Doubt, Public and Private

The radio news report at 5.30 yesterday was frankly dismaying. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has admitted that the killings in Paris led him to doubt God,’ the report went, ‘but he said he spoke to God who reassured him of his presence’. The dismay, as far as I was concerned, arose not from the news that ABC has had flashes of faithlessness in response to a terrible event, but the resolution of those doubts which must surely come across to any non-Christian as glib and weird. The wording of the headline changed as the day proceeded, thankfully, and the original interview on the never-failingly gruesome Songs of Praise made it clear that Abp Justin was not hearing divine voices: ‘God told me’ turned out to mean ‘I went for a walk and thought about it and remembered a bit from the Psalms that helped me to see things differently’. So not much different from the rest of us, then.

I suppose Abp Justin wanted to suggest that questioning the presence of God in such extreme events was normal and understandable. As friends of mine pointed out, this is on the face of it odd, as there is plenty of cruel and unnecessary death around all of the time without the need for mass-murder by terrorists to shake one’s faith. An act of very human evil, too, surely calls God into question rather less than a natural calamity, but even disasters of almost inconceivable magnitude are curiously rarely cited as reasons for doubt: Christians in the West seem to have been able very easily to mentally brush aside the 230,000 people who died in the great Tsunami of 2004, for instance.

The things that prompt us to doubt, if we have anything to doubt, are strangely personal and random. Terrible events such as the Paris killings don’t affect me on this level: I sort of discount them as the kind of thing one should expect in a fallen world. Instead, for many years the thing that set me off on a spiral of anger was the senseless suffering of my mother from arthritis and other frailties, which seemed not just random but strangely directed at her. I couldn’t see, and still don’t even though her situation is much better than it used to be, that this served any spiritual purpose or was of any benefit to anyone. I seem to have been able to digest that as time has gone on, and my own lapses into faithlessness are now caused, when they come, by tiredness or a succession of silly little personal frustrations which less make me doubt God as make me indifferent as to what I believe – an emotional disturbance rather than a philosophical shift. Then gradually I discover I do care once again.

If we conceived God as a remote and Olympian figure, these problems wouldn’t arise – they only appear when we believe that God takes an interest in what happens to us. Despite what I said about the Paris killings being an act of human evil, why God does not rescue people from such things is not as daft a question as it might appear. I can remember several occasions in my life when I might well have died, and one particular episode when I still can’t understand why I didn’t; talking to people suggests that this kind of experience is more common than one might think. If Christians are tempted to see in such events signs of God’s care for them as individuals (and the Scriptures encourage us to think this way), the question necessarily arises, Why these interventions and not those?

Of course there is no answer. Christians live in a world which is full of hazard and pain, and also one in which a man died and was alive again. Somehow we have to hold these two facts together, and the only connection between them is two pieces of bloodstained wood hammered into a cross, the site of that man’s death. That’s as much of a response from Heaven as we get. For some of us, it’s enough to keep us moving forward, and to provide the means of trying to understand and assimilate the disasters which afflict us; and for some it isn’t.