Surprised by Doubt: How Disillusionment can Invite us to Deeper Faith
This is a really good book. It has several problems, which I’ll discuss last, but if you just skim book reviews, I want to make my point early on: this is indeed a good book and can be used effectively with those wrestling with doubt.
As you might guess, the title is a take-off on C. S. Lewis’s Surprised byJoy. The similarities rise to more than just the title. The authors quote Lewis frequently as they make their case for genuine Christianity. Their writing style is warm and not overly academic—also like Lewis’s. On balance the book is an invitation to carefully rethink the issues that have provoked many moderns toward skepticism, or even outright rejection, of the claims of the Christian faith.
One thing that adds to their credibility is that the authors themselves have struggled with doubts about their own faith. Another is that they honor questions and doubt without dismissing or belittling the skeptic. Instead, they engage with the doubts. Another is their humility: they freely admit they don’t have answers for all of the questions. Carson and Chatraw make a case for mystery—that unanswerable mystery should be expected when investigating a sovereign God.
I’m thankful that they are going after base hits, not home runs—they admit repeatedly that they cannot prove the existence of God or the claims of the faith. Instead they are building a “wager” that the Christian explanation of reality is far more likely than alternative explanations.
The principal metaphor they employ for the Christian faith is that of a great house with many rooms, each representing a different flavor of historic, orthodox Christianity. Chatraw and Carson divide the book into three sections: The Attic, Outside the House, and The Main Floor. The rooms on the main floor all share the same load-bearing walls. The load-bearing walls represent the unifying commonality of the essentials of the orthodox faith. In other words, while each room might differ on peripheral issues, if you’re on the main floor, you are a legitimate, true Christian.
In Part 1, the first five chapters of the book, Chatraw and Carson flesh out the metaphor, saying that some people have moved up to the attic and erected new walls consisting of peripheral issues that the attic dwellers insist are load-bearing. These individuals tend to say, “if you don’t have the same walls I do, you’re not really a Christian.” Like most attics, the ceiling is not high, and these Christians have adopted a stooped posture, unable to stand up straight. That stooped posture skews how they see others and how they read the Bible.
The authors provide several examples of attic dwellers. Evangelicalism on the left, with its nouveau catechisms of social justice and sexual/gender doctrines gets a mention. Fundamentalism on the right, with its dogma specifying the approved positions on culture (politics and political parties, forms of entertainment, use of alcohol and tobacco) or theology (eschatology, position on modern Israel, the ordinances, church governance), occupies a large part of the authors’ concerns. Some churches and fellowships (right and left) become vitriolic in their insistence that all true believers must share their particular distinctives.
The authors’ chief concern in the book is for believers who grew up in an “attic church” and have reached a point of disillusionment in which they are ready to jettison the faith because they see these questionable and peripheral issues being confidently elevated as though they are essentials alongside the actual Gospel.
In Part 2, chapters six through nine, Chatraw and Carson encourage the reader to examine closely the ground outside the house before jumping out of the Attic window (the metaphor is escape, not suicide). Four alternate philosophies are explored: the New Atheism, Optimistic Skepticism, Open Spirituality, and Mythic Truth. Chatraw and Carson drive the presumptions attached to each of these secular philosophies to their logical conclusions, demonstrating that the ground outside the house is not quite as inviting as it might first appear. Jumping out the Attic window simply trades one set of problems for an even worse set.
In Part 3, chapters ten through sixteen, Chatraw and Carson invite the reader to come down to the main floor and have a look around. “Now, as we turn to explore the main floor of the Christian house, we are asking a different question: Does Christianity offer a better foundation, better explanatory power, and a better way to live than the [outside] spaces we explored in part 2” [93]? They employ three perspectives: C. S. Lewis’s device of “Looking at” and “Looking Through,” to which they add “Stepping In.”
“Looking at” is a serious exploration of the historical evidences of the resurrection in chapter ten. What explanation provides the best understanding of the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead: Fraud? Hallucinations? Chatraw and Carson provide multiple reasons why the claims of Jesus’ resurrection are best explained by His actual, historic, physical resurrection.
Next, in chapter eleven, the reader is asked to look at the Person in the Center—Jesus Himself. Are the four gospels credible? Did they misrepresent Jesus? What kind of man was He? The authors point out that the gospels present Jesus as one who challenged and scandalized the orthodoxies of His day, rather than one whose ministry was calculated to win wide approval.
In chapter twelve, we are invited to examine the load-bearing walls that are absolutely essential to the integrity of the house over all. “This brings us to the load-bearing walls of the Christian faith. Attic Christianity mistakenly makes the house appear as though most of its walls are load-bearing or at least integrally attached to the load-bearing walls” [113]. The authors’ answer is to step back and look at the historic creeds which have stood the test of time over the centuries, such as the Apostles’ Creed. The Apostles’ Creed has been accepted by the Church at large as a legitimate statement of faith for at least fifteen hundred years by believers in different faith streams of Christianity. It provides common ground for the Christian faith.
Moving to the motif of “looking through,” in chapter thirteen the authors explore Pascal’s critique of Descartes’ skeptical approach to knowledge. In Pascal’s view, the human appreciation of and desire for transcendent truth, beauty, and goodness is itself an argument for God. Pascal’s “wager” is to “take all of the aspects of human behavior into account, and ask this question: Where might true joy be found” [131]?
Chapter fourteen suggests that justice, human dignity, beauty, and meaning are all markers “gesturing toward a profound and mysterious meaning” [140]. In the authors’ words, “Christianity provides a window that makes sense of the world, including human nature and our deepest aspirations” [134]
The third perspective, “Stepping in,” occupies chapters fifteen and sixteen. Chatraw and Carson suggest that the skeptic “try” Christianity. “If you’d like to believe in Christianity, but don’t think you can, you might be going about things the wrong way. It could be that you have been trying to control contingencies in order to achieve a certain kind of certainty, your own two-plus-two approach to the God question” [147]. They provide three reasons for staying on the “main floor” rather than bolting through the window:
There are good reasons to take the core claims of Christianity seriously [149];
What other options do you have [149]?
Since we can’t opt out of formative practices altogether, the question becomes which practices best form us for flourishing [151].
The chapter ends with this hopeful sentence: “But the collective witness of his people and the Scriptures is that those who humbly continue to seek God will eventually find him” [153]. Chapter sixteen suggests the spiritual practices the seeking skeptic should engage in: participate in the sacred by observing birth, death, and marriage; commit to a room on the main floor of the house that is serious about worship; slow down and pray; meditate on Scripture; slow down to appreciate the beauty of creation; and continue to look both at and along the faith.
Though I believe Surprised by Doubt is a helpful book to give someone who is considering “deconverting” from the faith because of disillusionment, I do have several concerns. For one, the authors don’t consider the matter of recent creation to be one of the load-bearing walls of the faith. It is presented as a (losing) argument with science that contributes to the disillusionment of doubting believers. But the doctrine of creation refuses to play nice. Once you give ground on recent creation by accepting some combination of theistic evolution or old-earth theories, you’ve started pulling on a thread integrally connected to nearly every major doctrine of Scripture. Besides, “science” is not speaking with a unified voice on evolution and long ages: genuine empirical science is calling into question major assumptions made by evolutionists. “Received truth” like James Hutton’s principle of uniformitarianism, the bedrock of evolutionary geology, is being seriously challenged (even by secular geologists). Andrew Snelling’s magisterial work Earth's Catastrophic Past Geology, Creation and the Flood (two volumes) documents the modern scientific discoveries that dispute doctrinaire evolutionism. Is the doctrine of recent creation a load-bearing wall of the Gospel? Perhaps not, but the loss of the doctrine throws a great deal of historic orthodoxy into difficulty. Just like the authors were courageous to drive the four secular philosophies to their logical conclusions, it might be wise for them to do the same thing if one jettisons recent creation: the resulting theological problems are daunting.
Like C. S. Lewis, Chatraw and Carson also admit to the possibility of universalism, as though the doctrine of eternal judgment is a non-load-bearing wall. Despite the authors’ loyalty to historic orthodoxy, apparently that’s a historic doctrine they have chosen to overlook.
My final concern has to do with their closing advice—engage in spiritual disciplines. For readers who are genuinely regenerated but are struggling with doubts, that is precisely the right advice. Their re-immersion into spiritual disciplines will eventually have its intended effect. But for readers who are disillusioned because they’ve never truly been regenerated (in other words, to whom 1 John 2:19 applies), Chatraw’s and Carson’s advice sounds like preparationism—a highly disputed practice in orthodox circles. In their own words: “Without claiming a mechanistic and universal demonstration of the truth of Christianity through these practices, in this chapter we’ve been inviting you to wager on Christianity by developing habits that allow you to step into its light. If there is a God and Christianity is true, these practices are some of the means of experiencing his grace” [160].
These problems aside, I think this book can be greatly used of God for people who are wrestling with doubts. The authors’ gentle tone and style, the focus on the essentials, the easily understood metaphor, and the excellent reasoning combine to make this a useful book. Four stars, highly recommended.
