What makes Christianity hard?
There are many possible answers to this query. How you answer it reveals an ideal deal not only about yourself—your temperament, your station in life, your mind and heart—but in addition in regards to the context through which you reside. Christians in several times and places would answer quite in a different way.
Suppose, for instance, you reside in Jerusalem just a number of a long time after the crucifixion of Jesus. What makes Christianity hard shouldn’t be belief within the divine or the good distance separating you from “Bible times.” You’re in Bible times, and everybody believes within the divine. No, what makes it hard is the suffocating heat of legal persecution and social rejection. Confessing Christ’s name likely makes your life worse in tangible ways: Your family might disown you; your master might abuse you; your folks might ridicule you. The authorities might haul you in for questioning in case you strike them as a troublemaker.
Or suppose you’re a nun in a medieval convent. You’ll live your whole life here, never marrying or bearing children or having a house of your individual. You are pledged to God until death. You’re what people will later call a “mystic,” though that’s a quite dry term for having visions you regularly experience as suffering: ecstatic glimpses of the consuming fire that’s the living Lord. What makes Christianity hard? You definitely don’t wonder in regards to the existence of God—you’ve seen God together with your own eyes. Nor are fame and wealth a source of temptation; your life is hidden away from the world. But your life shouldn’t be easy. Faith stays hard.
Or imagine you’re another person, someplace else: a priest at a rural parish in early modern England. You live in a time of non secular and political upheaval. The Reformation has upended long patterns of worship and expectations of unity. Religious wars rage on the continent, but your decidedly unspectacular charge is a village of farming families. What makes Christianity hard here? That background conflict is perhaps a part of it, but far closer to house is the sheer numbing routine, the each day quotidian grind of weather, crops, weddings, pregnancies, illnesses, funerals—Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter—12 months in, 12 months out; wash, rinse, repeat.
If I were to place this same query to my friends or my college students in America today, I feel I do know what they might say: What makes Christianity hard in our time and place is doubt.
Doubt about God’s existence; in regards to the resurrection of Jesus; about miracles; about angels, demons, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; in regards to the biblical texts or the history behind them or the church that offers them to us; in regards to the credibility of all the above. And all that doubt perches on the precipice of a yawning chasm between “back then” and “here and now”: oppression and slavery and superstition versus liberty and human rights and science. Should we actually accept unquestioningly the religion of our ancestors when—we are inclined to think—we’re so a lot better than them in so some ways?
I’m not describing atheists, apostates, or “exvangelicals” here. This is what number of abnormal Christians feel. Or at the very least, it’s the water they swim in, the intrusive thought behind the mind, the semi-conscious source of inertia they feel when the alarm blares on Sunday morning. American Christians face no Colosseum, but this emotional and mental pressure could be very real. The doubts add up.
It doesn’t help that doubt is in vogue. Doubt is sexy, and never only in the broader culture. I cannot count the variety of times I’ve been told by a pastor or Christian professor that doubt is an indication of spiritual maturity. That faith no doubt is superficial, a mere honeymoon period. That doubt is the flip side of religion, a sort of friend to fidelity. That the presence of doubt is an indication of a healthy theological mind, and its absence—well, you may fill in the remaining.
The pro-doubt crowd gets two essential things entirely right. First, they need space to ask honest questions. Second, they wish to remove the stigma of doubt.
They want church to be a spot where doubt shouldn’t be a pathology, where the experience of doubt shouldn’t be an ethical failure, where the doubt produced by questions, or the questions produced by doubt, are welcomed, accompanied, and explored. A church like this is able to be known for a culture of spiritual hospitality. Ordinary believers could say out loud what really keeps them up at night, quite than keeping it unspoken for fear of judgment or rejection.
We should all want these items. Where churches have erred, pastors should right the ship. We don’t want children and young people pondering questions are bad, much less that following Jesus means believing six inconceivable things before breakfast.
Where, then, do the pro-doubt folks go fallacious? I see 4 ways.
First, pro-doubters universalize a specific experience. It’s true that doubt shouldn’t be a fake problem easily solved by a bit of spiritual bootstrapping. But is believing in an invisible God or the virginal conception of Jesus what makes Christianity hard for everybody in all places and at all times? Read enough of Christian literature in praise of doubt and that’s the impression you’ll get.
But leaf through church history, like I did above, and it becomes apparent that what makes Christianity hard will depend on context. Exposure to the lives and writings of fellow disciples from across the centuries, living in vastly different times, places, and cultures, puts our challenges in perspective. They are so often personal, not general; parochial, not cosmic. They aren’t inevitable or unalterable. Christianity is lots greater than the Bible Belt or the secular West.
Second, pro-doubters are inclined to describe doubt not only as a universal challenge but as a needed feature of mature faith. There’s a combination of selection bias and classism at work here: Doubters are typically affluent, brainy types with a school degree and a laptop job. None of that is bad; I fit the bill.
But not everyone does, and our experience of religion shouldn’t be universal. Our tendency to wrestle with doubt shouldn’t be an integral part of knowing God, a gauntlet that every serious Christian must run. It is just unfaithful that faithful maturity is at all times marked by doubt. Did Moses wonder if God is real? Did Paul second-guess his vision of the risen Lord? What about Julian of Norwich, our non-hypothetical nun? Must the easy and assured faith of so lots of our spiritual elders—the proverbial grandmothers within the pews—really be “problematized” before it’s worthy of our respect? The query answers itself.
Third, pro-doubters go too far in making doubt a virtue. Doubt shouldn’t be a sin, but that doesn’t mean it’s desirable. God may use it for good; it might be an important step in an individual’s journey with Christ. But we want not valorize it or have fun it. In short, doubt doesn’t call for either praise or blame. In most cases, it’s a thorn within the flesh.
At best, doubt is a ladder to climb. But ladders aren’t ends in themselves. We use them to get somewhere, to finish some job. Dwelling without end in perpetual doubt is like making one’s home on a ladder—technically possible but removed from ideal. If someone advisable a ladder as an answer to your need of a house, you’d rightly query his judgment.
Finally, pro-doubters mischaracterize the character of questions. Questions aren’t similar to doubts. Thomas Aquinas asked 1000’s of questions in his short life. Augustine’s Confessions alone comprises greater than 700 of them. What else is a catechism but questions followed by answers? But there’s the rub. Doubt begins with a lack of trust or credibility; questions don’t. My children ask me questions day by day, not because they doubt me, but because they trust me.
For this reason saints and mystics adore questions, including questions that can not be answered on this life. Questions arise from and foster our trust in God. Questions grow faith.
To distinguish questions from doubt shouldn’t be to praise the previous by re-stigmatizing the latter. It’s to make clear for believers that while doubt often entails questions, questions don’t at all times (and even normally) entail doubt. That is nice news for the anxious amongst us. Ask away, the church should say. The Lord welcomes your questions.
What, then, makes Christianity hard? Is there a solution that pertains to all of us? As a matter of fact, I feel there’s.
What makes Christianity hard is faith, albeit not within the sense lots of us expect. For too many Christians raised within the church, faith means mental and emotional certainty, and so the Christian life is defined as believing as hard as you may in difficult things. In this model, when a feral query nudges its nose into the tent, you’re left with only two options: Kick it out by by some means believing harder or accept that your faith is fraudulent and provides it up. Having faith means I have to work myself right into a lather believing weird things that “modern” people in a “scientific” age find incredible. With that as the choice, no wonder doubt looks attractive!
But faith shouldn’t be this desperate maintenance of internal certainty. It is just as accurately (possibly even higher) translated as faithfulness. To have faith is to maintain faith, to take care of fidelity to God, to trust him and turn out to be trustworthy in turn. What is universally hard about being a Christian is being faithful to the Lord irrespective of one’s circumstances.
Whether one lives in times of persecution or alone in a convent, in an epoch of division and war or in an age of skepticism and affluence, within the high tide of medieval Christendom or under Islamic rule in modern Iran, the decision of Christ is strictly the identical. In every circumstance, Christ invites us to take up our cross and follow him to Calvary (Luke 9:23). We are called, in other words, to die.
Sometimes our deaths are literal; sometimes they’re religious; sometimes they’re social or financial or familial. Sometimes they’re all of those and more (Gal. 2:20). In every case, for all of the superficial differences, we wear the identical yoke. Christ guarantees us that this yoke is straightforward, its burden light—and it’s (Matt. 11:30). But the death to self it requires is a each day crucifixion that saps the flesh of its power to carry us in its sway.
Doubt may be a part of this struggle. The struggle is real, lifelong, and customary to us all. The struggle, nonetheless, shouldn’t be the purpose. The point is where we’re going. The point is whom we’re following. The point is that the cross shouldn’t be the ultimate destination; death shouldn’t be the top (1 Cor. 15:26, 55–57). We aren’t doomed to wrestle and suffer and wonder without end. When we walk out of the tomb, we are going to leave all that behind. Like graveclothes, whatever doubts once bedeviled us will lie piled on the ground. Free of each burden, we are going to walk into life.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the creator of 4 books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.
