Dark Prophet Status: Reclaiming Doubt

Last updated on: December 31, 2012 at 9:51 am by Andre E. Johnson

Dark Prophet Status: Reclaiming Doubt 2012-12-31T09:51:00-05:00 Andre E. Johnson

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by Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

R3 Contributor

I recently began looking for theological works on doubt. To my surprise, I found very few. In fact, I only found one (1) book, written by Alister McGrath. It seems as though this book is written from a systematic perspective. Sure, there are other books written by Evangelical pastors that pursue the argument in favor of certainty, but I actually think this is the wrong approach. Certainty has its limits. Once you begin at point A, you are then searching for point B, and doing so out of an impulse for certainty. What if belief and the question of faith moved us beyond certainty? Away from the idolatry of a certain, normative God toward a more robust system of believing, where questions compelled us to live more radically into the followings of Jesus, for example. What if?!

I want to argue for moments where we reclaim doubt. I call this the Dark Prophet. We don’t so much look to doubt for learning how to negotiate our impulse to believe or even our moral impulses. What if doubt helped us find a new way into Christianity, or maybe we arrive at something that is beyond Christianity? Certainly, we will arrive at a place beyond the Christendom of the 21st century. Might we revolutionize what is almost the 3rd millenuim of Christianity with doubt? After all, it is Pete Rollins whose tagline on his website reads: to believe is human; to doubt, divine. This is precisely where I want to head–into the point of light that doubt is and becomes for those of us who are either disenfranchised with the Church that leaves no room for questions, or for those of us who simply have more questions than answers.

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