Faith in, and doubt towards, what? The objects of our faith define the nature and orientation of our doubts

"Doubt and belief are ultimately equivalent. Doubt relies on an alternate subterranean set of tacit belief in something else. Those who say otherwise are unaware of the alternative beliefs they hold to live." 

- Tim Keller (as ascribed by his son and fellow Presbyterian Church In America minister Michael Keller) 

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Everybody carries what (Lutheran-background) sociologist Peter L. Berger calls a "plausibility structure" in their mind - a set of deep assumptions about what is credible and in-credible, believable and unbelievable. It functions the same way as Christian doctrine and discipleship. Everyone believes something - a set of 'doctrines,' foundational first-principle concepts about the nature of reality, including: 

• The existence or non-existence of the supernatural realm; 
• The nature of ourselves (pleasure-seeking biological machines? Carbon-based relatively intelligent bipeds? Images of God?) ;
• The nature of other people, (aliens? Strangers? Threats? Resources? Friends? Neighbours?) and 
• The nature of the world around us (an illusion to be observed with detached equanimity? A finely-balanced internally-sufficient biological and physical organism? The creation of a personal God?). 

Those doctrines 'disciple' us and each other. We use them to guide our decisions, both instinctually and more intentionally. We evaluate others around us according to them, and in the process tend to self-select ourselves into communities which validate those assumptions. Through those process of communal reinforcement, we pass those doctrines, those foundational worldview assumptions, on to others. 

During the first two decades of the 21st century, it was culturally fashionable in the West to think that belief in the supernatural in-credible. Religious people were to be pitied and patronised because they were on the wrong side of history. Aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were anti-theist missionaries, doing their best to convert everyone away from religion and into atheism. And political movements associated with social changes like same-sex marriage villainised conservative religions - especially Christianity - which continued to affirm the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. In other words: multiple social, cultural pressures were applied to try and make atheism the only believable belief, and to make religious faith incredible. 

That kind of closed-minded atheism is now dead. It came and went in about twenty years - less than one generation. There has now been a discernible 'vibe shift' back in favour of belief in the supernatural. Religion and spirituality are back in fashion. US author, social commentator and spiritual seeker Tim DeRoche has been bold enough to call " old-fashioned" "faith" the new "successor ideology" - the new set of culturally fashionable assumptions which form the plausibility structures for people raised in that culture, and thereby influence what they tend to find credible and incredible, believable and unbelievable. 

The resilience of religion is itself a sign that God exists. The human need for transcendence - for meaning beyond this physical world, beyond greedily feeding our desires - has proven stronger than the massive amounts of time, money, and clever arguments mounted against it. 

But resurgent religion and spirituality is different from a revival of Christianity. Christianity is not a generalised, non-specific belief in the divine. It has definite doctrines which explain the nature and identity of the God we believe exists and what it means to relate properly to him. E.g.: 

• God is one - Christianity is monotheistic - but his one nature is expressed in and as his three persons - we worship the Holy Trinity. 
• That one God made himself known as Jesus of Nazareth - not Vishnu or Shiva or any other manifestation. 
• That Jesus, God the Son incarnate, died to take upon himself the consequences of our sins (penal substitionary atonement) and rose victorious over sin, death, and the devil, 
• And is therefore the only way to be right with God. "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved," Acts 4:12. 

Those doctrines in turn shape our discipleship - they guide our life as Christians, including amongst other things 

• Our attitudes to people of other religions - they may be wonderfully kind, upright, industrious human beings, model citizens, and credits to their societies and religious communities; but before the face of the most holy and righteous God, all their good works are but filthy rags. They need to put their trust in Christ, the only sinless one, to be saved. 
• Our sexual ethics - we believe in binary sex, the sanctity of lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage, and that sexual activity belongs only in that kind of heterosexual marriage - all of which runs completely opposite to contemporary Western sexual libertarianism. 

The vibe shift towards religion and spirituality will probably throw up lots of prejudices against those kinds of Biblical, 'evangelical,' distinctly Christian beliefs and behaviours. Recent reports point to the interest in the supernatural tending to flow into aesthetically glorious, liturgically ancient forms of Christianity on the one hand and new versions polytheistic pagan spirituality on the other. 

That's not a reason to despair. It is a caution against over-enthusiastic naivety. I've posted earlier about engaging patiently with people who are on a journey towards Christ. We will need to engage with whatever it is that predisposes them to disbelieve the Bible and the Biblical Christ. We may face polar opposite prejudices from different kinds of people. 

• Faithfully religious people will be predisposed against the free, gracious nature of forgiveness. Religion predisposes people towards working towards their salvation, and towards seeing free forgiveness as facilitating the kind of self-indulgent moral decadence we see in the West today; 
• While 'progressive' 'liberals' will be predisposed against precisely that kind of religious morality and blame it for preventing people from finding sexual and romantic fulfilment (which is to tacitly divinise sex and romance, worship the goddess Eros, and reduce humans to fundamentally sexual beings - homo sexualis, not homo sapiens - but that's a matter for a separate post...). 

On the one hand, engaging with all these conflicting, contradictory belief patterns, and their associate doubt patterns, will be confusing and exhausting. On the other hands, it's easy, because it's the same thing that the church has done for two millennia; which the Apostles did; which Christ himself did, and the prophets before him: constantly return to the written word of God, and reform our beliefs about God through that written word, which, through its inspired nature, reliably brings us to know God the Word incarnate: Jesus Christ, the only way, truth, and life. 

Photo credit: Brett Jordan, Pexels free stock images