Benefit of the Doubt: An Interview with Greg Boyd
Adam
Joyce: Tell me about why you wrote Benefit of the Doubt? What was
the genesis of the book and the ideas that animate it?
Greg
Boyd:
It originated as a sermon series I did a couple of years ago on faith. I gave
the series because of how often I’ve seen an unbiblical model of faith screwing
people up. Through my own studies I came to the conclusion that a lot of what
we call faith today is not biblical faith. This widespread unbiblical faith
creates all sorts of unnecessary quagmires and I’ve often seen it contribute to
many young people leaving the faith.
AJ:
Throughout the book you talk about how it matters not just what you believe,
but how you believe, and you claim that the misguided way many believe today
damages their faith. Can you tease this out?
GB: Whereas Scripture
espouses a covenantal model of faith, many contemporary Christians embrace a
psychological concept of faith, holding that your faith is as strong as you are
certain. With this concept comes the idea that God wants us to talk ourselves
into a state of psychological certainty—leading people to believe that their
salvation, or healing, or whatever blessing you want, depends on attaining a
requisite level of certainty. So we end up with this rather bizarre picture of
God threatening to withhold salvation or healing unless we can sufficiently
convince ourselves of the truth of certain beliefs. Instead of celebrating
salvation by grace, we feel enormous pressure, trying to attain salvation by
psychological certainty!
This
concept of faith is also inherently irrational because people end up trying to
talk themselves into having more certainty than the evidence for a particular
belief warrants. People understandably wonder why God
would leverage a person’s eternal destiny on their ability to convince
themselves of certain beliefs.
Another
damaging aspect is this presentation of faith as an all-or-nothing package
deal, as though all our beliefs were equally important. This way of structuring
faith is increasingly vulnerable in our day because it creates a house of cards
theology where everything hangs on everything else. If a single belief gets
knocked down, the whole thing may come tumbling to the ground.
When
I became a Christian, I was taught that if the Genesis creation account isn’t
literally true, the whole Bible is a book of lies. Well, it took about a half a
semester in an evolutionary biology course to convince me this couldn’t be
true. Though it was excruciating, I felt I had no choice but to jettison my
entire belief system and the vibrant relationship with Christ I’d enjoyed for
about a year. But not only is this way of holding faith dangerous for believers,
its also hard to evangelize with. The all-or-nothing model of faith is simply
no longer plausible or attractive to people in a post-modern culture.
Instead,
I believe its healthier for Christians to structure their faith along the lines
of concentric circles. The center of our faith is the revelation of God in
Christ, thematically centered on the cross. This is the one belief everything
hangs on. The closer to the center a belief is, the more that hangs on it,
while the further out a belief is, the less that hangs on it. The concentric
circle model allows us to major in the majors, and to minor in the minors.
Plus, it’s flexible, which is extremely important today.
AJ:
Jumping off of this idea that Christ provides the center of our faith, you
advise people to believe in the Bible because they believe in Jesus, and not
the other way around. What do you mean by this?
When
Christians make the Bible the reason they believe in Jesus, their faith in
Jesus is dependent on whatever reasons they have for believing the Bible to be
God’s Word. This is why so many today feel pressured to hold that the Bible is
a perfect book. This means their faith in Christ can be called into question if
they ever discover that it’s not perfect according to the standard they impose
on it. I’ve met many people who abandoned faith in Christ because they
encountered archeological evidence that undermined the historical veracity of a
particular biblical narrative or because they found contradictions they
couldn’t resolve. They concluded the Bible wasn’t perfect, according to certain
historical standards, and thus could not be God’s Word. This is tragically
unnecessary.
Instead
of this, I encourage people to believe in Jesus for the same sort of reasons
the early disciples did. They didn’t believe in Jesus because they found him in
the Bible: they believed because of his character, the incredible claims to
divinity he made, the power he demonstrated, and especially because of his
resurrection from the dead. Once they believed in Jesus, they then looked for
him and found him in their Bible. But they never would have come to believe in
Jesus if they had started with the Bible.
We
have compelling grounds for believing in Jesus, apart from any consideration of
the Bible as God’s Word. There are a host of persuasive historical arguments
that don’t presuppose the Gospels are inspired but that support accepting the
disciple’s testimony about Jesus’ character, his claims to divinity, his
miracles, and his resurrection from the dead. There are also a number of
philosophical, existential and personal considerations that support seeing
Jesus as Lord and Savior. These sorts of arguments provide a solid foundation
for our faith in Christ. Once this is established, we have a solid foundation
for our faith in Scripture as God’s Word, for the Jesus we now believe in
endorsed it as such.
AJ:
We interviewed Andy Crouch a few weeks ago and
talked about idolatry. Our discussion resonated with something you tweeted. You
said: “Violence is like a credit card: It deceptively offers a no cost positive
gain in the present by deferring a great payment in the future.” Idols can act
like a credit card. The idol of certainty may not make a lot of demands in the
beginning but it will make large demands of you down the road. How have you
seen idolatry work in the faith communities you have been a part of? Is there a
history to the patterns of this idolatrous faith and how it plays out?
GB: I would define an
idol as anything outside of God, revealed in Christ, that we get life from,
meaning, anything that provides us with our ultimate sense of fullness, worth
and security. The contemporary psychological model of faith motivates people to
chase after certainty as a way of feeling secure in their salvation. This means
that people are getting their life and security not from God, but from
their sense of being certain that they embrace the right beliefs about God.
This is why certainty-seeking faith is idolatrous.
This
is a variation of the modernist quest, going back at least to Descartes, to
build a fortress of certain knowledge on an unshakable foundation. This model
of knowledge has crumbled in our post-modern age, which is why the
certainty-seeking concept of faith is increasingly implausible to so many
non-believers today. Almost everyone today recognizes that we are limited human
beings who can’t possibly be certain that we’re seeing things correctly most of
the time.
AJ:
You place a strong emphasis on the covenantal nature of biblical faith as
opposed to the contractual form of faith that many hold today. Can you talk a
little about this? Also, how does doubt function differently in contractual
verses covenantal contexts?
GB:
Salvation
in the New Testament is a covenantal, not a contractual, concept. It’s more
like a marriage than a deal worked out in a court of law. While a contract is a
legally binding deal that takes place between people, a covenant
involves parties pledging their very lives to one another. Faith, when
understood as a covenantal concept, isn’t about attaining a sufficient level of
certainty to seal a deal; it’s an expression of trust in another and a pledge
to be trustworthy in relation to another, just like wedding vows. In covenants
people don’t need contracts because they trust the character of the other party
and they pledge to be faithful to this other party.
There
is a great difference between doubt within the context of a covenant and doubt
in the context of a contract. Doubt in the context of a covenant can make the
covenantal relationship stronger. Most folks who have been married for a while
discover that, when you hit speed bumps and commit to being honest about them
and working through them together, they end up deepening your love and
commitment to one another. That’s certainly what I’ve discovered in my 34 years
of marriage. Even when the speed bump is a failure by one of the spouses, if
the couple will deal honestly with it and work through it, being willing to
regain trust over time, it can take their marriage to a level they maybe never
dreamed was possible.
The
whole narrative of Scripture shows us a God who delights in honesty, and this
says a lot about the character of God. When God enters into covenant with us,
he takes the good, the bad, and the ugly. God continues to faithfully work with
us and through us despite the many reasons we give him for not doing that. This
is supremely illustrated in the incarnation and crucifixion when God becomes
one of us and then goes on to fully identify with our sin and our God-forsaken
cursed state on the cross. He bears our sinfulness in order to enter into this
marriage with a bride that he will transform to be “without spot or wrinkle.”
But the bride he initially gives himself to and embraces is a bride with a
bunch of warts, a mouth full of crooked teeth, and very bad body odor.
AJ:
Christian Wiman, an American poet, has said, “God calls some people to unbelief
in order that faith can take new forms.” I was wondering if you would want to
say something similar about doubt? Does God sometimes call us to doubt? What
might that look like?
GB: I don’t know if God
calls us to doubt, but he calls us to honesty, which is going to involve doubt.
Whatever is real about us God wants expressed. This is what the Psalms are all
about. It is an act of worship to honestly express what is real to God, however
ugly that may be. Reality is the only commodity that God trades in. God does
not want our pious lies.
Paul
says that we are to speak the truth to one another in love. The word truth
in Greek, aletheia, literally means, not concealed, to not cover.
So the church is called to be a community in which we freely uncover our
true self to one another. James makes the same point when he tells us to
confess our sins to one another, because if we’re unveiling our true selves, we
will find ourselves confessing sins. By being a community that is focused on
what is real rather than how things appear, the church can be a community where
healing takes place. For only by bringing wounds and failures out of hiding can
people ever be healed and grow out of these wounds and failures. Through our
vulnerability with one another the Spirit – who, remember, is called the Spirit
of truth – can grow us into the likeness of Christ. On the whole, the
church is currently far from being this community of truth.
AJ:
It is almost like we need to tear the bubble wrap off of our faith. You have to
get down to the real thing.
GB: All sin involves fleeing
from reality. Scott Peck talks about this in People of the Lie. He claims that all
neuroses are attempts to short change reality and create our own alternate
reality apart from God. It is another way of saying we are the Lord of our own
life, we are the creator. That is essentially what Adam and Eve did in the
garden.
I
don’t recall where it is from, but I remember once reading C.S. Lewis say
something along these lines: “The whole business of life is learning how to
accept and eventually love reality as God defines it.” He is saying that
maturing in faith is a matter of learning how to conform our ways to God’s ways
and our thoughts to God’s thoughts.
AJ:
The subtitle on the book is “Breaking the Idol of Certainty.” Could you talk
about how both Christians in general and church leaders can help break this
idol? An idol doesn’t shatter after one strike; you have to slowly chip away at
it. Are there ways to do this in worship itself? Are there individual and
communal practices that can help with this?
GB: I’ll make two
points in response to this question. First, I believe we desperately need to
get rid of the “all or nothing package deal” model of the faith. When
everything is equally important, it doesn’t leave any room for questioning or
doubting. Only if we have a concentric circle model of faith, with Christ as
the center and as our only source of life can we have an appropriate sense of
what is and is not truly important. Only then can we be free to ask questions
and explore and disagree. If we aren’t getting our life or security from Christ
alone, we will get it from our correct beliefs about Christ. This makes an idol
of our rightness and an idol of our community.
Second,
it is absolutely essential that leaders in our communities model honesty and
vulnerability. Christians still tend to put pastors and other leaders on a
pedestal, pressuring them to exemplify perfect behavior and perfect faith. That
is why so often you have big leaders who fall hard. They never were given space
to deal honestly with their struggles. Everything remained hidden.
To
the degree that our external and internal lives are incongruous, we are sick.
That is what the hypo in hypocrite means, that we are dual. We are whole
only to the degree that there is no incongruity between how we appear and who
we actually are. So, if a community is going to move toward becoming a whole
community—a community of truth—it is essential that the leadership of the
church models and encourages honest speech and open confession. You have to get
rid of the idolatry of appearance, the idolatry of being the “holiness club.”
AJ:
In Benefit of the Doubt you talk about how the church should have an
Israelite faith, should wrestle with God. A lot of times, there are ways
Christian communities can act like “hygienic prisons.” When you have doubts,
people can say, “Take your doubts somewhere else, and deal with them, because
they will infect us.” But then there are communities that are in love with
doubt, they fetishize doubt, life is doubt all the way down. What does
wrestling well and doubting well look like?
GB: So this is a
both/and moment and those are extremes you want to avoid. I worry about some
progressive Evangelicals because they seem to wallow in the doubt. Doubt is a
virtue for them. C.S. Lewis said the purpose of questioning is to move towards
an answer, it is not an end in and of itself. I think that is absolutely right.
Moving
beyond this, we need to make a distinction between doubting from the outside
of a covenantal relationship with Christ and doubting from the inside
of the relationship. The difference depends on whether one is confident enough
to commit to living in relationship with Christ. If a person doubts this, they
doubt from outside the covenant, and in this case I encourage them to take an
honest look at all the reasons people give for believing in Jesus. One
shouldn’t expect to arrive at a point where they can’t possibly doubt that
Jesus is Lord. If the bar is certainty, then it will never be met, because it
is an unreasonable bar. The only question one should be asking as they consider
committing to Christ is this: are the reasons given for believing in Jesus
sufficient to make you confident enough to commit to living in a
covenantal relationship with Christ? That is biblical faith. It doesn’t matter
how certain or uncertain you are, so long as you’re confident enough to commit
to a certain course of actions.
Once
a person has entered into a covenant with Christ, doubting well takes on a
different flavor. Now you’re wrestling with issues from the inside of the
relationship, the way married couples work through issues. That is what Job got
right. As miserable as he got, he kept the conversation lines with God open. So
as you struggle, don’t put your faith walk on hiatus. It’s unfaithful to bail
on the marriage every time you confront a problem. Work out the problems from
the inside of the relationship, and as in our earthly marriages, you’ll often
find the commitment to remain faithful, despite the problems, is what deepens
and enriches your relationship with God.
I
don’t want this to be misunderstood, but faith is really a matter of living as
if what you believe is true. To be faithful to Christ means I will continue
to live and pray and love enemies as if Jesus was Lord, because I truly
believe he is Lord, even if in a partly dark time I’m mad at him and my heart
can’t feel it and my head can’t clearly see it. That is the essence of a
biblical faith. It is not the absence of doubt; it involves living a certain
way in the midst of doubt.
If
necessary – and I have done this several times in my life – I go back to the
beginning and reexamine the considerations that led me to decide to place my
faith in Christ as Lord in the first place. I have invariably found that this
sort of reexamination not only makes me again confident enough to commit my
life, but it has, over the long haul, increased my confidence.
AJ:
In regards to Job “keeping the conversation lines open,” it is interesting to
think that Job is modeling what prayer in the midst of doubt looks like. Yes he
is conversing with his friends, but his words are shot through with doubt, shot
through with anger and confusion directed at God. This conversation begins with
silence, but the silence doesn’t mean the end of the conversation.
GB: Yes, eventually Job
opens his mouth and that is when his friends get freaked out. I love the fact
that when God shows up and with the end of his monologue, he says to Eliphaz,
“I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the
truth about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7, NIV). Now the Hebrew
word koon means “to align” with some standard. So what is the standard
Job’s speech aligned with? It can’t refer to the way God actually is, because
God rebuked Job for what he said and Job repented for what he said. Job
confesses: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful
for me to know” (Job 42:3, NIV). If you look at what Job actually said
about God, it is pretty nasty stuff. At one point he basically calls him Satan
– his “adversary.”
Yet,
Job still ends up vindicating God before the heavenly counsel in light of the
wager in the beginning. He did this because he spoke honestly. That is
beautiful and God praised him for that. He kept the lines of honest
communication open.
By
contrast, Job’s friends perfectly illustrate the dynamic of what is happening
today. In Job 6, Job tells his friends how they are speaking out of their fear.
His friends wanted a self-assuring theology, one that assured them that what
happened to Job would not happen to them. So they had to convince themselves
that Job deserved what he got. They have to indict Job in order to protect
themselves. This is yet another fallout of a faith based on idolatrous
certainty. People purchase their assurance at the expense of others. To his
credit, Job says to hell with your self-serving certainty about your theology,
I’m going to talk about what is real. And God applauded.
Story of Israel Jesus’ Story as Story of Israel Fulfilled Church’s Story as Israel/Jesus’
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