Emotional Doubt

Don: As we have discussed, doubt that leads to spiritual growth is instructive, a tonic, medicinal. I call this “intellectual doubt,” because it stems from an incomplete dataset, from questions to which there is no apparent answer. It is a spur to action, to inquiry, to investigation—to a search for answer or at least some level of extrapolated explanation or assurance. It is unsettling, but not destructive of faith and spirituality. It is enabling, not disabling. It embraces the infinite, apprehends the mystical, and leads to greater faith. This is the kind of doubt of people in faith stage 3, the kind of wrestling with god that Jacob experienced.

On the other hand, what I will call “spiritual doubt” is the kind the New Testament warns against because it throws a wet blanket over the smoldering wick of the inner light. It does not acknowledge the grandeur of the cosmos or the exquisiteness of the intricacy of the cell. It sees nothing greater than itself, it sees nothing of the infinite. It is destructive and poisonous, and it leads to spiritual paralysis, despair, and nihilism.

A third type of doubt seen in the scriptures is what I will call “emotional doubt.” We see it in Moses, when he became exasperated with the Israelites in the desert and said to god something like: “I can’t take this any more. These people don’t listen. I want out!” We see it in Jeremiah, who says to god: “I’m tired of you saying you’ll do one thing and then doing something else instead.” We see it in John the Baptist when he had to ask if his sacrifice was worth it—if Jesus was really the messiah. We even see it in Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane and even on the cross.

This is doubt that causes a great deal of mental anguish. It is rooted, I think, in extreme stress, physical and mental. We’ll use Elijah to illustrate. Elijah had been tasked to bring the wayward people under King Ahab’s rule back to god. He challenges the prophets of the false god Baal to a public contest at Mount Carmel, to see which is the true god, and he wins. The story ends with a bloodbath in which all the prophets of Baal are slain. This angers Ahab’s queen, Jezebel, who threatens to kill Ahab. We pick up the story in 1 Kings 19:1-14:

Now Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah, saying, “So may the gods do to me and even more, if I do not make your life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.”

Remember, Elijah had just been through a huge emotional experience on Mount Carmel, when out of the blue comes this threat on his life, and from a powerful source. He comes undone. You would think that a man who had just successfully invoked the power of god would be unfazed, but no. He is distraught to the point of suicide:

And he was afraid and arose and ran for his life and came to Beersheba, which belongs to Judah, and left his servant there. But he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree; and he requested for himself that he might die, and said, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take my life, for I am not better than my fathers.”

The physical effects of Elijah’s extreme emotional distress can be seen in what follows: the need for deep and prolonged sleep, and for food, following a long period of sleeplessness and loss of appetite. These happen to all of us who go through severe emotional distress or overwhelming fear, such as when we lose a loved one, or face dire financial straits, or lose a job.

He lay down and slept under a juniper tree; and behold, there was an angel touching him, and he said to him, “Arise, eat.”

God’s response to his emotional doubt is not a lecture, not an attempt to try to convince him that god exists; rather, it is to meet those physical needs, those deficiencies that led to his emotional doubt. He was exhausted, and he was hungry. When our doubt is similarly rooted, god’s response is to take care of those needs. In fact, Elijah goes through two sleep/eat cycles before any attempt is made to reason with him. God does not try to remind him of what he (Elijah) had just seen of god’s power on Mount Carmel.

Then he looked and behold, there was at his head a bread cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, “Arise, eat, because the journey is too great for you.” So he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God.

Now comes the second part: Having taken care of Elijah’s physical needs, god starts to reason with him. But as usual, god does not make statements: He asks questions. He leaves it to Elijah to vent his doubts.

Then he came there to a cave and lodged there; and behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and He said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He said, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”

God’s solution is not to re-engage Elijah in any kind of activity, not to get him to try to find god again on his own, but to rest and simply wait for god to find him. Which god does, in a most dramatic way that shows Elijah that god is not where you expect him to be, that god’s ways are not our ways:

So He said, “Go forth and stand on the mountain before the Lord.” And behold, the Lord was passing by! And a great and strong wind was rending the mountains and breaking in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle blowing. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave. And behold, a voice came to him and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Elijah’s second misconception is that he is all that stands between god and god’s oblivion:

Then he said, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”

God swiftly disabuses him of this notion (verse 18). Elijah’s assessment of god’s supporters is off by a factor of 7,000:

Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him.”

God is telling Elijah that his dataset is seriously deficient.

What can we do, for ourselves and others, when we or they are in a state of emotional doubt?

David E: I remain unclear what it is that Elijah doubts. He is talking with god through all of this, so he cannot be questioning god’s existence. He’s doubting himself. Is emotional doubt the same as self doubt?

Alice: It arises when we feel that our relationship with god has deteriorated or even been severed.

Pastor Ariel: Elijah certainly seemed to doubt his own effectiveness in fulfilling his mission to bring the people back to god. He doubts his own people thinking he’s the only one left on god’s side, only to be told that is far from true. Perhaps he is doubting whether his life has had any meaning.

Robin: He seems to doubt god’s ability to protect him from Jezebel.

Harry: It sounds like self doubt to me. He has misjudged god, he has misjudged the support for god. The lesson is that we are clueless about god.

David McF: His response was typically human: “I did something for you, at great personal effort and risk, so you owe me.” But in his own moment of need, when Jezebel threatens, god is nowhere to be found. We humans have great difficulty understanding the way god works. and that is what god was trying to show him.

Chris: At the culmination of his success against Baal and for the glory of god, he expected the people would flock back to god in a huge public display of support, yet they apparently did not, leaving Elijah feeling alone and vulnerable. God is perhaps saying that he sometimes works in ways other than huge public displays.

Kiran: Ahab was the last in a line of increasingly immoral, godless kings. His wife was the daughter of a priest of Baal. A soldier of Ahab told Elijah that he, the soldier, had hidden and was feeding 150 prophets of god, so Elijah should have known he was not alone. The reason he felt alone was because following his success on Mount Carmel, he anticipated that Ahab would reform his rule but he did not. This was his mission, and it appeared to him to have failed. He didn’t realize that he was just one cog in the wheel, that other forces were at work, that he was not, in fact, alone.

Pastor Ariel: The 7,000 faithful were already faithful before Mount Carmel, even after enduring three years of drought. There was no big event, such as Elijah staged, for them. There was only god’s still, small voice, and that is the greatest thing that god does for us—to speak to us individually, in his still, small voice. Like, I suppose, many pastors, I too harbor a desire for big, faith-inducing, events; it is good to be reminded that god himself does not work that way. He works through his spirit operating in each of us individually, and that is what brings transformation that is true because it is driven from within, not by external forces and influences.

Jay: Intellectual, spiritual, and emotional doubt are all about the interaction between wo/man and god. Spiritual doubt is doubting whether god is even interacting with us at all, whether he cares at all about us, and even that he exists. This type of doubt is frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, as a thing to be avoided. Intellectual doubt is about working out one’s relationship with god, as in the story of Elijah. Emotional doubt is doubting one’s ability to interact, to have a relationship, with a god one believes in but who is so powerful he can hurl down fire from heaven and melt an altar. God tries to get Elijah past this latter block, by pointing to the still small voice, the inner light, in contradistinction to the roaring wind, the rumbling earthquake, and the crackling fire.

Ada: I see emotional doubt as arising from disappointment when we feel we are not in god’s presence, that he’s not upholding his end of the bargain, not paying us back for our belief.

David McF: Elijah probably felt that way when told that god had 7,000 supporters. Why weren’t they here to support him in his hour of need? But in fact god did support him with food and rest. We are just so nearsighted that we don’t see things from god’s perspective. It’s one of our most difficult challenges.

David E: Perhaps it was the story of Elijah that sustained so many Jews during and indeed after the Holocaust. The Jewish people have remained strong in their faith, as a whole, and the still, small voice explanation seems to me to be the only one that cold have resulted that remarkable and observable fact.

Don: Is emotional doubt real? Has anyone experienced it directly, or know someone who has? When I encounter people who seem spiritually drained, I tend to try to give them more information, to try to re-kindle their faith. Is that the right approach? Is there a better way? Elijah seems to suggest one.

Kiran: I have experienced emotional doubt, and I have found the mere presence of a friend, a comforting other, telling me that everything is going to work out somehow, to be sufficient to dispel it. In a way, this is what the angel did for Elijah as he lay emotionally drained under the tree. He was there for him.

Don: Yes, as I mentioned earlier, god’s response is not to talk through Elijah’s doubt but to encourage him to rest and let things work themselves out. So telling people in distress from emotional doubt that they need to pray more, or pray harder, is perhaps not the best advice. Encourage them to rest, and to recover a calm mental state when other strategies to re-engage with god can be tried.

Pastor Ariel: We instinctively want to respond with what we think is helpful information to see them through. When I was in nursing school, our professors flatly forbade us from giving information to our patients, under penalty of being kicked out from the program. God did not give information to Elijah; instead, god asked him two questions, which also had a therapeutic effect.

I think the three kinds of doubt are all related and interact with one another. Elijah’s doubts led him to seek information at the mountain of god but god only gave him what he needed: Two questions, and the assurance that Elijah was not alone, that there many others who had a committed relationship with him (god) and were working with him just as Elijah had.

An interesting thing about the public display of god’s powers at Mount Carmel is that it was aimed at convincing the doubters, not those who already believed, and yet it did not work in the case of King Ahab. If fire from heaven won’t work, then what will? The still, small voice will work, god was telling Elijah.

Robin: Our emotions and our logic seem always to be at war. Too much logic, and we can’t serve god. Too much emotion, and we doubt. Logic should have told Elijah that a god who could hurl fire down from heaven could easily take care of Jezebel’s threat and Elijah then need not worry, but his emotions got the better of his logic. We need to balance the two.

Jay: One can layer the three types of doubt on top of the stages of faith and in particular on the transitions between the stages of faith. We’ve discussed whether our church could help people transition. Discussing the roots of doubt and how god responds to it is perhaps a key part of the prescription for a successful transition.

Pastor Ariel: The knee-jerk reaction of people in stage 2 is to try to get people in stage 3 back to stage 2. Stage 4 people don’t want to discuss their faith with stage 2 people for fear of upsetting them, making them feel insecure and thus interfering in their comfortable faith. Stage 2 people seem to be the problem, yet they form the bulk of the church. How can we have a functioning community of faith with such a tug of war going on?

Don: And of course it is a real tug of war. There is real tension between stage 4 people, attending church to find the grandeur and the mysticism and the mystery that comes from a spiritual experience with god, and the stage 2 people sitting next to them in the pew but looking for structure and answers and cause and effect.

Pastor Ariel: Of course, “stages of faith” is just a model, and like any model it does not tell the whole story. Maslow’s model of the hierarchy of human needs did not fit Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King, who reached the model’s pinnacle—self-actualization—while missing some lower parts of the supporting structure entirely.

The stages of faith model might not tell the whole story either. What are its assumptions? For instance, does it assume that stage 2 people do not also seek the grandeur and mystery of god? I’m not sure that faith in the four stages is as clear-cut as the model makes it seem. To be sure, the model leads us to some valuable insights, but there has to be something missing. It seems to me we need to tread very lightly when attempting to compartmentalize people’s spirituality with clinical precision. Stage 4 people still seek some structure, and stage 2 people seek the spirit within them. Maybe the model needs to be more flexible and allow for such commonalities.

Jay: The model does not pass judgment on any stage. All the stages of faith are a valid form of faith. So viewing stage 2 as “lower” than stage 4 is indeed wrong.

Pastor Ariel: But in a real sense, would one not want to be a stage 4 person?

Jay: I don’t think so. Stage 2 people have a real relationship with god. It’s a positive. Stage 1 seems, however, negative in comparison.

Pastor Ariel: From what I have read of this discussion, the model implies that progression through the stages of faith is something to be encouraged, that one should push from chaos to order to questioning to community.

Kiran: If there is pushing, it should be guided by god. Everyone has a role. Stage 2 people’s role is to reach out and bring stage 1 people into stage 2.

Pastor Ariel: So when one reaches stage 4, one has no more mission?

Harry: Stage 1 are just people who just don’t value religion, who just want to get on with their lives and have no time for religion or spiritual things.

A stage 4 person probably has no problem with evolution or science in general, so any discussion between that person and a stage 2 person (who probably does take issue with the theory of evolution) is bound to provoke discord. The latter believes that the bible is the literal word of god and therefore the biblical story of creation must be true. The former attacks that fundamental belief by saying that there may be much truth in the bible but it is not the word of god.

The model is missing a stage 5: A stage of love and acceptance of all. A stage 5 person would not have that discussion at all. There is no need to interfere in the beliefs of others. A philosophy of love and acceptance views all stages of faith as valid.

Which stage we end up in is more a matter of personality. Different personalities are drawn to different stages.

Don: As with any model, this one is not watertight. I find all the stages at work within me at times. I sometimes want my own way, I sometimes want structure, I sometimes doubt, and sometimes I just feel none of the above matters—I feel the presence of god. But like Ericson’s and Piaget’s models of childhood development, this model helps advance our understanding. We need such understanding when, for example, a brouhaha arises in the church board when stage 2 and stage 4 people clash over an issue of church rules, with one side wanting to stick to the rule and the other questioning the need to follow the rule and questioning the rule’s underlying principle. Such problems are real and anything that helps us understand them so that we might find a way to resolve them is to be welcomed, in my view.

But again, I would reiterate the view expressed by Jay that there is no judgment implied in the model. Progressing through the stages is not a plan of salvation. God is Harry’s stage 5 entity: He accepts and loves everyone equally, no matter what stage they are in. The model is just one way to help us understand how people assimilate faith and how their faith leads to certain kinds of behavior and relationship with god.

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