Room for Doubt: the figure of Thomas
It is now over thirty years ago that our local Anglican clergy conference welcomed Dr. Robert Webber as our guest speaker for three days of talks, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. Webber was at the time a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, teaching in the area of worship and liturgy. He’d grown up in a very conservative Baptist denomination in the States, and had gone to Bob Jones University for his first degree. From there he’d continued his studies, finishing up a doctorate at a very conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran Seminary, and then landed at Wheaton College—perhaps the highest profile evangelical college in the States, and the alma mater of Billy Graham—where he taught for some thirty years.
Somewhere along the line, Webber’s studies in liturgy had drawn him toward Anglicanism, and in 1985 he wrote his book, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelicals Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church, in which he described the reasons behind his own gradual move toward the Anglican tradition. At the time the book was met with a highly critical response from many of his Evangelical peers, and it apparently also raised some concerns within Wheaton. After all, weren’t these Anglicans part of the liberal mainline? Was this professor’s faith going lukewarm?
Yet Webber persevered, and in time his peers at Wheaton become very receptive to his move and its impact on his thought and teaching.
What’s interesting is the way in which his faith provided an anchor for many young students. As he told the story, time and again a young student would come to his office, quietly close the door, sit down, and begin to talk. No, not just talk… agonize over their doubts and struggles. Many of these students had grown up in small town America, attended school with kids who’d all been raised in the church, gone to Sunday School and youth group in a kind of milieu in which this belief system just fit with the way their world was shaped. Then they’d headed off to Wheaton, launched into a first-year program of their undergraduate degree, and began to be introduced to other ways of seeing things. Whether in an earth sciences course or in a history or philosophy class, these new ideas kept surfacing which bumped hard against the safe little world in which they’d been raised. Yes, this was a premiere Evangelical college, and yes its motto—written not in Latin but in clear English—was “For Christ and His Kingdom.” The professors were all required to pledge themselves to an Evangelical belief framework, but that didn’t mean that a science professor wouldn’t talk about the age of the earth, a philosophy professor wouldn’t critique the thinness of some theological thought, or a history professor wouldn’t outline the sometimes problematic origins of American fundamentalist thought. This was all new to these students, whose way of being in the world had previously been very safe, very sheltered, and very insular.
And they’d come to Dr. Webber and tell him they weren’t sure they could believe their childhood Christianity anymore. It just didn’t “fit” with what they were learning in their academic courses, so how to now believe? And he’d tell them to come to church with him on Sunday, and to keep coming week after week. “When we stand to say the Nicene Creed and you’re not sure you can say it, let me say it for you,” he’d tell them. In other words, let the church community hold this belief for you in its liturgy, prayer, and communion. But just keep coming, and don’t cut yourself off.
As John tells this gospel story, I see Thomas—doubting Thomas—standing very much in line with Robert Webber’s wise counsel. The other disciples have had this extraordinary experience of encountering the risen Christ, “But Thomas (who was called the Twin) was not with them when Jesus came.” They are delighted to tell him of their experience, but all Thomas can say is, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
Thomas can’t bear to believe. Earlier in this gospel, he’d already resigned himself to the fact that Jesus would likely be killed in Jerusalem, saying, “Let us also go, that we may die with him,” (John 11:16), which shows him as the one disciple in the bunch who has a realistic assessment of what was likely to happen. Here now, when the rest start to talk this resurrection language, he won’t buy in. He has to see, has to have proof, and it is likely that he just isn’t prepared to even entertain that thought to any real degree. It is likely that on that first Easter Sunday he’s been out, perhaps buying some supplies for their long walk back home to Galilee. He’s that ready to just go, leaving Jerusalem and the dream of a saviour Jesus behind.
Yet the others aren’t ready to leave Jerusalem… not now that they’ve had this experience, and so they stay put. “A week later Jesus’ disciples were again in the house,” John tells us, “and Thomas was with them.” Thomas was still there, fully a week later. He may not be able to drop his doubts and just believe, but he’s not about head home on his own. He keeps company with the others, which is the remarkable point about this story. “When we stand to say the Nicene Creed,” Robert Webber would say to those students wracked with doubts, “and you’re not sure you can say it, let me say it for you.”
The great 20th Century theologian Paul Tillich was insistent that doubt was something we needed to walk with as people of faith. “Doubt is not the opposite of faith,” he famously wrote, “it is one element of faith.”
If doubt appears, it should not be considered as the negation of faith, but as an element which was always and will always be present in the act of faith… serious doubt is confirmation of faith. It indicates the seriousness of the concern, its unconditional character. - Paul Tillich
The wrestlings that we do at various points in this walk of faith are not, in fact, negations of our faith, but all a part of it. “If there is no room for doubt, there would be no room for me,” as Frederick Buechner once put it. But then you might say, sure, but didn’t Thomas—didn’t Mary Magdalene and all of the apostles—have an experience of the risen Jesus? Something that moved them beyond all doubt?
Well, sure, but remember those stories; they met their old friend and teacher, recognized him, saw those scars, shared a bit of fish with him. Yes, he was newly, fully alive in his resurrection life, but still very much Jesus; very much familiar.
Of course there are those from across the centuries who have had thoroughgoing mystical religious experiences of the sort the Frederick Buechner isn’t sure he could bear. Take St. Paul for instance, whose encounter with Christ knocked him blind to the ground, or the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich whose “showings” formed the point at which her faith deepened to an almost unimaginable level. But for most of us most of the time—you and me and Thomas and Frederick Buechner and Mary Magdalene and Paul Tillich—we need space for the struggle, questions, wrestling, and, yes, even doubt.
What Thomas lived was not some apostasy, but rather part of the only way he could walk, living in his doubts until he could see his Lord. But do recall - he did not try to walk his path alone.
And neither should any of us, for this is a shared path, together as members of the one Body of Christ.