Doubt

“When Bunyan personified despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress, he depicted it as a giant who battered his prisoners mercilessly. After the first round of beatings, Giant Despair visits his captives… and finds them ‘still alive, though barely alive at that. They could do little but breathe.’” - Desiring God

“It’s one thing to describe doubting, questioning and, ultimately, shifting faith commitments as ‘deconstruction.’ It’s another to prescribe it as the means of coming to terms with Christianity’s unpopular truth claims or the baggage of a Christian upbringing.” - Breakpoint

“If a Christian told me he had never dealt with doubt, I wouldn’t believe him. Or at least I would respectfully conclude he was in denial, or lacked self-awareness, or wasn’t a serious-thinking person.” - Desiring God

“Every faith deconstruction story is about a person who has unique experiences. While the Bible doesn’t use the word, it does offer significant insights into faith deconstruction.” - TGC

“One natural response is to shut down challenging questions for fear faith’s foundations will crack. But forbidding questions is unhealthier than wrestling with honest doubts.” - TGC

“intellectual solutions weren’t what Lewis needed in those moments. His arguments hadn’t lost their rationality; they’d lost their emotional weight. In the face of his wife’s death, they now felt hollow.” - TGC

“The study concludes that ‘most in the general population, and Christians in particular, see doubt as a phase to move through, and arriving at certainty is the preferable end goal.’” - CPost

“When someone in a relationship with us does something inexplicable, then what we think about that action depends pretty much entirely on how healthy the relationship is. If we trust him, we assume there’s a good explanation. If we don’t, we don’t.” - Olinger

“One of the main reasons that Christians wrestle with doubts these days is that they bump into something that doesn’t seem to make sense.” - Olinger

“I’ve written before about an experience I had while in seminary, when I doubted the Biggest Thing Ever—whether there’s a God, and whether any of this is true. Doubt is an important part of growing up.” - Olinger