Here’s the second part of Mary Jo’s chapter in “A New Kind of Apologist,” a new book featuring various essays by renown apologists and edited by Sean McDowell. If you missed the first part, catch up here.

The book will be released on March 1, 2016 and is currently available for pre-order. Stay tuned for parts three and four of her chapter next week!

Answer Doubt

“A friend once caught me off guard by asking, “Why would a woman want to attend a session on apologetics?” Actually, it had never occurred to me that my gender would be a factor in whether or not I should seek and discover answers to foundational questions about belief in God. Why wouldn’t a woman who had been given a rational mind, as made in the image of God, want to know what she believes and why she believes it? After all, I had come into the field of apologetics through my own doubt about God’s existence. And yet, the question was laid out before me.

I began to understand that apologetics was a relatively new  1 area of the Christian faith. Women’s ministries generally did not have materials for this kind of study. So I had to think of what would communicate the purpose of this mostly unknown field to the souls in those ministries. I found my answer through my own story, beginning with answering doubt.

Doubt is common to the human experience. We do not have all the answers, no matter what the field of inquiry. This is certainly true in the Christian faith as well. Dr. Gary Habermas states, “Doubt, manifested in many forms from the assurance of one’s salvation to factual questioning, is certainly one of the most frequent and painful problems which plague Christians.”

Further, doubts can arise for many reasons other than not just having knowledge. First, when our life experience does not match up to what we perceive our life should be, we can view this as a failure by God to live up to those expectations. Our reaction may be to distrust God or to question his very existence.

Second, we may have a brush with great evil or may be concerned about evil in general when we see so much of it daily. One of my friends began questioning God’s existence after his wife suddenly died, leaving him to raise four beautiful girls by himself. An audience member, mentioned previously, asked me how she could continue to believe in God when her three-year-old son died of leukemia.

Third, we are exposed to so many bad arguments due to the age of the Internet. Just as we can access more knowledge more quickly than ever before, we are also exposed to more bad philosophy and illogical statements than ever before. As C.S. Lewis stated in The Weight of Glory, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”  3 It’s not so much that we get argued out of faith or have doubts based in well-reasoned arguments; we just sort of fall away due to the unanswered influence of bad philosophy.

Fourth, a lack of intentional living in the presence of God due, in part, to a profound split in our minds and lives between the sacred and secular has caused us to live as secular people while trying to maintain that we believe in the sacredness of all life. We cannot merely affirm belief in God as a rational proposition; we must also practice belief in God in our everyday lives in the big as well as small things. Otherwise, we effectively live as atheists, as if there is no God.

So if we step away from belief in God, we might say that life with or without God isn’t much different, and that belief can fuel doubt into a raging fire. If we never intentionally put forth any effort to know the reality of God in our lives, it is no wonder that our lack of experiencing God would lead to doubts about his existence.

These reasons for doubts, along with many more, have been gleaned over years of conversations with women. While there are many reasons why someone may experience doubt, a crucial element of having doubt is how one handles it. This is the difficulty I see for women. We have so many confusing messages in our society about what a woman is supposed to be and what she is supposed to focus on that she can forget her most important role is as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. All other relationships and roles should be secondary to her primary role as a child of God. When her relationship with God is no longer the priority, she can begin to fall away through the busyness of distractions. As C.S. Lewis stated,

[M]ake sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious reading and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.  4

Yet, in order for women to bring their doubts to the table, they must have a safe environment—free from ridicule, suspicion, or rejection—in which to do so. They must have a loving, encouraging Christian community that focuses on identifying as a disciple of Jesus. While many Christian communities and churches encourage women to focus on many good things, such as being a wife, mother, leader, friend, church-goer, or career woman, some have forgotten that truly only “one thing is necessary.”  5 A woman’s identity should be grounded in her relationship to God. Her faith can be damaged when her identity is reduced to the roles placed upon her. When that happens, she has no time to sit at the feet of the wisest and best Teacher, to grow in knowledge and faith, and to be empowered to boldly proclaim the truth.

When we focus on building safe communities within our churches for answering doubts and encourage women to bring their questions about God to our churches, we will begin to build up their confidence in what they believe.”

Taken from A New Kind of Apologist

Copyright © 2016 Sean McDowell

Published by Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon 97402

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

Used by Permission