Preface

This book is about listening encouragingly to people who are struggling with questions and doubts about the Christian faith. Two assumptions form the basis of its chapters. The first is that because Christianity has accommodated very diverse opinions across the centuries about what its followers should believe and do, we have available to us more than one answer to most of our questions and more than one way of resolving most of our doubts. The second assumption is that the best way to help people in their struggles, our own included, is to support their exploring as many of these opinions as possible in order to discover those which make the most sense in the here and now.

Although most Christians who give the first premise any thought at all will find themselves in agreement with it, not all of them will be as comfortable with the second premise as I am. Some of my closest Christian friends, for example, have expressed to me quite forcefully their conviction that for a true follower of Christ there can be no uncertainty. A questioning or doubting spirit is an unfaithful spirit, of which one must repent. A less extreme version of their point of view insists that when questions about the faith of the church do arise, they should be referred immediately to religious authorities for timely, credible, and approved answers with which they should promptly bring themselves into confident agreement.

I respect the integrity with which many clergy and lay colleagues in ministry, across our many years of worshipping and thinking together, have defended these ways of looking at things. Nevertheless, I must continue to disagree with them. As does a very good friend of mine, who puts his own objection to their outlook this way: “God gave us minds, he expects us to use them, and we aren’t using them if we’re not asking questions.” To this wonderfully pithy statement I have only one thing to add: when people put their minds to the task of resolving their questions and doubts about faith, it helps to have someone available who knows how to listen, how to encourage them in their struggle, and how to refrain from trying to answer their questions for them. The chapters that follow seek to describe what we need to know as Christian friends and/or as trained caregivers in order to help people find their own answers to the questions about faith that their own experiences compel them to ask. Those to whom my approach may appear initially to be, as a student of mine once put it, an “anything goes” approach, should be comforted by its concern to balance the promptings of individual conscience in matters of personal faith with what the Christian tradition regards as saving truths cherished by all Christians at all times and everywhere.

The pages that follow contain a number of illustrations of how to make effective use, both in informal conversations and in formal caregiving relationships, of the theological and pastoral knowledge the book seeks to impart. All of the illustrations reflect actual encounters across my forty years plus as a pastor, pastoral counselor, chaplain, and seminary professor. But to protect the confidences exchanged in them and the identities of those involved, I have in presenting them given every care receiver and, with the exception of my own cases, every caregiver as well, a different name and have placed them in a different situation from the original. The downside of my exercising this necessary literary license is that I cannot express directly my deep and abiding appreciation for the many people whose real life struggles form the basis of this book. May God’s peace continue to keep their minds and hearts in love with the search for Him.