Faith After Doubt

I’ve always said it takes a good writer to spot a good writer, which is what I imagine happened when one of my favorite Christian writers, Richard Rohr, signed up another well-established Christian writer, Brian McLaren, to contribute regularly to Rohr’s daily meditative columns for the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Rohr had enjoyed great success ten years ago with his exploration of “spirituality for the two halves of life” (Falling Upward), along with several other books; and McLaren had found a ready audience for his books, including the one that delights in the title Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?

McLaren made some playful suggestions: 

•  Einstein: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

•  Hamlet: That is not the question.

•  A nun: It was a habit.

But McLaren can be deeply serious, offering more healing solutions than questions—whether the questions are funny or spiritually probing.

I haven’t had a chance to read McLaren’s latest book,  Faith After Doubt, but I wasn’t surprised to find it endorsed by Rohr in one of his columns.

Apparently, sixty-five million adults in the US have now dropped out of active church attendance and about 2.7 million more are leaving every year. They feel that their faith is falling apart.

I gather that McLaren shows how old assumptions are being challenged in nearly every area of human life, not just theology and spirituality. He proposes a four-stage model of faith development in which questions and doubt are not the enemy of faith, but rather a portal to a more mature and fruitful kind of faith.

McLaren writes: “Doubt, it turns out, is the passageway from each stage to the next. Without doubt, there can be growth within a stage, but growth from one stage to another usually requires us to doubt the assumptions that give shape to our current stage.”  

This draws me back to one of his earlier observations that "”Everyone is crossing roads. “But some,” McLaren wrote,”like the good Samaritan, cross the road in compassion and solidarity, moving toward the other to touch, to heal, to affirm human-kindness.”

In that spirit, he concluded, we have begun crossing the road; and on the other side, we are discovering others as neighbors, and God as the loving Creator of all. This crossing forever changes our identity.

And it’s that Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World, as the Moses/Mohammed book puts it, that remains McLaren’s focus as a writer.

He insists that we be “strongly benevolent toward people of other faiths, accepting them not in spite of the religion they love, but with the religion they love.”

No doubt about that!