Every Christian questions their faith at some time or another, unless they have a blind faith that refuses to engage with the world, a faith that is maintained in a sterile environment where questions cannot arise – but a sterile environment produces a sterile faith. It is perhaps this truth that Tennyson pointed to when he said that there is more faith in honest doubt than in all the creeds. There is nothing wrong with doubt as such, it is a question of what you do with it. As Roy Clements, whose book "Songs of Experience has broadly guided this short series says: “Doubt is to unbelief what temptation is to sin. A test, but not yet a surrender.” Indeed in the book of James the issues of temptation, trials, doubt and sin are all interlinked, and, in his eyes trials, temptations and doubts can be used to hone faith. In Psalm 73 the situation that has produced the seeds of doubt is the prosperity of the wicked and unscrupulous (vv2-12), a phenomenon that continues to the prese
Dialogues, monologues, sketches, poems, rants, theological and liturgical bits and bobs and miscellaneous other verbal doodles...