After “After Doubt”

Jesus had just risen from the grave. In just one of the bodily appearances Jesus made to the disciples that are recorded in the New Testament, he meets his disciples at a mountain (or “hill”) where “Jesus had told them to go” (Matt. 28:16).

The disciples will now ascend to behold the very Christ who would himself ascend to the right hand of the Father in heaven. On this hillside, the disciples worship their beloved Rabbi, who had conquered death by his own death.

Still, this little mountaintop worship gathering was grittier than one might assume. Matthew ominously comments: “but some doubted” (Matt 28:17). Matthew is the only Gospel writer to detail this “doubt” of some disciples who’d come to worship the resurrected Jesus.

In the years since I published “After Doubt”—my humble attempt at composing a pastoral and spiritual theology for those walking through the experiences of doubt and deconstruction—I’ve been afforded the opportunity to walk alongside countless individuals who are experiencing what the book intimately details.

Pondering and reflecting on the role doubt and deconstruction might play in our lives with Christ, more and more I’ve become convinced that we’ve vastly under-appreciated the transformative power these experiences can have in our lives. In other words, what too many have assumed to be the mark of apostasy may actually be a pathway toward Christlikeness and gospel faithfulness.

This isn’t some way of encouraging anyone to doubt or deconstruct their faith. In fact, I hope my reader never has to endure it. Instead, this is my way of saying that we can be better at walking alongside those who experience these realities in their everyday discipleship.

Because Jesus cares so well for the doubter. 

And he made room for them. Undoubtedly, part of discipleship to Jesus is choosing to follow faithfully even when our faith isn’t perfectly intact or clear. Part of following Jesus entails entrusting our faith to Jesus even when we can’t tell up from down or don’t know how to believe. Matthew’s willingness to reveal to us that some of these faithful disciples doubted is profoundly transformative for our moment. 

First, the doubt of these disciples speaks, I believe, to the authenticity of the New Testament. One, I suppose, could argue that the New Testament serves as little more than propaganda—writings by those in religious power as a means of keeping religious power. The only problem with arguments like these is that if it were true that these writings were, indeed, written by the powerful as a way to protect their own power, then they did themselves no favors by portraying themselves as foolish, incompetent and, in this case, doubtful.

One of my students pointed out to me after class this week that she has been struck over and over at how honest the biblical authors are about their own crises of faith. A point, she confessed, that made her take the truthfulness and authenticity of these writings more seriously. How could we call these propaganda writings if Matthew appears so willing to let us in on the humiliating secret that those tasked with believing in Jesus are the first ones who struggled to do so? 

Propaganda never includes self-critique. Little authenticates one’s faith more than actually a faithful journey through the struggle. I can usually tell if someone is serious about their life with God when they embody a willingness to give details to the struggles that keep them up at night and occupy their days. Pain and toil have a way of validating one’s deeply held commitments. This is always how you can tell a true story: It zooms into the nitty gritty. The sign of an authentic faith is that it is causing our lives great disturbance and difficulty. This is what love often is: being willing to be displaced by one’s commitments. Struggle, difficulty and, yes, I would say, “doubt,” can often be a sign of the presence of faith rather than its absence. Again, I’m not seeking to turn doubt into a virtue. Rather, I’m seeking to say that doubt can very well be a sign of deep faith.

Secondly, one can wade through doubt even as they are remaining faithful to what Jesus has told them to do. That is, obedience and doubt can often go hand-in-hand. Weeks earlier during Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane, he had instructed his disciples to meet him in Galilee up North after his resurrection.¹ They have come to this mountain precisely because they were told to do so. In short, obedience sets up the story of doubt. In other words, the very ones who obeyed the words of Jesus would still have to wrestle with their own doubts. 

The language backs this up. It’s critical to note that the word for “doubt” that Matthew chooses to use is the Greek word “distazo”—not the normal word used for “doubt” in the New Testament.² It is a word only used twice. Both in Matthew. Here. And as Jesus calls Peter to walk on the water to himself. Peter obeys, only to focus on the wind and the waves. Jesus then speaks to him, “You of little faith…why did you doubt?” (Matt 14:31, emphasis added). This, then, is not the “doubt” of disbelief or unbelief. That would be another word. Instead, this is the doubt of not being able to put all the pieces together of what one is seeing. As one commentator has wisely written, this is the kind of doubt that says, “It’s too good to be true,” or “Pinch me, I’m dreaming.”³

In both instances that Matthew uses distazo, the experience of “doubt” is immediately preceded by an act of “obedience.” There is a point to this. Matthew’s two stories undermine any line of thinking in ourselves which says: My doubt must be the result of my disobedience. Or, that people only walk through doubt because they are sinning. In fact, this has become one of the most virulent lines of attack by those who have made a cottage industry of bashing and belittling God’s sheep who are walking the crucible of doubt or deconstruction. This line of thinking says that they are probably just doing so because they merely want to sleep around, smoke weed or get their Sunday mornings back. These can undeniably be realities for some. But this is not the case for all. When Matthew is given the mic, it is clear that there is an experience of doubt grounded in scripture, which arises precisely among those who are being faithful to Jesus.

Third, and finally, the doubt that these disciples are experiencing is allegedly not done away with because of their experience of seeing the resurrected Jesus. Incidentally, the disciples had already seen Jesus resurrected before—twice, in fact. To say nothing of having spent three years walking with him as he performed undeniable and wondrous miracles. Doubt, then, is not to be seen as the absence of experience. They had experience. A ton of it, in fact. 

In my own Pentecostal and charismatic tradition, there can often be a wrong-headed assumption that the only thing we need to get for those struggling with doubt is more experiences of the supernatural or the miraculous—as though we could control these things at the waving of the hand. No. Experience is not a vaccine for doubt. Neither is the supernatural or the miraculous. I believe in the supernatural. I’ve experienced it! But long gone are the days when I thought that these experiences could help us side-step our disillusionment. Our text shows this. We must not forget even the story of Judas Iscariot who himself had three years of faithful witness of the life of Christ and still ends his journey in disbelief and self-destruction. One can have profound experiences and yet still walk through deep existential longing and doubt. 

In the end, those three words “but some doubted” have, I believe, given the church profound reason to give pause to any way of thinking that says all doubt is a vice.

A few months ago, my colleague and podcast cohost Dr. Nijay Gupta vulnerably shared a story with me about how his daughter had endured years of chemotherapy when she had cancer as a child. Reflecting on this painful season, Gupta confessed that chemo had both destroyed his daughter’s body and, paradoxically, saved her life. Of course, chemo could kill a person. And it very well may—if it is never stopped being given. Gupta suggested, I believe brilliantly, that this may be one way to consider the transformative power that doubt can have in our lives. Indeed, doubt can kill one’s faith. But, it very well may save it too. The difference is how it is used.

Matthew’s account concludes with Jesus giving these very disciples—including the ones who “doubted”—the Great Commission. They were then commanded by Jesus, after this mountaintop worship experience, to go into the world and share the story of Jesus and his commandments to the world. The connection must not be missed. For Jesus, these commandments to go and bear Jesus to the world were given to the very ones who had been described as doubting. When I talk on these matters, I have grown used to ending with a statement:

We need to stop seeing the doubter as a problem. What if we started seeing them as our future missionaries? 

Thank our good Lord that he did.

References

1 See Matt 26:32, 28:10, and Mark 16:7
2 The more commonly used Greek word for “doubt” in the New Testament is “diakrino.” Though lexically connected, they are significantly different concepts.
3 I like this wording—and borrow it—from a quiet blog entry by Tim Chaffey titled, “But Some Doubted: Studying an Intriguing Response to the Resurrection of Jesus.” Read it, seriously! It’s a fabulous little article and one that’s shaped some of my thinking here.

This article by Swoboda was originally featured on The Low-Level Theologian sub-stack on March 14, 2024. It has been edited for length and style and is reprinted with permission.

A.J. Swoboda

A.J. Swoboda is the associate professor of Bible and theology at Bushnell University in Eugene, Oregon, and lead pastor of Faith Center.