Unraptured Read online

  This is where a healthy faith lives: in a place of critical reflection that pursues the greatest depths of knowledge, accepts the things found there, and keeps diving deeper, but without the delusion of ever thinking we have it all figured out. The delusion is replaced with humility—a humility that recognizes our own limits and ignorance and sees the limits and ignorance of others not as a chance to embarrass them but as an opportunity to show them the same sort of grace and understanding that others have extended to us.

  If you’ve found yourself in this stage of life, hopefully that humility is something you’re willing to share. I hope you’re not shy about talking about what you’ve gone through, no matter how humbling the learning process might have been. The church is in desperate need of your story of humility and growth because it’s also in desperate need of people who, unlike me, don’t hate admitting that they’re wrong about things. Most people are like that, but I’ve made thinking I’m right into something of an art form. Don’t get me wrong: my “rightness” complex is not something I’m particularly proud of. I’d like to think I’ve become more comfortable with admitting when I’m wrong, but you’d have to ask my wife to know how true that actually is.

  Admitting I was wrong

  The conservative evangelicalism I grew up in was, and still is, a world of certainty. If something was wrong, it was wrong all the time. Murky areas were for squishy heathen liberals—moral relativists who couldn’t make up their minds about anything because they were too committed to being nice to speak the truth.

  “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it!” was my mantra. I had verses for everything, proof texts to prove why I was right and why you were living in sin. The idea that I could have been misunderstanding any of those verses, or taking any of them out of context, never entered my mind. I considered myself a biblical interpretations savant at the age of fourteen. Right and wrong beliefs were so obvious! If Christianity was about having all the right answers, it wasn’t because you needed to search for them. It was because you just needed to accept them. Believe in the right things and you, too, would have all the right answers and would go to heaven. The answers were right there in the Bible or a sermon or a Sunday school lesson. It was my job as a Christian to tell the rest of the world why they were wrong and why being wrong had them on a one-way trip to hell.

  When you grow up thinking the Christian life is about knowing all the right answers, dispensationalism seems all the more appealing. It offered answers to things I wasn’t supposed to be able to have answers to: the end of the world and the timing of Jesus’ return.

  I don’t have to tell you all the problems that come with a worldview that thinks it has all the answers. Arrogance, of course, is chief among them. Faith becomes a point of pride, because in this paradigm faith isn’t trust in God; it’s having all the right answers. Faith becomes superiority over the ignorant and the lost, and humility is transformed from a Christlike virtue to a deadly sin. To acknowledge the possibility of being wrong is to open up a breach in the well-constructed defenses of doctrinal surety.

  Not only did the words “I might be wrong” never enter my mind; to have said those words would have felt like a sin. Which makes a sort of perverse sense. If right answers and right belief are the path to salvation, being wrong is a sin that paves the path to hell. Not just literally. At times, actual hell would have been preferable to the hell of personal embarrassment whenever I was exposed as being wrong in front of others. That’s exactly what I went through when I came face-to-face with the truth about the rapture: it felt like my own personal hell of embarrassment and self-doubt. This wasn’t my professor’s fault. It was mine for being so arrogant as to think not only that I had all the right answers but that I couldn’t possibly be wrong.

  That’s why it took me so long to emerge from that hell. Any sort of life-altering self-realization takes a while to work through, of course. But I was coming out of a world­view that treated even the consideration of other points of view—at least about large theological issues—and the potential doubt that consideration might cause, to be nothing short of sinful. So if I was told by a person in authority that Muslims, LGBT people, alcohol, or rock music were sinful and here’s a Bible verse to prove it, I never thought to question it. If ever there was a moment when I did, I felt guilty for doubting the truth.

  It’s this certainty—that we already have everything figured out and never need to consider the possibility that we might have been wrong about something or somebody—that stands as one of the greatest challenges the church faces today, particularly in light of globalization. As the world shrinks, we’re forced to come face-to-face with people who are different from us and on whose anonymity we could previously project all our prejudices. As science comes alongside globalization, its insights and revelations about how the world works can pour water on the fire of our conviction of who is dangerous and what is unnatural. So we have a choice to make. We can either break bread with our new neighbors and listen to what they have to say or we can continue to find reasons to hate them for being different from us. We can open ourselves up to the idea that not only could we have been wrong, but maybe the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives the way the Spirit was with Peter and his vision of the sheet filled with unclean food that he was commanded to eat (Acts 10:9-16). Or we can further entrench ourselves in our preconceived notions about the world and the people in it. We could consider that perhaps the Spirit is opening our eyes, as she did with Peter, to deeper truths about the world. Or we can reject that possibility, double down on our beliefs, and seek out proof texts to prove we were right all along.

  Far too many of us have chosen to do the latter—to willfully live in the first naiveté. Admitting that we’re wrong either is too painful or is seen as sinful. And so arrogance becomes the sinew of our faith. It’s this elemental arrogance that has the church mired in a reputation of bigotry, hatefulness, and ignorance. For too long we’ve refused to make space for even the possibility that we might be wrong about anything. In the name of God, we’ve refused to make space for the people Jesus went out of his way to invite to the table of God. It’s this sort of sanctified arrogance that leads to an us-versus-them mentality that sees the world as a battlefield instead of a home. Our neighbors become our enemies. We dehumanize them simply because they don’t think or talk or believe or act exactly the way we do.

  Learning to say “I don’t know”

  As Paul reminds us in the timeless hymn of Philippians 2, we are called to imitate Christ’s humility, to have in us the sort of Christlike humility that values others above ourselves, so that we are looking not to our own interests but rather to the interests of others. We’re called to love people more than we love being right, but being right theologically rather than being in right relationship with our neighbor has become the defining identity of the church.

  Sometimes that call to Christlike humility means acknowledging we’re wrong, but other times it’s as simple as saying “I don’t know.” Unfortunately, we don’t make much room in the church for “I don’t know” either, especially when it comes to our leaders. We expect them to have all the answers, all the time, and to give them to us whenever we ask, like they are some sort of theological Google-made-flesh. When right belief is the key to salvation, there is simply no space for not knowing.

  Even after years of wandering in the spiritual wilderness, graduating from college, doing a graduate degree in theology that humbled me even more, and spending years of ministry with teenagers that humbled me still more—even after all that, I was still terrified of three little words: I don’t know.

  As a minister, I had to be prepared to proclaim the gospel “in season and out,” as Paul commanded in 2 Timothy 4:2 (NIV). I thought I couldn’t do that without having all the answers, because that’s what the gospel was about to me: the right answers. So I had to have an answer ready at all times—or else make up something that sounded good. The idea of admitting I didn’t know was horri
fying, a mini hell of embarrassment and shame. As a youth pastor, the fear was even more crippling. I was tasked with teaching teenagers the faith. In my mind, that meant I had to give them the answers and direction they needed to be good disciples. How could I do that if I didn’t have the answer to every question they asked?

  When I finally found the courage to admit that even as a pastor, I didn’t know everything, and that I even had doubts about some of the things I said I believed, it felt like a giant burden was lifted off my shoulders. My admission also opened the floodgates, as friends and strangers alike began sharing their own questions, insecurities, and doubts.

  It turned out I wasn’t alone. And not only was I not alone, I was probably in the majority. Most people in the church struggle with doubt and uncertainty at some point in their lives. Little did I know how many people sitting in the pews next to me at church were wrestling with the same doubts and questions that I was—including many standing behind the pulpit. We just didn’t want to admit it, let alone talk about it.

  Sadly, we don’t make a lot of space for folks with questions. We silently shame them if they don’t have the right answers, ask too many questions, or refuse to join the right side on cultural or theological debates. Many mainline denominations and progressive traditions have made embracing doubters a kind of calling card. But in the sort of conservative, fundamentalist Christianity I grew up in, having all the right answers and never wavering in your faith were the marks of a true Christian. (Well, that and never having a beer.)

  Holy doubt

  We have forgotten the long and sacred history of doubt and struggle with faith in the church, going back long before there was something called the church.

  The Old Testament is filled with stories of people who struggled with their faith. Abraham doubted God’s faithfulness to give him a promised heir. Moses doubted God would provide for the people in the wilderness. Elijah doubted God’s faithfulness. So did Job. When we get to the New Testament, we find twelve doubting disciples—including their leader, Peter, who doubted Jesus when he called him out to walk on the water. On the cross, Jesus took on the cry of the psalmist and doubters everywhere when he cried out to God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; cf. Mark 15:34; Psalm 22:1). After the crucifixion, the disciples hid in fear with no hope that things were going to get better. Even after the resurrection, Thomas doubted it was true until Jesus invited him to put his fingers in the holes of his hands.

  But the spiritual struggles of the faithful didn’t stop with the Bible. After it became apparent that Jesus wasn’t coming back as soon as people expected, many in the early church had doubts about whether he was going to come back at all—so much so that the book of Revelation became something of an embarrassment to many Christians. In the Middle Ages, Saint John of the Cross endured what he called the “dark night of the soul.” In the modern era, that great pillar of faith Mother Teresa confessed, in her posthumously released diary, that she experienced tremendous doubts, including going some fifty years without feeling the presence of God in her life. Read that last line again. Mother Teresa—the person whose name has become synonymous with faithful Christianity—struggled with crippling doubt for fifty years. Half a century. Most of her adult life.

  But in many corners of Christianity today, particularly within fundamentalism where dispensationalism thrives, doubt is treated as a sin. To doubt is to call into question both God and the authority of the church. The former is treated as blasphemy and the latter as an intolerable threat to the established order (or, more specifically, the people leading that established order). The Christian faith may have a long history of doubters, and the writers of the Bible may have gone out of their way to note doubt’s often-unavoidable place in our spiritual journey. But in many corners of the church today, doubt is treated as a betrayal of God’s love. If we really loved God, the logic goes, then we would never doubt God’s presence, God’s faithfulness, or the people who tell us they’ve been called by God to lead us.

  When doubt becomes a scarlet letter in the church, one of three things results: 1) people are lost to their arrogance; 2) people live in agony, tormented in the shadows; or 3) people simply leave the church. The first and second—people living in arrogance, on the one hand, and others living in shame because of their doubts—have been going on forever. But we’re starting to see the third—people leaving the church—pick up steam each year. In the past decade alone, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, lost a million members.2 Of course, not everyone is leaving because of doubts and questions. Some people have the space to ask questions in church and still leave, for myriad reasons. But in the information age, when people quite literally carry around the totality of human knowledge in their pocket, we in the church can’t afford to pretend we know everything. We can no longer claim we have everything figured out all the time.

  We need to remember the example of Jesus. He didn’t chase Thomas away or chastise him for his doubt. He embraced him. When Peter faltered on the sea, Jesus didn’t let him drown. He reached out, picked him up, and carried him back to the boat, where he wasn’t greeted by shame but by fellow disciples whose own doubts were far stronger than his own—so strong, in fact, that they didn’t even have enough faith to get out of the boat. And when Jesus ascended into heaven, leaving his disciples behind with the great commission to go and make disciples of all the nations on earth, some still doubted. But Jesus didn’t excommunicate them. He gave them the same authority as the rest of the disciples to be his agents of grace in the world (Matthew 28:16-20).

  The story of God’s people is the story of people who struggle with their faith, yet aren’t pushed away or chastised by God. Instead, we are given the grace to keep going, to keep doing the work of bringing the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven. Unfortunately, instead of embracing doubts, we often draw ideological lines in the sand and demand allegiance to our theological convictions. That approach might rally our base in the beginning. But silencing doubt and shaming people for asking too many questions—labeling them as “creating disunity”—ultimately ends up driving people away, often permanently.

  The church’s intolerance of doubt almost drove me away. When I lost my faith in the rapture, I thought that I had lost my faith altogether. For a long time I thought that there was no room for me in the Christian faith if I didn’t have everything figured out or know all the right answers. That sense of spiritual homelessness spurred so much of my anger and embarrassment. I wasn’t just embarrassed because I had made a fool of myself in front of a professor I respected. I was angry because I thought that, in having all those answers taken away, I’d had my faith taken away from me as well. If Christianity was all about belief and if I didn’t have the right beliefs, who was I? What else was there left worth believing in?

  The church has inflicted far too much pain on people by not making space for their questions and doubt. However, making space for people who doubt and wrestle with their faith isn’t about keeping people on the membership rolls and maintaining church attendance figures. Making space for people who doubt and wrestle with their faith is critical to the life of the church because faith is found in doubt. Without doubt, faith wouldn’t be faith. It would simply be knowledge. Knowledge may sound more appealing and powerful—it sure did to me when I was in love with the rapture. But Jesus said blessed are those who have not seen and yet still believe, not blessed are those who already have it all figured out (see John 20:29).

  We seem to have forgotten that we see in a mirror dimly. One day we will see clearly, but that day is not today. And that’s okay, because we’re called to faith, not expertise. If we had all the answers it wouldn’t be faith; it would be something more akin to science. As wonderful as science is, we have to resist the urge to turn the Christian faith into a scientific system. We need to let science be science and faith be faith. Learning and understanding are in no way bad; in fact, they are a
gift of the Holy Spirit. But when we try to force the round peg of faith into the square hole of science, not only do we strip faith of its mystery but, more importantly, we strip it of its boundless beauty.

  The beauty of Christianity isn’t in its theological systems and dogmatic rules. It’s in the ability of faith as small as a tiny mustard seed to move mountains, love the unlovable, and bring heaven to earth. When we try to bind the Christian faith to the affirmation of ideology and dogma, we strip it of its life-giving, creation-transforming power. Faith is about transformation, not affirmation. It’s about believing that no matter how flawed we are, how riddled with doubt we might be, how broken and sinful our lives may have become, God loves us anyway. Faith is believing that God is working through us to do a new and wonderful thing in the world, not just for our sake but for all of creation.

  Doubt isn’t something in need of fixing. It’s not a disease the church needs to cure. It’s a part of faith. It’s a step in all our journeys, much like Ricœur’s critical thinking stage. Doubt may even be a constant lifelong companion for some of us, just as it has been for so many saints throughout the history of the Christian faith. As the church, we must resist the urge to fight doubt with answers. We certainly must stop shaming people, whether overtly or covertly, for asking questions and having doubts about what they believe. Certainty is not the key to salvation. As Anne Lamott famously says, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk.”3