A Fourth Kind of Doubt

Jonathan Noyes at Stand to Reason has an interesting post up this week on the subject of three kinds of doubt Christians may experience.

There is intellectual doubt: questioning the historicity of the Bible, the rationality of Christianity, and so on. There is emotional doubt, where pain, disappointment or unanswered prayers lead believers to question the goodness or existence of God. Then there is moral doubt, fueled by a failing struggle with sin. It can lead us to doubt the ability of God’s grace to transform us, and may result in inertia and despair.

It’s a worthwhile exploration of the subject, but I’d like to add one more kind of doubt to Jonathan’s list: theological doubt.

Theological Doubt

Theological doubt is different from intellectual doubt in that it is not merely a search for the answer to a nagging question. The doubter already has an intellectual answer to the problem with which he is struggling. His systematic theology supplies it and the respectable influences in his denomination insist upon it as orthodoxy. The problem for the theological doubter is that he just doesn’t like the answer his teachers have given him and, trapped in the echo chamber of his system, he can’t seem to find any other theological view to replace it with. Perhaps the “answer” offered him creates more problems than it solves, or violates his perceptions of the character of God or his understanding of scripture. It may leave him living in a universe he doesn’t much like anymore.

Christians should be wary of giving our fellow believers pat theological bromides of this sort. The cognitive dissonance they may produce is so disturbing it can become an ongoing emotional event. Have you ever blithely quoted Paul to a questioning determinist: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” If you have, there’s a good chance the result was persistent theological doubt. Good work, sir!

One possible way of dealing with theological doubt is to embrace your questionable theology even if it leaves an unpleasant taste in your mouth, grind your teeth, gird your loins and stoically endure the unpleasant implications that follow from it. Another is to declare the source of cognitive dissonance “one of the Bible’s great mysteries” and refuse to think about it anymore. Neither solution is likely to produce long-term satisfaction or peace.

Dealing with Theological Doubt

Perhaps an example will help. Here’s a letter to Doug Wilson from a reader whose wife has theological doubts:

“My wife and I (married for 1 year) grew in really traditional Pentecostal, Arminian churches. I have for a few years now embraced Reformed theology, while she is having some struggles. For instance, she sees that free will is a myth and man can not choose God for himself, unless God intervenes sovereignly through His Holy Spirit and gives the man a new heart.

There is some disconnect however when it comes to the doctrine of election. We have gone over the subject so many times together but it always results in the same hopeless feeling for her that God is simply not just. The discussions stopped being productive a long time ago about the same time they started to wear down on the relationship between us.

More so, it’s also affecting her relationship with the Lord, where she struggles to see him as gracious and good anymore.

What would you advise me at this point? How can I help her in this situation?”

Boy, that’s not a small problem for newlyweds.

Not a Small Problem

Doug’s response is a variation on my second (and likely unsuccessful) coping strategy, which is basically “Sit down with her and suggest that you put the entire subject on the back burner for one year. This would apply to your discussions about it, and would also mean that she should resist any temptations to think about it.” In other words, tell her to stick her fingers in her ears when your theology makes God appear unjust, ungracious or un-good, and go “La la la la.” Lots of luck with that. Also, REALLY good luck to her in not thinking about it if you now attend a Reformed church. (The reader doesn’t say.) If that is the case, she will be bombarded with it incessantly.

Personally, I think pursuing any kind of short- or long-term indoctrination strategy with a spouse concerning second- or third-tier doctrinal matters profoundly unwise, perhaps impossible. The goodness, grace and justice of God are incontestable spiritual truths that the prophets and psalmists of the Babylonian exile believed in unshakably even while going through times of national chastening. If your systematic theology makes you doubt the character of God, there’s a fair chance it’s your theology that needs a major re-think. It is orders of magnitude more important for this young man’s wife to retain her belief in the goodness, grace and justice of God than for him to persuade her to adopt determinism or replacement theology, which, even if they are not entirely erroneous, are manifestly secondary or tertiary doctrinal matters. A right view of the “Jewish question” will not get you into (or keep you out of) heaven; a right view of Christ definitely will.

This young man may be able by some intellectual jiggery-pokery to convince himself that all human agency is a myth. He may even convince himself that a micromanaging God who created a world full of automatons under the mere illusion of subordinate authority is somehow “more sovereign” and more worthy of praise and worship than a God who created man with the genuine ability to choose good or evil, yet still accomplishes everything he sets out to do. That doesn’t mean this young man can expect his wife to successfully auto-lobotomize so that she thinks the same way he does.

Flexing the Headship Muscles

Theological doubts of this magnitude combine the worst features of intellectual and emotional doubts. It’s not that these provocative and unhappy discussions should go on the back burner, it’s that the husband should simply drop the subject and never raise it again. Keep your disputable matters between yourself and God, and “disputable” is unquestionably the category into which Reformed Theology falls. The head of a wife is her husband, as Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians. I would counsel this young man to flex his headship muscles by loving his wife the way Christ loved the church: sacrificially. If they are not still in fellowship in a so-called “Arminian” church, I’d suggest they find one, preferably a gathering with a less charismatic tone than the denominations in which they grew up. This will allow the wife freedom from teaching that makes her struggle to see God as good or just. Meanwhile, the husband needs to commit to restudying his own systematic theology from scratch to see if he has gone wrong somewhere along the line.

It’s one thing for two systems to come into conflict, and for their proponents to simply agree to disagree. This is not likely to happen in a relationship like that of the husband and the wife, which is both asymmetric and intimate. Even if the wife could be brought to outwardly agree with her husband, she may actually be increasingly miserable when exposed to claims about God’s character with which she viscerally disagrees.

When You’re Just Not Getting Through

Any position you can’t explain coherently and understandably to a person genuinely looking for answers needs more study — and I mean yours, not theirs. If you’re not getting through, it’s time to stop talking unless they bring it up. If this young man were a Physics teacher and found that his lessons on Quantum Mechanics consistently inspired his students to drop out of Physics, he would be wiser to question the content of his lesson plan or his teaching methodology than to assume the problem is all between his students’ ears. Either the husband’s explanations of Reformed Theology need more work to make their logic understandable, or else there is a flaw in them so basic that his wife’s sanctified common sense is reacting to it with alarm even as her husband “educates” himself into intellectual and spiritual torpor.

Theological doubts are only a bad thing if the theological system they question is itself correct. Unless they involve the deity of Christ or the truth of the gospel, they are not worth wrecking a marriage over.