I’m starting to think that we are using the wrong terminology to discuss doubts, both within the church and in the bloggernacle. The term “faith crisis” is often used when someone’s doubts create cognitive dissonance for them to the point that they aren’t sure they should stay in the church. Folks like Greg Prince and Adam Miller refer to a new focus on faith when people experience doubts, a reframing referred to as “New Mormonism”; this is not a movement, but a description of how an individual moves forward when confronted with doubts.
In a talk entitled “Come Join With Us,” an invitation for even those who experience faith crises to participate in the church, Pres. Uchtdorf made the statement:
“Before you doubt your faith, doubt your doubts.”
This statement was either taken as a wise caution not to go from one certainty to an opposite certainty (my view) or as circular logic (majority opinion among the disaffected) or possibly something in between.
As Derek Lee blogged at Rational Faiths:
It’s easy to tell someone to choose faith in the face of doubt when you don’t even understand what’s causing those doubts in the first place, but it’s not very helpful. Judging by the negative interpretations people have offered to the “doubt your doubts” line, a lot of people have been receiving a lot of unhelpful advice.
This is a valid criticism, if not of Pres. Uchtdorf’s intended message, of the ways in which his talk has been used by some members as a cudgel against doubters, as if the advice he gave is to set aside one’s own experiences in favor of someone else’s (church leaders? the “faithful”?) superior judgement and experiences.
I was recently listening to a Maxwell Institute podcast in which Blair Hodges interviews Peter Enns, author of The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our Correct Beliefs. His book is written for those who are already engaged in a faith tradition but who find themselves doubting, which as he sees it is every Christian who has ever lived. What’s valuable in his exploration is the concept that faith and belief(s) are two separate things, and that this distinction is seldom understood by both doubters and non-doubters. To put it another way, a “faith” crisis is not doubting one’s faith, but doubting one’s beliefs, and that’s a whole different ball of wax.
Beliefs include a lot of different things, some examined, some unexamined. A belief is
- an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists.
- trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something.
Peter Enns points out that most of us are referring to the first definition when we experience a faith crisis, but that the second type of belief (which is faith) doesn’t need to be collateral damage just because we discard a specific belief we have previously held. Changing our opinion on various facts or statements doesn’t negate the existence of God or that there are things that are beyond our experience or understanding. Rather than a “faith crisis,” doubts arise because we discover that we don’t believe something that we had previously not given much thought to, something we sort of took for granted as a fact or worldview. Maybe we should call it a belief crisis.
What Is a Belief?
This reminded me of a leadership development training I did several years ago about questioning our assumptions. Because of the focus on “authentic” leadership, one of the key themes in leadership training for the last 20 years has been to strip away dysfunctional behaviors that impede our ability to relate to one another or to solve complex problems. One of those dysfunctions is when we operate under unquestioned assumptions, some of which are harmful to us personally (e.g. can cause negative relationship patterns or self-harming thoughts) or to the organizations we lead (e.g. can prevent progress or creativity).
The underlying premise of the training included an understanding of how beliefs develop in the following stages:
- We are void of beliefs at birth.
- As we grow up, we will do whatever we think we must do for air, food, water & love.
- Some beliefs empower us; some disempower us. Some beliefs are based on invalid perceptions.
- People will always act in a manner consistent with their beliefs.
- We become what we believe to be true about ourselves.
- We forget the origin of our beliefs over time.
In religious terms, everyone is raised in some type of framework, whether that is a religious framework or not, a Christian one, a superstitious one, etc., and adhering to that framework is a safe place for the child whereas rejecting it is unsafe and can result in rejection. The parental perspective or that of the authorities in the community is the one that holds the cards. Behaviors are acceptable within defined parameters in that framework or culture. Children seldom question the framework or culture; they operate within its bounds to ensure their own safety and needs.
A graphic from the training shows how our beliefs are internalized, how they exist in the mind using an iceberg as a metaphor.
- The visible iceberg represents our awareness, our stated beliefs, the things we are conscious of believing or the way we articulate our feelings, values and beliefs.
- The waterline is our mind, which creates rules & articulates our fears based on our underlying subconscious.
- Below the water is the realm of our subconscious: our experiences, the sensory data we have received in response to our interactions with the world, our fears and hopes, memories of verbal conversations with others, snippets of wisdom, etc.
- All of these things are used by the mind as evidence supporting our fears, rules and beliefs.
Because we are largely unaware of the reasons for our beliefs, since they originate in childhood, our statements of belief are not always an accurate representation of what’s really going on with us. As Haidt puts it, we are the rider on the elephant trying to explain why the elephant goes where it goes, but we aren’t really in control of the elephant. So it is with our beliefs. We don’t know why we believe the things we believe. We forget the origin.
The next part of the training goes on to talk about how fears keep us locked in a comfort zone:
- Fears result from criticism, emotionalized “DON’T” messages, and inhibitive behavior patterns.
- Fear of rejection starts in childhood with the perception of “conditional” love.
- Children crave unconditional love and physical contact.
- All success in life depends on our belief and positive self-concept.
- Negative self-image beliefs occur when we perceive ourselves being rejected or loved “conditionally.”
- Perceptions of lack of love create dysfunctional emotions such as blame, fear, hurt, sadness, self-pity, depression, greed, anger, anxiety, guilt, and jealousy.
- Our behaviors are driven by our beliefs. New beliefs create new behaviors.
When it comes to religion, unfortunately, we all get enamored with the idea of having correct beliefs.[1] We have confidence in our answers rather than humility that we don’t understand everything. Without humility we never feel the need to trust in God. We are proud of our beliefs, standing up for them against people who don’t share them rather than seeking to understand and love others. We are willing to fight to the death for the rightness of our beliefs, to kill people for our opinions, not realizing that many of them are based on things we didn’t fully understand. Knowing a thing, believing we know a thing, creates a heuristic that leads to pride and elitism.
Sometimes doubt is just an exchange of old beliefs for new certainties. That doesn’t mean that the old beliefs were more correct than the new ones. That just means that when we get stuck on the idea of correct beliefs, the infatuation with certainty and being right, faith is the casualty. Being certain is the dysfunction, the sin.
From Peter Enns’ book:
Watching certainty slide into uncertainty is frightening. Our beliefs provide a familiar structure to our messy lives. They give answers to our big questions of existence: Does God exist? Is there a right religion? Why are we here? How do I handle suffering and tragedy? What happens to us when we die? What am I here for? Answering these questions provides our lives with meaning and coherence by reining in the chaos.
When familiar answers to those questions are suddenly carried away, like stray balloons at a county fair, we understandably want to chase after them to get them back.
What Is Faith?
I have pointed out elsewhere that when church leaders use the term “faith” they nearly always mean “trust.” They don’t mean a set of beliefs or of creeds or statements or a worldview. But in our testimony meetings, we nearly always do talk about a set of beliefs or how we “know” our worldview is right or better than others’.
ENNS: The word believe in the New Testament is the same word that’s used for faith in the New Testament.
HODGES: Is this pistis?
ENNS: Pistis, yeah. And a much better way—I’d say a default way of looking at those words. When you see the word believe or faith, put trust in there and see what it does because that’s pretty typically what that word means. . . .
. . . Believing in God—that sometimes has wiggle room for us. Trusting God—there’s no wiggle room involved at all. And that’s why I think the Bible talks about it so much. So having beliefs isn’t wrong. But what God cares more about is trusting God and not having these beliefs that we line up that we play games with.
When he talks about playing games with our beliefs, he’s referring to the dysfunctional behaviors that stem from too much focus on being right, things like blaming, keeping score, hypocrisy, pride, elitism, and so on–which are all the opposite of trusting God. They are specifically about not trusting God, about creating a safety net for ourselves in case God can’t be trusted and so that we aren’t vulnerable to others in our faith community.
The Role of Doubt
Dr. Enns makes a provocative statement in the podcast:
doubt is not the opposite of faith—certainty is the opposite of faith
But the point is rather obvious when you think about it. What makes a trust fall work is that you do have the queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach that you don’t know it will work, and you recognize that you are not in control. When religion feels like we are in control, like we just need to check the boxes and all will be well in Zion, we aren’t actually operating under faith. We are just momentarily lucky. Enns refers to our luck running out or a “faith crisis” as “uh oh” moments:
See, and that’s when things happen to people, if they’re raised in that mentality, they’re going to look at these “uh-oh” moments as almost entirely negative. But I think people who might have been raised differently as Christians—to just let it be and you don’t have to be have omniscient perfect knowledge to be a Christian. You can have doubts. I think they’re more set up, actually, to be more flexible maybe when these things happen. And actually at some point, maybe with the encouragement of good friends and family members, to—”where is God in all this?” and then to move forward with that.
The problem isn’t in the “uh oh” moment itself or the faith crisis, but in two things that Enns discusses: our own brittleness (or our need to be right) and the inability of our faith communities to be a safe place to discuss setbacks, doubt and ambiguity. Of our own inability to deal with our lost beliefs constructively, he talks about two different dysfunctions: throwing it all out or refusing to throw out what doesn’t work:
We tend to think of our faith as a body of truth that we hold to intellectually. And I think real faith is much deeper than that, actually. It’s about trusting God—which is the subtitle—trusting God more than holding on to correct beliefs. Because trusting is more difficult, I think, than having a set of beliefs. It’s easy to construct a system of thinking and you can keep that together for a very long time. Now, eventually, life happens, and then what happens with that faith system? You start questioning it or even worse, you ignore what’s happening to you and you just keep playing a game like it’s okay.
Like a boyfriend or girlfriend who really isn’t good for you and a jerk, but you keep making believe like the relationship is really working well. . .
It’s like playing make believe and I don’t think God wants us to play make believe. So we move forward in an attitude of trust in God rather than feeling like we have to be certain about everything, because often times we’re not.
And “weak faith” is usually equated with doubting. And I simply don’t think that’s the case. I think doubt is part of the journey of faith. It’s part of what actually helps us grow, I think. Because I think it’s hard to have genuine faith in God and trust God when everything is always working smoothly. It’s the pain and the suffering, I think, that move us to a closer sense of feeling God’s presence in our lives.
This concept that things working smoothly is a problem reminds me of the idea that
Fleshing out the concept that our Christian communities can actually dissolve faith faster than our own doubts do, when some church members turn on others from a place of fear:
HODGES: Another one you talked about is “when Christians eat their own.” This is something else that respondents to your survey talked about as an obstacle to their faith.
ENNS: It’s a big one. And it’s the only one that we can actually control. I’ve known over the years many Christians who have functionally left any sort of semblance of the Christian faith because of how they were treated by other Christians—especially Christians in power whether in churches or elsewhere. And yeah, I mean, that just reminds me of how community oriented the Christian faith is. It’s not individualistic. You actually need people, and you can see the face of God in others, when you love other people and they love you God’s presence is with you. But the other side of that is when there’s just plain old pettiness and meanness and politicking and slander and—I’m not exaggerating, really trying to ruin people’s lives in the name of Jesus. And that makes people say, they’re just, “I’m going to walk away from this.” Now, you might think that’s illogical because they don’t represent the Christian faith and I think that way too. Like I don’t want people like that to define what I think about the Christian faith.
But still, when you’re caught in the middle of those kinds of things, it’s a reminder to me of how powerful the notion of Christian community is. And it can make or break it. And that’s Paul’s big thing, in my opinion. Like in Romans, for example, it’s about the community of believers of Jews and Gentiles together as one, because if you don’t do that, if you can’t pull that off, you’re demonstrating that the gospel simply doesn’t work, right?
Where We Get Off Track
Unfortunately, within Mormonism, we really do often conflate a belief (a “fact” or statement of worldview) with faith in our use of the word “testimony.” A “testimony” is a witness statement in which we share our beliefs, often with an explanation of the evidence (experiences, memories, feelings) that have led us to conclude we have a correct belief. And proving that we have correct beliefs is antithetical to faith, as the Zoramites illustrated with their prayers at the Rameumptom from Alma 31:
15 Holy, holy God; we believe that thou art God, and we believe that thou art holy, and that thou wast a spirit, and that thou art a spirit, and that thou wilt be a spirit forever.
16 Holy God, we believe that thou hast separated us from our brethren; and we do not believe in the tradition of our brethren, which was handed down to them by the childishness of their fathers; but we believe that thou hast elected us to be thy holy children; and also thou hast made it known unto us that there shall be no Christ.
17 But thou art the same yesterday, today, and forever; and thou hast elected us that we shall be saved, whilst all around us are elected to be cast by thy wrath down to hell; for the which holiness, O God, we thank thee; and we also thank thee that thou hast elected us, that we may not be led away after the foolish traditions of our brethren, which doth bind them down to a belief of Christ, which doth lead their hearts to wander far from thee, our God.
Their prayer is entirely about the “correctness” of their beliefs, particularly as contrasted with the wrong beliefs of others. We may recognize this attitude from occasional LDS testimonies that poke fun at other faiths’ silly traditions or that tout our own beliefs as the best ones or the most true. We even hear shades of this when people decry the values of the world as if we don’t in fact live in and shape the values of our communities.
Faith exists beyond the borders of our knowing, in the realm of what we don’t fully understand but we trust. When confidence moves to certainty, we’ve overshot the mark. The mark is trust in God, trust that there are things bigger and wiser than we are, that there are greater things out there than we can imagine, that our limited beliefs aren’t the sum total of existence. If God exists, he’s greater than the box we try to put him in. Knowing that we can’t know is the beginning of faith which is why doubt is the beginning and not the end of faith. [2]
Maybe we should drop the term “faith crisis” altogether. We should emerge from questioned assumptions with a renewed sense of our own imperfect understanding, a newfound humility and awe, more curiosity and wonder, and the freedom that comes from letting go of dysfunctional behaviors like blaming and shaming, pride and elitism, rather than feeling boastful of our new set of “correct” beliefs. If that’s where we end up, we are really just in the same place we started.
Discuss.
[1] Not just religion, of course, but also politics and life in general.
[2] Enns readily admits that his book is for people who are already wrestling within a framework of belief in God and as such isn’t the book to convince an atheist. From the transcript:
HODGES: In fact, one of the big themes of the book is, one of the reasons we shouldn’t rely on certainty is precisely because of our limited ability to understand things. . . But some people want to turn that into—”you don’t need to study stuff. You don’t need to think about stuff.”
ENNS: Yeah. I mean ironically it’s this studying stuff and thinking about the stuff that has led me to this point of view [chuckles]. It’s listening and reading voices through the ages who have thought about this too and have come to certain conclusions about “what does it mean to have faith in God?”
And remember too, the book is written for people who are in some context of faith. I mean if somebody comes to me and says, “Well, you have to give me a reason to believe in anything.” I say, “Well, okay. Maybe I haven’t.” That’s another book, that’s another idea, that’s another conversation entirely—
. . .This is for people who are struggling with faith—which is frankly most Christians that I know—and saying “it’s okay.” [laughs] . . . I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s okay. You’re not broken, you don’t need to be fixed. You’re not a sub-Christian. You’re not a tier below “super Christians” who have their act together, because they don’t. And if they think they do, they’re not as honest with themselves as you are.
Wheat & Tares 
A complicated subject, but central to everything. I was on a long cab ride yesterday with an Ethiopian Muslim driver and I pestered him with questions about his faith. He was very devout, saying his five prayers every day, almost always at a mosque, which for a cab driver is quite a sacrifice and inconvenience. He claimed to have never doubted the existence of God, nor the essential truths of his Sunni sect and practices. It seemed to never have crossed his mind to question his beliefs. In fact the word “belief” wasn’t something he seemed fluent or comfortable with. Islam doesn’t seem to be a “belief” per se, but rather a “practice” which one simply does without question. I’ve heard Judaism is similar. No one cares what you believe, only what you practice.
I told him that Christianity is infused with doubt, that belief is THE central thing for a Christian, an act of faith in the face of doubt and darkness, the Apostle Thomas, etc. He seemed astounded at this. He asked if I had ever doubted the existence of God. I said “of course” and that I expect to doubt for the rest of my life. For a Muslim, that is no way to live. Doubt is the Christian path, not the Islamic path.
I wonder if Mormonism is trying in some way to adopt this Old Testament quality of faith which this Muslim guy had, which is less about belief and more about practice and tradition. Mormons make a big display of saying “I know thus and such is true” but maybe that is simply a way of responding to the secular humanist culture we live in, and is not actually fundamentally so important. What is more important than “I know” is “I do.” Mormons have enough practices that they can demonstrate their faith, not through their belief, but through their action.
Perhaps this is a reason why creeds were termed an abomination. I like the idea of faith as trust, and that this trust is more involved with relationship than with a system of beliefs. Perhaps then instead of meaning ‘I know the church is true’ it is ‘I have a relationship of trust with the church’. This can be in place even if understood beliefs are not considered absolute on my part or the part of church leaders. If this is in place that trust could endure even if beliefs are not understood or perfectly shared.
I have long appreciated the separation of belief and faith (or, perhaps even better, the distinction between our modern understanding of belief as intellectual assent and earlier eras’ understanding of belief as about a direction for action [it’s in the very etymology of the word…there’s a strong etymological connection with things like “love”, but also implications of what one holds dear, pleasing, etc., One believes in one’s beloved — and when you put it like that, it gets back to the trust idea), but to me, there are still definitely issues for Mormons.
With Mormonism, there is a strong association of God with the institution. So, saying something like “have faith in God” as a conscious action of trust gets wrapped up in the idea of “have faith in the church institution”. (Maybe that association is the product of an improper belief, but such a belief is part of Mormon faith (that is, to say you trust/faith as an active verb in God as a Mormon means to trust/faith as an active verb in the church institution, however you parse that out, given fallible leaders.)
It seems to me, though, that you can frame faith crises not just in terms of crises of beliefs (intellectual assent to claims), but also in terms of crises of trust/loyalty to the institution. It’s not just that disaffected folks think the church is wrong, but that the church *lied* or *misled*. It’s this language that implies culpability, deceptive or malicious intent….and when those things are there, how can you really say you “trust” the church?
I have believed for a long time that faith = trust. My faith is very simple. I trust that God exists. I trust that He knows I exist. I trust that he influences me.
I have had a witness that the BofM is the word of God. I don’t place my trust in this though. It’s more of a fact (using the term loosely), and how do you place trust in a fact? (I trust in the neighbor’s house being blue…) Trust is about relationships. And the relationship must be with deity, not related to facts/witnesses *about* deity.
Sometimes I think the term faith crisis should be used to describe what goes on around the people who question their beliefs. Because, from my own vantage point, those questioning usual turn it into a negative experience for those around them. Not necessarily because they decide to change their beliefs, but in how they speak of their former beliefs.
Sort of in the vein of “Leave it, but can’t leave it alone.”
I find that as many lose their faith in the gospel, they also lose faith in the correctness of beliefs such as sexual fidelity or drinking.
I know that if I lost faith I would feel I had lost out on a lot that I would want to make up.
I’d suddenly feel I had denied myself a lot for a meaningless belief.
I’m wondering what other constraints people would consider unfair?
This is a great point! But I think this is pretty hard for many of those who were born in the church to actually do because it is indoctrinated in layer after layer over the years while growing up that it’s all or nothing, true or false. One must swallow it whole to be accepted!
So when the until recently faithful bic encounters an official piece or three that apparently cannot be true the ALL begins to shatter into nothing and the baby is tossed out with the bathwater! This is a huge vulnerability with the official narrative and practice that has been mostly ignored because practicing TBMs are unaffected by it.due to looking away while disowning the defectors..
Don & Howard, I think your points requires clarification in light of the Enns interview because they both point to the fallacies of polemic thinking as pertains to religious devotion. Unfortunately, because people use heuristics (and are often encouraged to do so by church leaders and members alike), they buy into the fallacy that either it’s all true or it’s all a lie, so when they discover that one of their many beliefs (any of which could be based on mistaken assumptions or poor information or emotional fear-mongering from their childhood need for security, etc. etc. etc.) is wrong or untenable, then they may react by doing one of several things:
1) throw out all faith (trust) in God and religion and apple pie and the kitchen sink,
2) ignore the evidence that their belief is wrong or untenable, continuing to cling to a misunderstanding, or
3) learn to distinguish between a belief (or assumption ) and faith and also learn to distinguish between trust in God and trust in a religion or fallible leaders.
People who do #1 often do feel like since it was all a sham, they should drop church attendance and the “silly” Mormon rules that no longer have a hold on them. They were only following those because of a fear of consequences based on a specific belief. People who do #2 stick with it until they can’t–they put it on a shelf maybe. People who do #3 are the resilient ones. Even some who do #3 find that their faith communities are intolerant of their “nuanced” view of cherished unquestioned assumptions.
But another point here is that when you really need God and faith is when crap happens in your life that throws you for a loop like loss and grief, illness, or financial setback. Until you have a reason to believe you can’t handle it all yourself, you run the risk of lacking faith.
The constant repetition in church testimonies of the words “I know the church, BoM,the current prophet, etc. is true”, as opposed to the use of the words ” I believe” has caused me great thought over the years. When I mention this in church classes or testimony meeting I get the big stink eye. We used to say” I believe”. When did it change?
Sure I agree those options exist Angela. But I wouldn’t have explained it with heuristics, it seems apologetic like you’re blaming the members here when it wasn’t that long ago that President Hinckley explained it this way:
He sounds pretty darn literal and given the tendancy of LDS members to amplify their callings and the words of their leaders he was making a big mistake if he wasn’t meaning to be literal. What TBM is going to screw around with kingdom of God?
So I believe it’s safe to say that it’s sold as all-or-nothing and expected to be swallowed whole and a compliant personality (which members are also taught to become) will tend to swallow it whole.
But that’s only part of the problem. The layered indoctrination interweaves each of these all-or-nothing doctrines even down to dress codes and social codes into one’s frame of reference and personality (isn’t it all the kingdom of God?) layer upon layer through each human development stage year after year until they become highly integrated within the individual. You can take the person out of the church but you can’t take (some portion of) the Mormon out of the person. (Which is precisely why they can leave the church but can’t leave it alone).
Now attempt to tease out and remove just one or three of these specific belief(s) to discard. It’s not that easily done without causing serious structural cracks unless you’re the type of person who insisted on thinking for yourself throughout your growing up.
Howard: First, my comment does state that leaders and other members encourage the use of heuristics, so we are in violent agreement there. But I think you are giving religious beliefs special dispensation for some reason when ALL beliefs originate in childhood, often rooted in fear, fully integrated into the person’s identity. All that is addressed in the post. It’s not easy to reevaluate beliefs, to question our assumptions, but it is part of life.
“You can take the person out of the church but you can’t take (some portion of) the Mormon out of the person.” That’s a great soundbite, but people do take some portion of it out all the time. Every Mormon is a cafeteria Mormon whether they know it or not. We even use terms and mean different things. This is how we can think we share common beliefs until we scratch beneath the surface.
People do discard beliefs if they determine they are false. People change political affiliations, decide they prefer to live in the city (even when they only knew rural life), change what kind of car they like. People discard beliefs all the time, which doesn’t mean it’s easy to do, certainly not in the grip of disappointment. The deeper held and the more unexamined the belief, the harder it is to discard it.
I don’t know about ALL beliefs but I agree a very large number of our beliefs do originate in childhood. I’m not addressing religious beliefs rather I’m talking about LDS systematic and highly repetitive indoctrination method that spans one’s growing up and competes with one’s parenting or in the case of TBM parents is reenforced by TBM parenting. Also I’m not talking about people in general rather I addressing compliant personalities which the church seeks to create and reenforce.
My (some portion of) comment meant that some residue of Mormonism will remain, not that no portion of it can be removed, so I think we appear to be in violent agreement here as well.
I do generally agree every Mormon is a cafeteria Mormon to some extent though many would deny it and argue against it, but to what extend are compliant TBM’s cafeteria Mormons? And isn’t denial commonly and liberally used to maintain a self belief of faithful orthodoxy? But these facts are largely irrelivant when it comes to actually doing surgery on some portion of their personally perceived orthodox belief when they are part of the specific but very large group I’m discussing.
Indeed people do (and don’t) discard beliefs if they determine they are false. But I’m arguing that if you happen to be a compliant bic TBM member this is a much more difficult hurtle to get over without toppling.
Yes people often will argue that they aren’t a cafeteria Mormon without realizing that not every Mormon shares their own individual understanding of the gospel. Even the Q15 use terms like atonement and revelation and priesthood in ways that are unique and unpredictable.
I enjoyed the post and will have to listen to the podcast, but if the crux of the argument boils down to “never mind the details, since you undoubtedly have them wrong, and just trust God”, I don’t think you’re left with very much. Trust God to what? In what? What does it mean to trust God when you don’t know what you believe about Him? You have to have some solid beliefs to trust at all. Otherwise, “trusting in God” becomes nothing more than a fatalistic trust that things will turn out okay in the end (which is not nothing, I guess, but it certainly doesn’t meet my needs). Or, maybe it means our belief is that all these questions about meaning are unanswerable and we choose to just quit worrying about it.
This isn’t to say I disagree with anything in the post been said, really, just that it seems to me that our beliefs still remain the foundation of our hopes and our choices, and they need to be something firm. I tend to agree with Howard’s Pres. Hinckley quote. That doesn’t mean that everything taught or believed in the church is correct or ought to be part of our foundation, but something needs to be firm or we’ve nothing to build on.
Martin: I think that’s a very valid point about the airy-fairy quality of faith as described, kind of like “When all else fails, still trust . . .” I don’t really have a great reply to that other than to share a snippet from the interview that is somewhat on point:
HODGES: And this is where some people might push back on this entire idea because there’s a sense in which there’s a level of vulnerability that you set yourself up for. People don’t want to be taken in. And with belief right now—you’ve probably read some of Charles Taylor stuff, about the secular age we live in. It’s not a given anymore that there’s a God, as it used to be. And so there’s a sense in which we don’t want to be taken in. And now we’re reading a book by Pete Enns that says “just trust.” And some people will say, “Well, Pete’s just asking you to turn off your brain,” right?
ENNS: Mhmm.
HODGES: Because if you use your mind, you’re going to start seeing all these difficulties and all these holes. So how do you respond to that idea in terms of like, “Oh, well, Pete just wants you to trust because he knows there’s nothing there.” If it’s fact-based, you’re not going to be able to make it.
ENNS: Yeah. Boy, we could go—How much time do we have here?
HODGES: Yeah [Laughs]
ENNS: I think part of the problem there is a very modern notion that faith in God works on the basis of, let’s say, analysis or logic or evidence or data. Things you can test or see or smell or touch.
HODGES: —As Christians, we kind of set ourselves up that way—
ENNS: —We have set ourselves up for that, I know—
HODGES: —You know, here’s the proofs of God and something.
ENNS: I mean all that stuff is fine on one level. But one of my sort of “faith claims,” I’d say, is that I don’t think that exhausts the nature of reality. And I think if God exists, there is mystery involved that is something that our little minds simply cannot grasp as a starting point. I do believe it’s—
HODGES: So why think about anything then?
ENNS: What do you mean?
HODGES: I mean, I like how you’re introducing this idea of mystery, right?
ENNS: Mhmm.
HODGES: In fact, one of the big themes of the book is, one of the reasons we shouldn’t rely on certainty is precisely because of our limited ability to understand things.
ENNS: Right.
HODGES: But some people want to turn that into—”you don’t need to study stuff. You don’t need to think about stuff.” And that runs counter to your entire career and your whole kind of process.
ENNS: Yeah. I mean ironically it’s this studying stuff and thinking about the stuff that has led me to this point of view [chuckles]. It’s listening and reading voices through the ages who have thought about this too and have come to certain conclusions about “what does it mean to have faith in God?”
And remember too, the book is written for people who are in some context of faith. I mean if somebody comes to me and says, “Well, you have to give me a reason to believe in anything.” I say, “Well, okay. Maybe I haven’t.” That’s another book, that’s another idea, that’s another conversation entirely—
HODGES: That’s a different book, yeah.
ENNS: This is for people who are struggling with faith—which is frankly most Christians that I know—and saying “it’s okay.” [laughs]
HODGES: You want to make room.
ENNS: I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s okay.
Haven’t commented here in a very long time!
So…was Uchtdorff really misinterpreted? Did he really talk about vacillating between two opposite statements? I highly doubt it. It’s not even a statement based on circular logic, because there are no premises. It’s literally nonsense if taken too seriously. Do I seriously believe that a reasonably intelligent Uchtdorff stayed up late at night exploring the logic of doubt to come up with that statement….or do I believe that he sort of just grabbed at the quippiest sounding thing he could think of to try and make people question their own intelligence by striking at an insecurity. At best he wasn’t misinterpreted as much as he mispoke, his intention to suggest that people should weigh the negative information about the Church with as much scrutiny as they do the faithful information about the Church.
“So you care about the Truth you say? Well, have you doubted your doubts??” It is intended to make a person feel arrogant for having doubts, which is exactly what causes so many to doubt in the first place. They are bothered by the hubris of certain faith. So, you make them feel that same hubris for having doubts by asking an inane question about whether they have “doubted their doubts”. See, the problem is this. What is a doubt? It can only be an expression of uncertainty. So it’s not circular logic to doubt your doubts, it’s a double-negative. You are supposed to express uncertainty not only about beliefs or assumptions…but you should also express uncertainty about your uncertainty? Doubt is irreducible, it is self-evident. People can lie about their sense of doubt, but they cannot actually be doubtful as to whether they are doubtful. To put a finer point on it, sure I can exercise just as much intellectual caution towards a claim supporting the Spaulding-Rigdon theory for the Book of Mormon, as I can for the Official Declaration about the “coming forth of The Book of Mormon”. I can be disciplined enough to hold all evidence, pro or con, to the same standards of rigor and suspicion….BUT I CANNOT be skeptical that my uncertainty exists without likewise questioning my own sanity. I mean it’s weird, under this logic not only can I not have absolute certainty about almost anything…but I can’t be certainly uncertain either??? Since I can’t know anything for certain, I have to entertain the possibility that I might actually be certain??? I mean, this is just a garbage statement that has the look and feel of a car, but no engine under the hood.