FAITHFUL DOUBTING

April 6, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

“Unless I see in his hands the print of nails,...1 will not believe."
~-John 20:25 (RSV)

Scripture
John 20:19-3}

Joseph Meister is probably not a name you recognize. Joseph Meister
was a little boy who survived because a scientist engaged in faithful and
courageous doubting. Louis Pasteur N02." the lethal virus that causes
rabies into Joseph Meister's body in\802./ It was an act that violated all
the rules and conventions of medical scf@nce, not to mention common-sense.

Pasteur was convinced that disease results from germs which multiply
in the body. He had evidence that a weakened strain of those micro-
organisms placed jin an animal's body stimulated a wonderfully combative
response which resisted the disease. He called the startling new practice
vaccination and he had successfully vaccinated sheep against anthrax.

1 (9 he turned his attention to rabies, one of the most dread
diseases af His age. He worked tirelessly to isolate the microbe. And
then one day little Joseph Meister was bitten by a rabid dog, a fatal
occurrence which ordinarily would have resulted in his painful death. But
his parents had heard about Pasteur's research and came to the famous
scientist and begged him to try to save their son. After intense personal
struggle and doubt, Louis Pasteur did the unthinkable. He injected a small
amount of rabies virus under Joseph Meister's skin. He did it a number. of
times during the next several weeks. The result was also unthinkable. _
Joseph Meister did not contract rabies. Pasteur had doubted the wisdom of
his day, courageously and faithfully.

A little doubt, by and large, is a healthy attribute. The history of
medicine, what Lewis Thomas calls our Youngest Science, is essentially the
story of those courageous people who weré willing to doubt what was
regarded as the truth. It wasn't long ago in the sweep of history, after
all, that we believed blood washed back and forth in the body like the
tides of the ocean and that draining some was a healthy thing to do, or
that holes drilled in the skull would relieve the pressure of migraine.

In the public world of politics skepticism is not the problem -
guilibility is. The consistent culprit in history is the willingness of. —
people to believe what they are told. Adolf Hitler said it...the greater

the lie and the more often it is repeated the more believable it will
become - and then demonstrated it. Free societies depend on the doubters,
the skeptics who call everything into question, who do not assume something
to be true simply because it is said by a cabinet official or a general or
a press secretary or a President. I had a professor of political science
who said once that the main reason Nazism could not have succeeded here is
that American skepticism would have snorted in disrespect at goose-steping
storm troopers and responded to the ridiculously excessive claims of
fascism with a healthy, "Oh, yeah? Prove it." It is very difficult to
know the truth about what is actually happening in Central America - when
there is a 180 degree differential in the story - the facts - as they are
told by our government, and our own press. It is, it seems to me, a time
for healthy skepticism.

There is a role for doubt in religion. It is essentially a healthy
role. It is, first, to call into question every assumption of authority in
the name of God. It is to raise embarrassing objections when religion
assumes that it knows what is best for all the people, including
restricting the rights of people and sometimes the lives of people. It is
to ask, gently but firmly, that the claims of religion be made at least in
conversation with free intellectual inquiry and honest dialogue, and when
religion seems to say you must believe what you cannot force yourself to
believe, the situation needs a strong and faithful soul to stand up and
say, "I object.”

Faithful doubting is not always fun. In fact it would seem that
doubt is a condition religion ought to alleviate. It would seem that the
gift of faith ought to deliver us from the discomfort of doubt. My
suggestion this morning is that the opposite is nearer the truth: that
there is such a thing as faithful doubting. It's patron saint is a
fascinating character named Thomas, one of the twelve, whose consistent
skepticism has earned him the nickname, "Doubting Thomas."

There is a body of intriguing lore about Thomas. One of the oldest
legends is that the disciples met after the crucifixion and resurrection to
divide the world among themselves for missionary work. Thomas was given
India and ancient tradition has him traveling as far as China. None of it
can be proven. It doesn't appear to the scholarly community that any of it
is true. But when Vasco de Gama and his Portuguese explorers finally
arrived in India around 1500 they were astonished to discover that the
Christian church was already there, had been there, in fact, for a thousand
years, and did attribute its founding to St. Thomas.

There is nothing documented about Thomas after the resurrection but
there are several intriguing references prior to the passion in the Gospel
narrative. When several disciples advised Jesus not to go to Judea because
of the danger of arrest - it was Thomas who rallied them and said, “Let us
also go, that we may die with him." There is nothing guilible, naive or
polyannish about that.

At the last supper Jesus was talking about his death and what was
ahead and Thomas wasn't getting it and so he blurted out, “Lord, we don't
know where you are going: how can we know the way," to which Jesus
responded, “I am the way; the truth, the life."

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And then Thomas turns up missing from the room in which the disciples
were hiding after the curcifixion. I imagine this strong, painfully honest
skeptic, unable to bear the passivity and deathly confinement of that
place, risking - almost flaunting - his personal safety - by walking the
streets; I imagine him lost in his mental anguish, wondering how he - the
committed skeptic - had been taken in by the implausible dream. The
Galilean he nad followed for three years was dead. So were his words. His
ideas. His hopes. It is no surprise that when Thomas returned to join the
others in that hiding place, and they tried to tell him that Jesus had been
there, alive, he could not, would not, believe it. Not until he saw the
evidence, the almost clinically physical evidence, would he believe it.

I like knowing that. I'm glad Thomas was there and I'm grateful that
the New Testament is honest enough to remember his story. It's helpful to
know that the people around Jesus were not stained glass saints. They were
not gullible. They are slow to give up preconceived notions, reluctant to
trust the power of powerless love, protective of their own safety. They
fall asleep at inappropriate times, interrupt sublime moments with
tasteless arguing, and finally, stubbornly refuse to believe. Luke
remembers that they thought the first reports of the resurrection were idle
chatter. Matthew describes the Risen Christ standing in the middle.of the
disciples and "they worshipped him, even though some of them doubted."
That's an incredible statement - standing right there looking at him and
stili doubting. I love that incident. They sound like you and me.

I conctude, at least, that faith and doubt are not opposites, that
they are not incompatible. I would suggest that sometimes they are
complementary, that there is a creative counterpsrtal tension between them.
But it is not easy to sustain that tension. There is, in fact, a strong
appeal today to religion that will resolve that tension; religion. that
provides certainty. There is a deep human need for something, anything, we
can know for sure. And there is a popular and powerful public assumption
that right religion will produce it. Sometimes that assumption emerges
even for those of us who know better, but can't help regard with envy our
friends who have been saved from uncertainty and delivered into a promised
land where everything is clear and simple and where there is no more doubt.

One of the reasons the behavioral sciences are often suspicious of
religion is that history teaches us to beware of the people who have
religious certainty on their side. The ultra-conservative Protestants of
Northern Ireland have no uncertainty at all about what is true
theologically and what is right politically. The people who planted a bomb
under the seat of an airliner last week are not bothered by doubts.
Religious fundamentalism is endangering our world. Whatever its
denomination: Moslem, Christian, Jewish, Protestant, Catholic - religion
that has no room in it for a dissenting opinion, for honest doubt, is a
great and profound tragic threat to peace and life itself.

Beyond the public and political reasons there are, it seems. to me,
good, sound theological reasons for celebrating faithful doubting and honest
skepticism. Apart from it, you and I are inclined to come to our religious
conclusions on the basis of our feelings alone. If we can't “know” the
truth of religion in the same way, for instance, as we "know" the existence

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of this building, these pews, this pulpit, we ought at least to be able to
"feel" its truth emotionally. It's one of the most serious problems
thinking people have with religion. Sometime popular religion seems to say
that the way to resolve this dilemma is to stop thinking about it and
concentrate on “feeling it": park your intellect on the steps outside and
bring only your emotions to God. Professor Joseph Sittler, reflecting on
that favorite old hymn “Blessed Assurance" wrote: "this hymn suggests that
nothing Christian is authentic until it has become a blessed assurance in
some warm, pervasive, crucial experience... the temptation is to hang the
reality of God...on...the immediacy of a feeling." And then he shows what
has made him one of the great theological thinkers for our time by asking:
"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 internal
dimensions?" [Grace Notes, pp. 48, 50-51]

The faith is bigger than our doubts. The truth is larger than our
questions and more comprehensive than our capacity to comprehend or feel.
If my emotions are the arbiter, what happens when my emotions are agitated,
provoked, bent out of shape? Robert McAfee Brown, quipped somewhere that
the brave declaration “God is Dead" says more about the person making the
statement than it does about God. And there has always been a suspicion
among historians and theologians that Martin Luther's occasional harshness
and morbidity was due, in part, to persistent gastro-intestinal distress.
The best traditions of Protestantism have always wanted to hold up to the
clear light of reason, for examination, for questioning, individual
experiences of revelation before they are superimposed as normative for
others.

Faith is not the absence of doubt. It never has been. The issue is
very contemporary although the text - the incident is nearly 2,000 years
old. Catholic New Testament scholar Raymond F. Brown suggests that a
helpful way to view this story of Thomas and the Risen Christ is as the
author using a first century stage to address an audience: “seated in the
darkened theatre of the future, silently viewing what Jesus was saying and
doing. But now, as the curtain is about to fall on this stage drama, the
lights in the theatre are suddenly turned on. Jesus shifts his attention
from the disciples on the stage to the audience." [The Gospel According to
John, Vol. II, p. 1048] ~

That's us, that is to say, sitting here thinking about events that
happened 2,000 years ago and struggling, I would submit, as Thomas did,
with the basic believability of it all. The theologians and preachers can
drone on that it is the wrong question. But it is the question we ask.
Did it happen? That is the seasonal variation of the deeper, fundamental
question which is asked today with vigor and openness and candor. It is
the question of the existence of God, the reality of the transcendent, the
silence and absence of God in a world that is radically secular. The
"Death of God" movement was evidence of the struggle. The issue - for us,
sitting in the theatre with the lights suddenly turned up, is very basic.
Can I believe it? It is a struggie that goes on in the secret places of
many an honestly faithful heart.

If that is your struggle please know that you are not alone. I keep
close at hand for my own use a wonderful excerpt from a letter Dostoevski

wrote more than a century ago: “As far as I am concerned I look upon
myself as a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt: it is
probably I shall remain so to my dying day. I have been tortured with
longing to believe - am so, indeed, even now; and the yearning grows
stronger, the more cogent the intellectual difficulties that stand in the
Way... And yet God sometimes sends me moments of complete serenity. It is
in such moments that I have composed in my mind a profession of faith."
[see Wm. Hamilton, New Optimism, on The Death of God, T. J. J. Altizer and
W. Hamilton] —

Please hear the Good News on the Second Sunday of Eastertide. It is
that a strong and faithful disciple had trouble believing. Please hear the
good news that faith and doubt are not opposites. There is room within
faith for strenuous doubt. There is in the body of Christ an honorable
vocation of faithful doubting - its patron saint is Thomas our brother.

And then please hear the Good News that there are moments of
serenity, of luminous clarity, even of certainty. They are given to us, as
they were to Thomas, when we are together: When we rise and sing one of
the great hymns of the Church and feel at one with one another and with
that great communion of the faithful who help us believe.

There are, moments thank God, sometimes Fleeting ~ but with enough
sharpness in them to redeem all the other moments when doubting and
ascertaining and struggling and agonizing and intellectualizing are
suspended for a graceful season and faith is given and we know Thomas'
confession as our own - "My Lord and my God."

They happen for many of us when we hear an invitation across 20
centuries ~- “see my hands - my feet - come to me - eat this bread - drink
this cup - know that

I am
and that I am with you forever.

Amen.

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