Home > Work > God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt
1 " Interestingly, God's remedy for Elijah's depression was not a refresher course in theology but food and sleep... Before God spoke to him at all, Elijah was fed twice and given a good chance to sleep. Only then, and very gently, did God confront him with his error. This is always God's way. Having made us as human beings, He respects our humanness and treats us with integrity. That is, He treats us true to the truth of who we are. It is human beings and not God who have made spirituality impractical. "
― Os Guinness , God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of Doubt
2 " The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless. "
3 " Sometimes when I listen to people who say they have lost their faith, I am far less surprised than they expect. If their view of God is what they say, then it is only surprising that they did not reject it much earlier.Other people have a concept of God so fundamentally false that it would be better for them to doubt than to remain devout. The more devout they are, the uglier their faith will become since it is based on a lie. Doubt in such a case is not only highly understandable, it is even a mark of spiritual and intellectual sensitivity to error, for their picture is not of God but an idol. "
4 " Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed. "
5 " May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to. —C. S. Lewis "
6 " Part of the glory of the Christian faith is that at its heart is a God who is a person. “He who is,” the father of Jesus Christ and our father, is infinite, but he is also personal. The Christian faith therefore places a premium on the absolute truthfulness and trustworthiness of God, so understanding doubt is extremely important to a Christian. "
7 " The Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it is true. "
8 " He said for a man really to believe is like a lion going after its prey. His nose and eyes and ears pick up the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power in his body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down the lion envelops it in his arms (Africans refer to the front legs of an animal as its arms), pulls it to himself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a man believes. This is what faith is. "
9 " There is nothing wrong with raising questions, pursuing possible answers, and searching for evidence. All these are processes of thought that stop short of making judgments. The problem is not that the judgments of faith are themselves improper, let alone blasphemous, for judgments are part and parcel of the thinking process that God has given us. The problem in this situation is not that we make judgments on God but that we make judgments at all when we have insufficient grounds on which to do so. Once again it is not the result of too much thinking but of the wrong sort of thinking. "
10 " What is the difference between God disguising himself and deceiving us? That is where the principle of suspended judgment operates. Face to face with mystery, and especially the mystery of evil, the faith that understands why it has come to trust must trust where it has not come to understand. Faith does not know why in terms of the immediate, but it knows why it trusts God who knows why in terms of the ultimate. "
11 " What God is doing may be mystery, but who God is is not. So faith can remain itself and retain its integrity by suspending judgment. Jesus underwrites such faith when he promises, “I am the light of the world. No follower of mine shall wander in the dark.”9 He does not say we will never walk in the dark, but that we do not wander in the dark or have a way of life at home in darkness. To anyone not knowing the anguish of such a situation, the distinction may sound trivial—the darkness appears as dark and the dilemma as agonizing. But neither is ultimate, for the outcome lies with God. "
12 " Not only do Christians believe, they are those who “think in believing and believe in thinking,” as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith’s shoulder. "
13 " Outrage is appropriate in response to genuine wrong, tears in response to grief, shock in response to unexpected disaster. We mustn’t force ourselves to thank God for these things or we will be harder on ourselves and softer on evil than God is. It is not that even Christians need not give thanks for these things, but that Christians especially should not give thanks for them. We should always be as human as God made us. "
14 " The genius of the Reformation lay in the fact that human beings were made free under God. Justification “by faith alone” cut away the bureaucratic jungle of human authorities and subservience. But where this liberty was not balanced by responsibility, the Reformation made human beings so free under God that it was only a short step to their being free from God. We might say that the despair of existentialism is simply the logic of atheism, but this is true only insofar as atheism itself is the logic of ungrateful Protestantism. "
15 " the truth is this: We always have sure and sufficient reasons for knowing why we can trust God, but do not always know what God is doing and why. "
