WHAT KIND OF DOUBTER ARE YOU?

Gary Habermas, who struggled with doubt and had written extensively about it. His book Dealing with Doubt gave me some language that helped me understand the different kinds of doubt. He writes about three categories of doubts: emotional, volitional, and logical.

Emotional doubts arise when something throws off your emotional balance. A bad breakup, a sickness, a death in the family, or an unanswered prayer can lead to emotional doubt.
When we doubt emotionally, we don’t like God. We are more frustrated with him than anything. Our questions end with exclamation marks.
Emotions are part of being human. We experience highs and lows. In the lows, we can doubt God … or anything. Maturity means being able to overcome emotional doubts. C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, “Now Faith … is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience.”

 
Faith is holding onto what you believed when you were thinking straight. If you remember this, you can talk yourself out of emotional doubts. Why? Because you already know what is right; you are just questioning it because of some unexpected or difficult circumstances. To get out of emotional doubt, you exercise your will to overpower your emotions. This was the approach of the writer of Psalm 42, who says to his soul, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” Here he is speaking to his weary soul. And his follow-up to his first question is what will get him out of his emotional rut: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Ps 42:11 ESV).

 

Volitional doubts, unlike emotional doubts, engage the will first. You begin by not wanting something to be true, and so you intentionally begin to doubt, hoping that what you find in your research will confirm your initial desire to reject the belief in question.
There are times in our lives when we would like Christianity to not be true. Perhaps it is on a Friday when our hearts want to join our friends who are doing something we know the Bible would never condone. Our fleshly desires scream out at us, “This stuff can’t be true!” We know that it is not logic or reason making such claims. We just want to join in the “fun” for a while, and one of the easiest ways to get around our conscience is to deny our faith.

We also doubt volitionally when the offering is announced at church and we daydream about all the other things we could do with that tithe money. Our sin nature would rather we give to ourselves than to God, and so we try to reason why it could be better to keep the money rather than doing what we know God wants.
If we are honest, this is a constant struggle in most of us. The volitional doubter is summed up admirably by the words a character speaks in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead: “It seems to me some people just go around looking to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.”

 

Logical doubts are brought about by a crisis of information. Our ignorance about a certain topic leads to great uncertainty, unsettling our convictions. We deal with logical doubts by doing research. We read books. We consider ideas. We attend lectures. We invest diligently in acquiring more knowledge. Then we have to sift through it all and see what makes the most sense. We have to ask, What is consistent? What view lines up with how the world seems to work? Many logical doubts are cured with some research, clear thinking, and good old-fashioned reason.
As I reflected on my own doubts, I found that they were mostly logical in nature. This meant that the solution for me was more study—a desire that led to big changes in my life.

The changes began when my roommate was listening to a podcast by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. In it, he was discussing a program at Oxford University dedicated to equipping young leaders to answer the tough questions of life. My roommate walked in the door after work and declared, “Jon, you need to go study at Oxford. I think it will help you.”
He was right. I did need to go. But for a kid who grew up in a hockey dressing room and earned a straight “B” average in high school, Oxford was never on my radar. And yet, I somehow knew my roommate’s crazy idea was actually a nudge from God. I resigned from my youth pastor job and sold all my possessions, even my beloved motorcycle, keeping only what I could fit into a suitcase. I walked away from everything so I could learn how to settle my doubts.


Jon Morrison, “The Nagging Doubts That Strengthened My Faith,” in Everyday Apologetics: Answering Common Objections to the Christian Faith, ed. Paul Chamberlain and Chris Price