Benefit of the Doubt: An Interview with Greg Boyd

Posted Nov 2013 by Adam Joyce

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.