Quotes About Doubt

The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

Some things that are labeled Christian aren't true, and some things that aren't labeled Christian are true. Some atheists say lots of things that are true, and some Christians are full of shit.

It's the voices in your head that speak doubt and insecurity and fear and anxiety. Like a tape that's jammed on repeat, these destructive messages will drain an extraordinary amount of your energies if you aren't clear and focused and grounded.

Whatever we say about God always rests within the larger reality of what we can't say; meaning always resides within a larger mystery; knowing always takes place within unknowing; whatever has been revealed to us surrounded by that which hasn't been revealed to us.

This is because conviction and humility, like faith and doubt, are not opposites; they're dance partners. It's possible to hold your faith with open hands, living with great conviction and yet at the same time humbly admitting that your knowledge and perspective will always be limited.

If your faith is threatened by something that's true, then it wasn't much of a faith to begin with, was it?

One of the great "theologians" of our time, Sean Penn, put it this way: "When everything gets answered, it's fake. The mystery is the truth."21

Sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting 'the gospel' is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn't safe, loving, or good. It doesn't make sense, it can't be reconciled, and so they say no.

Often times when I meet atheists and we talked about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either.

a person who speaks to this hour's need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.

Which leads to another question: When Matthew tells us that some of Jesus's followers doubted, does this undermine the story, or is this the exact kind of honesty that reflects how people actually are? When each of the Gospel writers includes the part about the women being witnesses, why risk it? What a strange thing to include knowing it would discredit their story, unless women actually were the first witnesses.

everybody is resting on a set of interpretations, and we need to be honest about it.

But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I just want to throw up.

Because the blinking line doesn't just taunt you with all the possibilities that are before you, the potential, all that you sense could exist but isn't yet because you haven't created it. The blinking line also asks a question: Who are you to do this? And that question can be paralyzing. It can prevent us from overcoming inertia. It can cause crippling doubt and stress. It can keep us stuck on the couch while life passes us by.

This is the opposite of brainwashing. This is the opposite of Just believe and don't ask questions. He keeps inviting people to think critically, to examine, question, doubt, test, struggle. To own it for themselves. I came across this line in the New Testament: Test everything. I love that line. It's

when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren't taking the entire world into account.

Sometimes we hold back from throwing ourselves into it because we think that the only work worth doing is something completely original that's never been done before.

Why would anybody become a Christian?" That's a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an "explosive," not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.

Everyone who believes in the devil is the devil.

Once again I distrusted happiness, mistaking it for complacency.

No doubt, what with all that graft and corruption filling your schedule.

If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. Logic proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.