This week my department started discussing Matthew Lee Anderson’s Called in Questions, which is about the importance of asking questions in the Christian life.  We had a good conversation about the first chapter or so, with opinions about the place of questioning in and of the faith covering the spectrum.

This week over at Christianity Today, Brad East (of Abilene Christian University) posted a piece about doubt and the asking of questions that has been a nice continuation of the conversation for me.  East builds a great “argument” about the odd place of doubt in the life of the church and faith and does a quality redirect asserting another way to think about the issue: not just faith but faithfulness to a person, Jesus.  A quality quote:

What makes Christianity hard is faith, albeit not in the sense many of us expect. For too many Christians raised in the church, faith means mental and emotional certainty, and so the Christian life is defined as believing as hard as you can in difficult things. In this model, when a feral question nudges its nose into the tent, you’re left with only two options: Kick it out by somehow believing harder or accept that your faith is fraudulent and give it up. Having faith means I must work myself into a lather believing weird things that “modern” people in a “scientific” age find incredible. With that as the alternative, no wonder doubt looks attractive!

But faith is not this desperate maintenance of internal certainty. It is just as accurately (maybe even better) translated as faithfulness. To have faith is to keep faith, to maintain fidelity to God, to trust him and become trustworthy in turn. What is universally hard about being a Christian is being faithful to the Lord no matter one’s circumstances.

As always, the whole piece is worth a reading.  It’s both clarifying and encouraging.