On the tenth anniversary of the death of Princess Di the media was full of reverential retrospectives. Shortly after her death, Tony Blair called her the people’s princess. I think she can also be called, the media’s princess. Almost forgotten in all of the hubbub was the anniversary of the death of another woman who died the same week as Princess Di. This woman actually possessed the greatness of character the media posthumously awarded to their princess. If am referring, of course, to Mother Teresa.
The only thing the media chose to note about this remarkable woman was that she struggled with doubt. Newsweek Magazine chose to “honor” her by hiring new atheist flamethrower, Christopher Hitchens, to write a hit piece on her. Let me give you a sense of the tone of Hitchens’ article:
“[Mother Teresa's letters in which she wrote of her doubts] were actually first published in the fall of 2002, by the Zenit news agency-a Vatican-based outlet associated with a militant Catholic right-wing group known as the Legion of Christ. So, which is the more striking: that the faithful should bravely confront the fact that one of their heroines all but lost her own faith, or that the Church should have gone on deploying, as an icon of favorable publicity, a confused old lady who it knew had for all practical purposes ceased to believe?”
There are several things in this paragraph that need to be addressed. First and foremost, Hitchens is mistaken when he says that mother Teresa “all but lost her faith,” and for all practical purposes “ceased to believe.” Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Unbelief is the opposite of faith. Doubt is the no-man’s land in between the two.
Faith is choosing to believe even when the circumstances around us would tempt us not to, even when those circumstances shake us and cause us to doubt. Mother Teresa’s enormous faith was demonstrated by the fact that even though she doubted, she chose to continue to believe and she continued to act on her faith.
The essence of this kind of faith was beautifully stated by our local priest, Father Jack, when he preached the funeral of a young man whose life had been tragically taken in an automobile accident. He said, “At times like this we feel what we feel, but we do what we believe.” And as Mother Teresa continued to do what she believed, she was for all practical purposes a believer (and those practical purposes were legion).
In his hit piece Hitchens mocks our faith by seizing upon a statement from a letter to Mother Teresa from Joseph Neuner, “one of those to whom Mother Teresa turned in her own agony.” He “enjoined her to believe that her ordeal gave her a share in the Passion of Christ, and that His absence was in a way a ‘sure sign’ of his ‘hidden presence’ in her life….(Here might be the place to declare my interest, and to state that at the invitation of the Vatican, I testified against the beatification and canonization of Mother Teresa, as well as to confess that I tend to believe that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.)” — emphasis added
Hitchens does have a wonderful way with words. But his answer indicates that he has very little understanding of the Christian faith. Reading Hitchens one might conclude that there is a complete absence of evidence for the existence of God, and that a believer is a credulous individual who chooses to believe in spite of a total absence of evidence. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While other faiths may call their adherents to credulity, Christianity never has. From the very first Christian sermon on the day of Pentecost until today, Christianity has based its truth claims on objective evidence, the resurrection, and invited those who would believe to examine the evidence and then make a decision. Thus, Christian faith can be defined as; “Accepting a proposition as true, based on the evidence.” The evidence is good. The case is strong. This is why so many great minds have found the answers they sought in Christ.
So when I said; faith is believing in spite of circumstances that would cause us to doubt, I was not issuing a call to credulity, because there is abundant and compelling evidence for, (1) the existence of God, and (2) the truth of the claims of Christ. Interestingly enough, this evidence is compelling enough that from time to time it has even caused atheists to doubt their atheism; and sometimes it has resulted in their conversion.
C.S. Lewis is an example of this. After his conversion he wrote, “”Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”
Hitchens mentions one such man, Malcolm Muggeridge. He dismisses him as “an eccentric,” but had he not jumped ship and become a believer he would probably be one of Hitchens heros.
Muggeridge was actually a greatly respected journalist and an atheist very much in the mold of Hitchens. But he kept seeing things that caused him to doubt his unbelief. Finally, his doubts caused him to become a believer. I pray that someday Christopher Hitchens will do the same.
But if the evidence is as strong as I say it is why would a believer ever doubt? The reason is really quite simple. We live in an age in which God has deliberately chosen to work subtly and remain silent. The New Testament declares that this is an age in which God has called us to walk by faith not sight. This is an age in which – perhaps more than any other – God calls “the just [to] live by faith.” Were it easy to do this, faith would not be a virtue.
The author of the book of Hebrews tells us that God has spoken his final word in His Son. And so at the present hour, in the words of Paul, having “furnished proof” through the resurrection of His Son, God has nothing left to say to the human race other than the invitation he offers to the world through his ambassadors, believers, to be reconciled to God.
But sometimes the silence of heaven causes us to question the evidence, even though it is compelling. We represent a Kingdom that has not yet come (thus we continue to pray, “Thy Kingdom come,”) and we do this in a terribly the broken world in which the will of God is not yet done “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Sometimes the brokenness of this world slaps us in the face. This was Mother Teresa’s experience on a daily basis as she ministered to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta. And when this happens we often find ourselves doubting in spite of the evidence. Sometimes we doubt the existence of God other times we doubt his love, concern, power or wisdom. But doubt is not unbelief, though some have moved into unbelief because of it.
Doubt is actually a dark valley between faith and unbelief. It’s a bad place to visit and you wouldn’t want to live there. But the fact is, there are both believers and unbelievers in the valley, and the road through it is a two way highway. Some move from doubt to faith. Some move from faith to unbelief. Mother Teresa chose the former. We know this because in spite of what she felt she did what she believed. She wrote of her doubts in her private correspondence; but she showed us her faith by her works (James 2:18).
