A Season for the Spirit: The Doubters

Warning! You are about to read some of the most meaningful words on faith and doubt that you will ever read. Most, if not all words, can be credited to Martin L. Smith.

Only one requirement is necessary in order to understand. You must in some way believe that we possess an inner society of selves or at least be grappling with this possibility.

With practice we discover that there are a number of doubters within us, and they are all different.

Sometimes in the climate of prayer we discover that certain doubts are like angels, agents of the Spirit of truth who is struggling to strip away from us superstitious and immature beliefs.

Doubts about doctrines and moral rules may be the only way the Spirit of truth can get us to move from accepting Christianity at secondhand, to appropriating it for ourselves in the light of our own experience and questions. The Spirit can work better with us even if our faith is stripped right down for a time, than if we are cocooned in a complacent religiosity that we are not prepared to have disturbed.

One of our doubters seems more dangerous. His voice asks us to admit that the very existence of a loving God is implausible. He points out the Holocaust, the devastation of the exploding AIDS crisis, the blood-soaked history of the churches, and asks how long we are going to persist in the venerable fiction that God is love.

But if we give room even to this doubter in our prayers we might find ourselves led back to the foot of the cross to hear the agonized cry of Jesus, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

It is not true that there is obviously a God. It is not true that God is obviously loving. The radical doubter may be a kind of very austere prophet within us whom the Spirit of truth uses to make us face the extent of God's own hiddenness and silence.

I am grateful to my atheist friends; they have taught me not to cheat

There are other doubters in our inner society whom we need to bring to Jesus in prayer so that he can confront them. They mock our hopes, pour cold water on our trust in God, and tell us to stay with what common sense says is safe and sure. These he needs to challenge and disturb.

They are the sick and indigent parts of our self, the survivors of past disappointments and abandonment's, who draw on the inner fund of hopelessness that is part of our fallen human nature. When we hear them we must be urgent in bringing them to Jesus and specifically ask for healing.

- Martin L. Smith