“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
—Thomas, cited by John the Apostle, John 20:25
Since childhood, I’ve been prone to doubt and ask questions that, when spoken aloud, have been, on occasion, a bit embarrassing.
In what we used to call “Juniors” in Sunday School (the 1960s Southern Baptist division for kids, grades 4-6), I asked about the Genesis story. Sitting in Mr. Oxford Teague’s class (who had us read the curriculum aloud, verbatim), I rather innocently questioned God’s role in the creation story in Genesis 1.
“How could it be God alone who created the heavens and the earth, when it says, ‘we’ in Genesis 1:26?” I asked, referring to that passage, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…”
Mr. Teague furrowed his brow, clicked his dentures, cut his eyes to me, and then, staring back at the passage, said nothing.
My friend, Randy Jackson, came to my (and Mr. Teague’s) aid, explaining to the teacher, “He does that, don’t pay any attention to it.” And so with another click of his dentures, Mr. Teague motioned for the next child to continue reading from the curriculum. Had I an inkling of what a heretic was, I might have feared I was one.
Even when my mother took me to the preacher’s office, anxious for him to explain to me how I could commit to Christ, I asked more questions than a nine-year-old was supposed to ask, topping off my array of inquiries with, “What about that word, ‘Selah,’ what does that word mean after some of the Psalms?” I felt my mother’s embarrassment; the preacher only said, “I don’t believe anyone has asked me that,” promising to look it up later.
All my questions had answers. I just had to search to find them. That’s a lesson I was learning, an unsettling truth that accompanies walking by faith.
Years later, having committed to Christ, I still had doubts, wondering, overanalyzing most everything about faith. God seemed silent in response to deeper questions like disappointment, failure, pain, and death—all of which opened wider the door to doubt.
C.S. Lewis, wrestling with doubt, especially with the problem of pain, said that faith often requires confronting the “terrible darkness of silence.”
I discovered that a host of believers had doubts. And doubt wasn’t far from faith; faith was something of a sibling to doubt.
Doubt may seem a strange companion to faith, but they are like twins fighting for covers in a small bed.
I like how Christian writer Frederick Buechner described it, “Doubts are like the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”
And theologian Paul Tillich said of their relationship: “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of it.”
So we have the unfortunate case of Thomas, the disciple, forever saddled with the nickname, “Doubting.” But was he so “unfortunate”? And was he so “doubting”?
His doubts blossomed into faith. When the Lord encountered him, Thomas declared, “My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28).
Christian tradition has Thomas traveling to India after that declaration, eventually dying as a Christian martyr.
Perched together on a razor’s edge, doubt and faith cling together. On one side, a fall descends into a valley of despair, ending in a bog of unbelief; on the other, a pristine road ascends to a mountain top where one breathes the fresh air of a robust faith.
Timothy Keller observed, “You can either live as if there is no God when there might be, or you’re going to have to live as if there is a God when there might not be. In either case, you’re risking your whole life on something you can’t prove, which means you are living by faith, no matter who you are.”
Maybe Thomas should be called “Confessing Thomas” or “Faithful Thomas.”
But I still like the “Doubting,” for it reminds me that doubt can lead to faith, weakness to strength, despair to hope, and fear to acts of courage for God and others.
No doubt about it.