaining the problem or setting it aside but in the process the doubt spills over into other areas and gradually we begin to rewrite or jettison various parts of the faith until we can settle only with what we find comfortable. We may then position ourselves on the inside of the church but find ourselves having to ignore much of what we hear in church.
Those characterisations are perhaps presented in an extreme form; the first often leads to our drifting away altogether; the second to repeated disagreements with those around us in a study group. There is a third kind of doubt which arises more often today than we might like to think. It is the kind of doubt that afflicts those who learnt something of Christianity as children and then drifted away from the church to return as adults. But when we return we find that much has changed since we were last here and we don’t know nearly as much as we thought we did, but now as grown ups we are ashamed to ask what others may regard as an absurdly simple question. And so we are afflicted by the uncertainty of being completely in the dark on some things and only hazily in the light on others and we don’t know how much we are supposed to believe. So we are doubtful most of the time about ourselves and what we believe, yet we try to keep going in the hope that something will become clear.
All three of these portrayals are forms of doubt which need to be helped or challenged they all need in some way or other to be overcome. And then there is another more profound sort of doubt, something which might be described, I hope not too pompously, as existential’. An simple example might be found near the end of Betjeman’s famous, perhaps now rather hackneyed poem, Christmas. And is it true, and is it true/ This most tremendous tale of all?’ lines which seem to contain a deeply hesitant longing to believe a sentiment found much more often in Thomas Hardy’s poems for this time of year. As in,
Yet I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
Come; see the oxen kneel,
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb,
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.’
Deeper into such doubt is Hardy’s bemusement on listening to the ecstatic carolings of an aged thrush on New Year’s eve 1899, when everything to him seems shrunken, hard and dry.’ He wonders if in the thrush’s song there is, Some blessed hope, whereof he knew and I was unaware.’ Such doubt has nothing to do with this or that bit of Christian belief, nor with how ignorant or well informed one may be. It is a form of doubt which may come upon any Christian at any time. It is a feeling that belief is somehow impossible however much we might want to believe.
Examples of such doubt can be found even in believers who seem to everyone else to have a deep faith but who experience themselves very differently. Mother Theresa, whom many regard as a saint, could write in 1958, People think that my faith, my hope and my love are overflowing, and that my intimacy with God and union with his will fill my heart. If only they knew.’ Or again, I feel that God does not want me, that God is not God and that he does not realty exist.’ Clearly Mother Theresa was a much more spiritually and psychologically complex person than we might once have thought. And the same is true of many great Christian men and women. Perhaps it was true of John the Baptist in his prison cell. He had committed his life to a particular calling an extreme and often isolated way of life. It was not ending as he must have hoped a martyr to an ignominious puppet king like Herod. If he had put his faith in Jesus then he was finding it much harder to be faithful than those who flocked to Jesus for healing, and who received the surprising encouragement, Your faith has made you well.’
By contrast, real doubt is the belief that nothing can change, that things one might once have hoped for were mistaken, that however much others might try to convince you or support you, you cannot find a way out of this place of crippling doubt. And seen against this background faith becomes a kind of courage. We may have thought that the opposite of doubt was certainty. But it is truer to say that the opposite of real doubt is in fact courage. Courage is not devoid of uncertainty. It involves taking risks and being afraid of failure. But courage accepts that not everything can be known or calculated in advance; and even so courage is prepared to take the risk, make the decision, commit to an action in hope that as we do so questions will fall away or become clearer, things will change. Faith as courage is a spiritual dynamism, carrying you forward in freedom and responsibility to discover more about yourself and God. Faith as courage is a kind of resurrection from doubt.
Confronted by the evil machinations of Tempus HG Wells looks to his brain to work out a beautifully complex answer to a complex problem. But what is required is not, in that instance, thought but action, a simple courageous commitment to the opposing of a transparent evil. What is required of John the Baptist in prison is the rediscovery of that courage which led him to oppose Herod in the first place a recognition that even in the darkness of his cell he has a choice to remain true to his vision. For him and for us and for all God’s saints there remain the words of Isaiah: Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong fear not.’