I am by nature a skeptic. I have my doubts. Some people seem predisposed to accept stories about mysteries or the inexplicable. I’m just naturally skeptical.
I don’t believe in Bigfoot or Stonehenge or the Loch Ness monster. I don’t believe Elvis is still alive and working as a short-order cook at Taco Bell. I don’t believe in any of the JFK conspiracy theories. I don’t believe extra-terrestrials periodically visit the earth and give rides on their spacecrafts, partly because they never seem to land in Pasadena and give rides to physicists from Cal Tech; they always appear to a dirt farmer and his wife in Idaho who are missing a few teeth and whose parents are first cousins. I don’t believe the budget will be balanced, or that Elizabeth Taylor will stay married this time, or that a stomach belt will melt off pounds and inches while I sleep so I can always retain my boyish figure (though I have hopes).
I have my doubts. I am part of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-credibility-gap generation. I don’t give my trust easily.
This skepticism is not an altogether bad thing. If I trusted every offer that came along, I would have re-financed my house every day for the past two years.
But it is not altogether helpful, either. It gets in the way of prayer. It can create barriers in my intimacy with God. It can corrode my vision for the future. And I don’t think that I’m the only one who suffers from it. In fact, I think that those of us involved in pastoral ministry are especially prone to it.
SEEN THIS PERSON?
He is a high-profile guy. He has been a successful pastor. Sought-after speaker. Church consultant.
He has the kind of ministry to which people in our profession generally aspire. He is in demand. He is important.
One of the striking things about him when he speaks is his impressive certainty. He tells many stories, when he speaks, about answered prayer and growing churches. He is wonderfully assuring to the people who listen to him, who want badly to believe, and who do believe, but who don’t believe perfectly, not all the time.
I heard him some time ago at a Christian college conference discussing “world views” of well-known people. He quoted a poet who said she periodically surveys the world and asks herself if there is meaning and hope beyond cruel, physical reality, and finds that she answers yes about 70 percent of the time. The speaker quoted her in a contemptuous way, as if to say to the audience, “How sadly typical that a member of the so-called intelligentsia would go through life without 100-percent, full-time assurance of supernatural truth.”
But when he is behind closed doors, the closed doors of his hotel room if he’s talking with someone he knows well, behind the closed doors of his heart, he is a different man.
He is deeply cynical. He is cynical about the people to whom he speaks. He is cynical about the organizations with whom he consults. The kinds of things he says publicly about God and faith do not play out in his private conversations, and they would sound hollow if they did. There is little sense of wonder in him–about God, life, or people. He is cynical about other church leaders because he believes them to be as ego-driven and career-obsessed as he himself is. He is disillusioned about his family life, and although he is considered a champion of family values, “valued” is precisely what his family does not feel.
He prays sporadically, mostly in crisis. There have been moments when he thinks his prayers really have been answered. However, for the sake of the ministry he tells the stories of these answered prayers, tells them often, embellishes them slightly with each retelling until eventually he no longer believes in them himself.
One gets the sense that he speaks about God in his professional capacity, but that when he is offstage and relaxed and speaking candidly about “reality,” he thinks in terms of money and positioning and rivalry and success. The difference between him and the poet is that she at least could be honest about her assessment of the probabilities, while his forced expressions of assurance (and condescension for those who lack it) place his soul in a far more precarious position.
He is like the title character in the Wizard of Oz. He lives behind the curtain. He pulls off the special effects and gets people to believe. They see the fire and smoke; they tremble from a distance. But he knows the truth. It’s a show. There is no magic. There is impressive technology but nothing supernatural. He lives behind the curtain.
What he really trusts in is hard to sum up, but the word success might come close.
I will tell you his name. It is Legion.
He is no one person in particular. I have met him, in one form or another, many times, and so have you. What is worse, of course, is that I meet him from time to time in myself.
For it is one of the dirty little secrets of pastoral ministry that it is an occupation full of closet skeptics. It is an ironic fact of our trade that the very people who are paid by the church to build faith–in some sense even to have faith–are sometimes the most skeptical people in the congregation.
In fact, I think this is no coincidence. I think there are reasons why we are especially vulnerable to skepticism, and that wise people in ministry take special care to combat it.
WHY ARE WE SKEPTICAL?
I suppose we are skeptical partly because we minister as finite, fallen people in a fallen world where much goes unexplained.
A couple comes in for counseling. They desperately want a child, they have prayed fervently, they have waited twelve anxious, doubtful, barren years. Then one day it happens: the liquid in the test tube of the home pregnancy kit magically changes color, and their prayers are answered, and they have a perfect, healthy baby. A little boy. And they believe.
When he is 3 years old, this answered prayer is playing with an orange soccer ball. It lands on a crack in the sidewalk and bounces crazily to the left. It didn’t have to happen that way; a little more breeze, a little nudge from God, and the ball would have missed the crack. It could have bounced to the right, but it didn’t; God didn’t nudge it; it went to the left. And to the left meant into the street. He never saw the car.
And now they are alone again, his mother and father. Their world landed on a crack and bounced away with an orange soccer ball. And now their answered prayer hurts more than their unanswered one.
Pain is not the only story in this world, not by a long shot. But it is part of the story, and it is not safe to gloss over it too glibly, too quickly. Honest ministers never have. Old Testament scholars tell us the most common form of psalm is the lament. A few thank-you notes get thrown in here and there, but more psalms are addressed to the complaint department than anywhere else. It may be that our skepticism is not too strong but too weak; or at least that we are too afraid of the consequences to face it as fearlessly as does the psalmist.
Frederick Buechner writes: “There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm. The absence of God is not just an idea to conjure with, an emptiness for the preacher to try to furnish, like a house, with chair and sofa, heat and light, to make it livable. The absence of God is just that which is not livable. It is the tears that Jesus wept over Lazarus and the sweat he sweated in the garden and the cry he choked out when his own tongue filled his mouth like a gag.”
This is surely a part of the story. It is important to speak honestly about prayers that don’t get answered (at least in the ways we want), and hurts that don’t heal, or else we place ourselves and our hearers at risk for skepticism when we bump up against the real, fallen world.
WHAT’S THE DEEPER REASON?
However, the truth about my skepticism is that it does not result purely from a courageous decision to look life squarely in the eye. I said earlier I am a skeptic by nature. That may be getting me off the hook too easily. There is not (at least yet) any evidence of a genetic predisposition toward skepticism.
There are darker sides to my skepticism. Skepticism carries with it a kind of built-in excuse for spiritual entropy. It provides a twisted kind of justification for a failure to love, and love is, after all, hard work.
This more-destructive form of skepticism is a disease not so much of the intellect as of the will. It is not the doubting of Thomas that leads to a search for the truth; it is the doubting of Pilate (“What is truth?”), which is less a question about truth than an affirmation that truth cannot be found, an excuse to wash my hands of the whole thing and simply pursue my agenda.
Partly, this is a risk of education. When I was growing up, I had a vague idea that to become a pastor more or less conferred spiritual maturity on you. There were simple answers to difficult questions, and pastors were well-informed and quite certain about them. The discovery that this is not so produces a kind of disillusionment that may lead to a much deeper and more informed faith, but may also lead to a shallow skepticism that ceases to search for truth at all.
I long for the former. I remember a college philosophy professor who deeply influenced many of us; we were quite convinced of his near omniscience. (A friend of mine once thought he caught this professor in a logical flaw; we asked him why he didn’t point it out in class, and he said, “Because I was afraid that if I did, he’d prove I didn’t exist.”) But what influenced us most was his conviction that true education was not simply questioning all things but ultimately was about the construction of a life of faith.
We are especially vulnerable to skepticism in another way, which Helmut Thielicke called “the ministers’ disease”:
“The man who studies theology … might watch carefully whether he increasingly does not think in the third rather than in the second person … This transition from one to the other level of thought, from a personal relationship with God to a merely technical reference, usually is exactly synchronized with the moment that I no longer can read the word of Holy Scripture as a word to me, but only as the object of exegetical endeavors. This is the first step towards the worst and most widespread ministers’ disease. For the minister frequently can hardly expound a text as a letter which has been written to him, but he reads the text under the impulse of the question, ‘How would it be used in a sermon?'”
So we are tempted–in a way unique to our profession–to allow means of grace such as Scripture to become tools for career enhancement. When I find myself reading the Bible primarily in terms of how I can use it to speak to others rather than how God wants to use it to speak to me (not as much as pastor but as his child), it is a diagnostic indicator that I may be coming down with ministers’ disease.
I am vulnerable to skepticism because I too live behind the curtain. I see the fight between the soloist and the keyboard player. I preach sermons on intimacy while still in an unresolved (and sometimes, on my part, unfairly fought) conflict with my wife.
I am in danger, I suppose, of becoming skeptical about the church because I am so close to it. The first time I was invited to take part in a public worship service I remember hearing the pastors joke beforehand about which one brings in the biggest offering when he preaches. For me, the offering had always been an awesome thing (partly because it was the only time I saw that much money in one plate). I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to make jokes about the offering. I have been at churches where on some Sundays the offering is very nearly a joke in itself. But the notion of the offerings–grateful people yielding to God a tangible part of their lives–contains elements that should awe us. And our sense of wonder and awe is sometimes worn down by sheer familiarity. My faith is probably in more danger of being de-sensitized than de-mythologized.
I suspect that many times the reason I can be cynical about other people’s motives is because I am so intimately acquainted with my own. To the degree that I am in ministry to win applause, it will be difficult for me not to project the same intentions on others.
WHAT CAN I DO?
However, I am not a helpless victim of skepticism. One of the prayers that has become most important to me is the prayer of the desperate father in Mark 9:24, “I believe; help Thou my unbelief.”
One of the things that helps me most is to talk about my doubts and skepticism and criticism with a few close friends. The first time I did this was pretty threatening: I was afraid the friend with whom I shared my doubts (we went to seminary together) would be shocked. Instead his response was, “What? You too?” The honest discussion of our questions that day had the effect of deeply affirming my faith. Much of the power of my skepticism gets drained in the simple act of confessing it to somebody else.
It also helps to let people in my congregation know my faith is not perfect. This is not to say it’s appropriate to ventilate in the pulpit every doubt that comes along. For a pastor in a major faith crisis to get up and say, “I’m not sure today that God even exists. Sermon’s over; go home” would be clergy malpractice of monstrous proportions. But I will occasionally say, “It’s important to me that you understand my faith is not perfect. Sometimes I have questions I can’t answer. I don’t always give my trust easily.” This helps lessen my temptation to pretend. It also gives people who listen permission to discuss their own doubts.
One step that has aided me much was to find a spiritual director who could help my prayer life. I shared with her one time how my doubts could make it hard for me to receive anything from God in prayer. For instance, when praying I would have doubts that God could be really speaking to me since my life was so imperfect. Or I would wonder if this was really God speaking or simply my own thoughts and feelings.
“You need to practice discernment,” she said. “When you pray and sense God may be speaking, and then doubts come up–do these doubts move you closer to love and joy and intimacy with God, or farther away?”
The answer was clear: these doubts were keeping me from receiving anything from God in prayer.
“Then it would appear that these doubts are not of the Spirit,” she said. “It may be wisest simply to set them aside in prayer and open yourself to the possibility that God really is speaking to you.” As simple as that advice was, it freed me to believe that prayer–my prayer–really was an interactive, personal conversation in which God was not just listening but participating.
The early church fathers had a standard spiritual discipline for the cultivation of greater faith that applies especially to pastors: silence. One of them put it like this: “When the door of a steambath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its remembrance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good.”
Sometime ago I had an experience in prayer that was, for me, a powerful and unusual thing. I told several people about it, but this had an unexpected consequence. Gradually, the experience became less a shared moment between God and me and more an impressive moment I could use to demonstrate to people how spiritual I was. The mere talking about it changed it, robbed it of its value to help me. Silence, as Henri Nouwen says, is a way of tending the inner fire, which protects us from the coldness of skepticism.
I also find I need regular doses of simply reading good theology. Some time ago I went to a conference that suggested that being a “successful pastor” rests largely on having “the gift of faith”–defined more or less as being able to visualize having a large church with lots of parking. And in the back of my mind I was inclined to feel some distress because my mental visualizer does not always work reliably. It has too many channels. I get cable.
While that was still in my mind, I was reading Martin Luther. Luther told once of a woman tormented by doubt who said to him, “Dear Doctor, I have the idea that I’m lost and can’t be saved because I can’t believe.”
Then he replied, “Do you believe, dear lady, that what you say in the Creed is true?” She answered with clasped hands, “Oh yes, I believe it; it’s most certainly true!” To this he responded, “Then go in God’s name, dear lady. You believe more and better than I do.”
Luther reflected on this encounter: “It’s the Devil who puts such ideas into people’s heads and says, ‘Ah, you must believe better. You must believe more. Your faith is not very strong and is insufficient.’ In this way he drives them to despair. We are so constructed by nature that we desire to have a conscious faith. We’d like to grasp it with our hands and shove it into our bosom, but this doesn’t happen in this life. … We should hold to the Word and let ourselves drag along this way.”
Sometimes the best way to deal with my skepticism is with a healthy dose of perspective and humor. Luther noted that he was often tempted by the Devil to doubt because he knew his sinfulness: “I am of a different mind ten times in the course of a day. But I resist the Devil, and often it is with a [synonym for flatulence] that I chase him away. When he tempts me with silly sins I say, “Devil, I broke wind yesterday, too. Have you written it down on your list?”
I don’t mind being skeptical about the Loch Ness monster. And if the Cubs should pull through one of these years, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. But when it comes to God and the church, I don’t want to go through life a skeptic. I want to leave a legacy of faith.
Copyright 1994 John C. Ortberg, Jr.
Copyright © 1994 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
