I Doubt, Therefore I Am
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Second Sunday of Easter – April 3, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: 1 Peter 1:3-9/John 20:19-31]

            Jesus never calls Thomas a “doubter.” Rather, he tells him, “Don’t be faithless.” Yet for centuries we’ve stuck poor Thomas with that title and, to be honest with you, I don't believe that doubting is wrong. Rather, I am an advocate for doubt. All of us have heard the phrase from Descartes, "Cogito, ergo sum." "I think, therefore I am." That may be the most famous, but I don't think it's his most accurate proof. His most accurate proof was, "Dubito, ergo sum." "I doubt, therefore I am." It was the most accurate because his understanding was that one cannot doubt that one is doubting. You see that you have to exist as the doubter; you can't doubt that you are doubting. You can doubt everything, except doubt that you're doubting. Dubito, ergo sum -- no doubt about it.

            I came across a book by a historian of science named Jennifer Hecht. It’s entitled Doubt: A History and what I’ve been able to read of it this week has been well-researched and delightfully written. She notes that Descartes flipped the argument that one comes to know God by reason of the world around us to the fact that we know God because of our own self-consciousness. As she says, “it wasn’t that the magnificence of the world proved God exists, it was that inner knowledge of God could prove that the world exists. Consciousness is suddenly esteemed higher than the universe.” [p. 317] Descartes’ exercise in doubt shows that somewhere along the line we have to question everything before we can begin to believe, to put our faith in something.

Doubt, then, sets the parameters for faith. As there can be no reason without doubt, neither can there be faith without doubt. Faith rises out of doubt. Faith when first learned deals only with certainties. These are the things that our parents, our teachers, our heroes have explained to us. But the situation changes as we grow older. I like what the theologian Romano Guardini has written. He says, "Belief in the living God, the Creator and Father, means really belief in him as he is in himself." But in the mind of everyone faith is associated with some kind of mental image. For the child that image is first of all his/her own father, only raised to a mysterious greatness or to some other person especially revered or who represents majestic authority. As the child develops, that early image no longer fits in with newly found ways of thinking and feeling. The natural loosening of the ties between child and parents and opposition to the authorities in one's childish world have an effect. Hence, the young person's belief in God begins to waver. Now, is that wavering necessarily bad? No.

Doubt simply signals a change in the relationships and perceptions that we have. We need to learn to understand the difference between revealed truth and our own certainties. Like when we found out the real truth about Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, we begin to realize that reality can live in larger constructs. So that we can very well say, "Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" because the spirit of giving is more than just the personification of giving. So here we come to see that maybe we've constructed a vision of God that is not the same as divine revelation. Jesus asks Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” That’s the point Peter makes to his readers, “Without having seen him you love him; though you do not now see him you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy.” 

Doubt, a healthy skepticism, allows for real faith. Coming to know who God is in God’s self means to develop, though we aren’t really capable of ever really comprehending God in the fullness of God’s self – our heads would blow up! This is what the great existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers exposed in his classic Philosophical Faith and Revelation. There he raises the point that creeds, statements of faith, had once served a purpose as defining or explaining how believers related. However, when these statements became absolutes, here's the truth and there is no other, they can then become fatal to relationship. If we think that we possess all of the truth, if we have no questions, then we don't need to communicate anymore. We don't need to ask questions. We don't need to be open to questions. We become closed. Thus, the I-Thou relationship that is central to coming to know God, as the Transcendent came to make contact with the finite, is cut off. We're stuck in our own little world which we've made too small.

Peter Berger, who is a sociologist of knowledge as well as of religion, takes this notion a step further. He says that there is a heretical imperative. The Greek word herein means an opinion or choice, so the heretic makes choices of what to believe from the whole body of the tradition. Berger says given the wide spectrum of choices that are available in our pluralistic society, coming to the heretical imperative is absolutely necessary if we are to affirm faith in God. Berger wants to affirm the human as the starting point for theological reflection and to reassert the sacredness and the supernatural character of religious experience. So relationship with the Other is what enables us to deal with present reality and future uncertainty.

Relating to a God who sees us as not some object, but as a subject, as one who is able to relate, affirms our own dignity as human beings. It says that there is something worthwhile in us and in the world around us. This is why I am convinced that God spoke God’s Word into flesh in Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one, who by his incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection, fully embraced humanity and brought it into God's life. In him we see how God wishes us to relate and how we are to respond. The late Raymond Brown noted that the Gospel of John begins and ends with allusions to creation, specifically with God’s breathing life into our world. It seems to me that what is going on here is a renewal, a re-creation. Jesus breathes new life into the gathered disciples and into us. So our present status as God's children and our future hope of the full revelation of God's mind to us has real, profound ethical meaning for the present. We are called to truly become children of God, living after the manner of Jesus in the way we approach each other. We are to respond to God's invitation to be his children and to live after his image and likeness, restored in us through faith in Jesus Christ.

Our response need not be irrational. Faith is not antithetical to reason. Thomas Aquinas would talk of grace building on nature and how God can speak to the human intellect in such a way as to begin the process of redemption. The great Puritan thinkers did not disagree. As Perry Miller points out in The New England Mind, the Puritans thought that the fall's worst effect had been on the intellect. Sin had damaged the mind. Loss of dialectic, loss of the use of right reason showed us how far we were from the image and likeness of God. To them, the Puritan thinkers, reason was a means by which we were restored to the image and likeness of God. As Miller says, "Puritan piety was formulated in logic and encased in dialectic. It was vindicated by demonstration and united to knowledge." So reason and faith, in the mind our Puritan forebears, go hand-in-hand.

In other words, from our doubt, through our reason we can come to relate to God. We often wonder how this can happen, especially in face of the claims of the resurrection. The Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler confronted this lack of personal experience in a sermon. He preached: “It is only honest to say that I have never known fully that kind of life within the full, warm power of experience. I have not seen any burning bushes. . . . John Wesley’s ‘strangely warmed’ heart at Aldersgate Street – this is not my street. I have not the possibility to say of the Christian faith what many honest persons have said about it. But I have to come to see that to declare as a gift of God that which I do not fully possess is, nevertheless, a duty of obedience. Is the opulence of the grace of God to be measured by my inventory? Is the great catholic faith of nineteen centuries to be reduced to my interior dimensions? . . . No.” [quoted in New Proclamation, p24] We can come to faith because we have doubted and because we have believed, because we have been wounded and because we’ve been healed – and in those actions we are joined with humans of every time and place.

We must understand too that faith, and indeed salvation, is corporate. When Peter writes ‘you’ he is using the plural. It may make a great joke about Congregationalists always yelling “every man for himself,” but it’s that – a joke. The truth of the matter is that it is each of us for each other because covenant forms community. When God identifies with us in Jesus, Jesus is more than just an individual, Jesus is a corporate person and the identification there is with all of humanity. The consciousness that is raised through him is the consciousness of what it means to be human, to be made – and indeed, remade – in the image and the likeness of God. So our doubt leads us to faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other. We find God in the midst of ourselves and that’s the whole point of the resurrection and of our faith: God is always with us. Always.

So, doubt all you like. Ultimately you will see that you exist as the doubter and you will find God nestled in the midst of your doubt. Because even when we doubt God is still here with us. I doubt therefore I am . . . a believer.