Episode 42: David Dark - Doubt as a Holy Task
In this episode of Faith for Normal People, Pete talks to David Dark about the necessity of doubt in the life of faith and the human experience. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What is doubt?
Is the inability to embrace doubt masking something different?
What is good or bad faith?
In what ways is faith generalized in order to be made into a weapon against others?
How are doubt and curiosity related?
How can doubt allow us to communicate better with each other?
Is the Bible a help or a hindrance in embracing doubt?
Is doubt incompatible with faith?
Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
Doubt is having a nervous system and is being a human being. — @DavidDark@theb4np
The villainizing or the demonizing of doubt is just such a mean mind job used to control people. — @DavidDark@theb4np
Hooray for doubt. Hooray for not knowing things for sure. — @DavidDark@theb4np
When somebody speaks of their faith, I want to say: Faith in what? — @DavidDark@theb4np
Good faith is transparency, trust, being honest about what we can't possibly guarantee, what we can't possibly know. Hooray for faith if we're talking about people treating other people like human beings—with respect. — @DavidDark@theb4np
There is a rising fascism of unexamined faith. And faith is a generalization that is supposed to name some kind of virtue that we're all supposed to defer to. — @DavidDark@theb4np
Christianity—when it isn't fascism—is a moral movement, a peasant philosopher movement. — @DavidDark@theb4np
When Christianity means that I get to subject the population to my brutal fantasy concerning God, myself, and others, that's pretty messed up. — @DavidDark@theb4np
A person is a process. — @DavidDark@theb4np
There's a kind of solace, there's a peacefulness to it even, knowing that I can't wrap my head around all this and I shouldn't pretend that I can. — @PeteEnns@theb4np
I try to challenge all of the dividers that estrange us from ourselves and others. — @DavidDark@theb4np
I now view [the phrase] “biblical worldview” as a rhetorical weapon that morally serious people will not take up. — @DavidDark@theb4np
Don't say “the Bible says.” Because the Bible can't “say” any more than Queen's Greatest Hits Volume 2 can say. It's a collection. — @DavidDark@theb4np
I'm not saying the Bible is a tarot deck or a crystal ball or something like that. But we see what we're looking for, and we need to be really careful about what we're looking for. — @DavidDark@theb4np
Have compassion on yourself. Be a body in a body. There's nothing wrong with being a body. — @DavidDark@theb4np
To love a person is to love a process. And to love a self is to love a process. — @DavidDark@theb4np
Whatever lore helps you love yourself and others more is lore enough. — @DavidDark@theb4np
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: July class “Go to Hell? Alternatives to Eternal Damnation” taught by Jaime Clark-Soles
Books:
1 & 2 Samuel for Normal People by Aaron Higashi
The Sacredness of Questioning Everythingby David Dark
Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religiousby David Dark
We Become What We Normalizeby David Dark
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: You're listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: Well, folks, we're here to remind you that this is the last call to pay what you can for our July class, Go to Hell? Alternatives to Eternal Damnation, taught by the brilliant Jamie Clark Soles, and it's happening live on July 25th from 8 to 9:30p.m. Eastern time.
Jared: When you sign up, you'll get access to the live one night class. Plus a live Q&A session, a link to the recording afterward, and downloadable class slides. And as always, the Pay What You Can window closes when the class ends, then it'll cost $25 for the recording.
Pete: Members of our online community, the Society of Normal People, get access to this class and all our other classes for just $12 a month. To sign up, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/eternaldamnation.
Jared: And lastly, for those of you who want extra credit, we've resurrected our Hall Pass, which gets you access to all three courses in the 2024 Summer School Series. The June class, Restoring All Things, the July class, Go to Hell, and the August class, Banned Books: the Apocrypha Edition, plus a fun little bonus gift for your support.
So if you want to look into the Hall Pass, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/summer24. That’s thebiblefornormalpeople.com/summer24.
Pete: Folks, we're here to tell you about the newest book in our commentary series, 1 & 2 Samuel for Normal People. It's authored by the brilliant and witty nerd in residence, Aaron Higashi.
Jared: 1 & 2 Samuel is home to one of the most beloved stories in the Bible, David defeating Goliath. But what do we do with the rest of 1 & 2 Samuel, the stories that didn't make it to Sunday school?
Pete: Yeah, and what do we make of the man at the center of them? David, the one after God's own heart. If you've cringed while David's character is celebrated from the pulpit, questioned the example of a king who failed so miserably as a father, or wondered at the heart of a God reflected in a man such as this, this book is for you.
Jared: The book officially comes out Tuesday, July 23rd, but you can actually start reading it right now by going to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/Samuel.
Pete: Today on Faith for Normal People, it's just me, Pete, talking about doubt as a holy task with David Dark. And David is Associate Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University. He's written a bunch of books, including The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious, and his most recent book, We Become What We Normalize.
And don't forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for quiet time when Jared will jump back in and we'll reflect on the conversation and our own faith journeys. So hope you enjoy this episode with David Dark.
[teaser clip of David speaking plays over music]
David: “Doubt is necessary in our relations with one another. The holy work of doubt is knowing that a person is a process. So I think we get to bring doubt to our characterizations of people, to the perceived opponent, enemy, other. And there's something lovely about knowing that you can never know for sure where a person is at and what they're going to be. Being prepared to be surprised.”
[Ad break]
Pete: David, welcome to our podcast.
David: Thank you. I'm awfully glad to be here.
Pete: It's a long time in coming. We've wanted to do this for quite a while and we finally have the chance. So it's, it's, it's our pleasure too. So, you know, let's get into a topic that you know a little bit about because you've written about it, even though it's been a few years, I think, since some of this published and you know, you've done a lot of things since then.
You have a new book that just came out, which looks fantastic. But let's focus on doubt and it's, that's like the issue that keeps giving David, I don't know if you've experienced that talking with people, but I get this all the time, like, you know, I'm doubting, is it okay, is it not okay? It's being tied to deconstruction, which has become part of the Christian vocabulary in recent years, and it's sort of a big deal. So let me just ask you the question. What is doubt?
David: [chuckles] Okay. I think doubt is having a nervous system and is being a human being. I don't know what's on the other side of the door, you know, if there's not a window, there's the unknown.
And anybody in a body knows a degree of insecurity and uncertainty. And has some trouble distinguishing between what's real and not real. So yeah, doubt’s just part of being a human being. I think where many with, I don't want to say white evangelicals, get right into it, but I think sometimes confidence bluffs, suppressed fear gets mistaken for strength and character, like an active suppression of the feeling function is mistaken for integrity or power. And yeah, the villainizing of doubt or the demonizing of doubt is just such a mean mind job sort of used to control people. And I think doubt’s just lovely. Yeah, hooray for doubt, hooray for not knowing things for sure. And I even think of, lately I tie that saying of Jesus about let your yes be yes and your no be no and anything extra is of the evil one.
I tie that to this amazing poem by William Stafford called A Ritual to Read to Each Other. In that poem, Stafford throws in lines like the signals we give, yes or no, or maybe, should be clear, the darkness around us is deep. So when I say, as far as I can tell, I'll see you at the bowling alley tonight, or as far as I know, I'll be at the, uh, picnic. Those are lovely, pre-modern, ancient qualifiers that have been with the species for quite a while, because we've never been able to truly guarantee anything, even something and this feels kind of fundamentalistish for me, but I have a grandmother who if I said I'll see you tomorrow. She'd say if the Lord wills, right?
You'll see me tomorrow. And that, that bothered me for the longest time. But I think it's just a great way to live because we don't know what's coming and that's all right.
Pete: Yeah, it may not be the lord actually willing.
David: That's right.
Pete: …one thing or the other but it's more of a way of expressing I guess the inevitability of uncertitude.
David: Yes.
Pete: Yeah. I like what you said before, David, at least it resonated with me, this issue of confidence and, you know, I mean, we both are out there talking about these things and talking with people and there is a lot of pushback from those who have really an unwavering, I'm going to say intellectual confidence, in what they believe. And you're suggesting, I think you are, and I think I agree with this, that that's masking something.
David: Yes.
Pete: You said fear maybe or something.
David: Yes, I will say we feel before we think. Whenever I say I think, there's a bluff going on because I felt before I thought. Feelings are always there. And so to even say I think is to bluff a little bit, is to strike a kind of pose. We feel and then we formulate some thoughts and then maybe those thoughts become opinions.
And then we perhaps stake out a position based on our opinion, but we can go all the way back in view of incoming data and say, Oh, you know, maybe I was wrong about that. Let me go back to just being something that I feel rather than something that I think. Yes, it is masking, but when we're relaxed, we can talk a whole lot about how we feel and we can admit that we truly don't know. We suspect things, but we truly don't know so much and it was helpful to me when it was pointed out to me that agnostic means not knowing. It doesn't mean that you choose not to believe, it doesn't mean that you refuse to believe—it's just I truly don't know.
And I think that, I don't know what the history would be of people beginning to think that they have to pretend to believe things or pretend to know things in order to be whole or be saved or trustworthy. But I think there's an ancient world there where we're a lot more careful in the way we, uh, assert things.
Pete: We almost have this facade of intellectual certitude that we've constructed around us. Maybe, in part for good reason. We have figured out a lot of stuff, you know, about the universe. There's something to it, but in my opinion, that sort of like scientific certitude has seeped its way into specifically Christianity, and I'm not going to talk about all the other religions, but especially in the West, right, where you can know things certainly, like you can know that there is probably a black hole out there, you can't see, but you can see the effects of it, you know that it's there.
And you have the same kind of mentality towards the creator of the multiverse, you know, and those things don't compute for me very well, you know, was it, I forgot who said this, but you know, we're about the emotions. We’re feeling creatures who think, we're not thinking creatures who happen to feel. And so when people say, and I hear this all the time, “You know, don't let your emotions get involved, just think rationally” and, you know, is there really such a thing? You know, so maybe doubt is normal.
David: Yes. Inevitable. Absolutely is.
Pete: Again, another dumb question, but what's faith? I mean, how would you define faith?
David: Faith again, I, I do this thing with religion. You know, when somebody speaks of their faith, I want to say faith in what? And so when a politician or an elected official says that they're a strong man or woman of faith, that's absolutely fine. But faith in what? And if they aren't prepared to answer that question, as very often they're not, we're in the space of manipulation, in the space of someone trying to inspire trust or confidence while being sometimes hostile to questions.
So just as there is no generalized religion, there is no faith in general. So I'm always going to ask for the referent. Faith in what? Faith in myself. Faith in my family. Faith in the power of story or whatever that might be. But, generalized faith, a little like generalized politics, and generalized media, these are three abstractions that in the English language anyway, seem to do a whole lot of damage.
If we speak of politics as this thing that one can step in and out of magically, like, well, I retired, so I'm no longer in politics. Well, wherever two or more are gathered, politics, good politics, bad politics. But what kind? So with faith, I want to do the same thing. Bad faith. Good faith. And good faith is transparency, trust, being honest about what we can't possibly guarantee, what we can't possibly know, but hooray for faith, if we're talking about people treating other people like human beings, with respect.
There was a Doctor Who episode recently in which the doctor, he's a Time Lord. I should say they're a Time Lord. There was a female doctor regeneration not too long ago. But in a very recent Doctor Who episode, the doctor getting really frustrated with this kind of war torn fundamentalist war happening on a planet said something like, “Ah, faith, the word you use where you don't want to think anymore.”
So that word faith, “well, it's my faith, that's why I'm doing this” can be a way of shutting down thought and critical thinking. So we have a weaponized conception of faith out there that very often is deployed to baptize the abusive behavior of what I will call the white supremacist terror movement that is the existential threat to democracy in the United States of America, but also throughout Europe.
There is a rising fascism of unexamined faith. And faith is a generalization that is supposed to name some kind of virtue that we're all supposed to defer to. It's worrying. I'm an optimistic person because I believe in the power of open ended conversation and people talking things through, but it's a hard time for that abstraction faith because it's being deployed for very abusive ends.
Pete: And even saying, making it a little more concrete by saying, you know, faith in what? Well, I have Christian faith. What does that mean?
David: Yeah, be specific.
Pete: That's not even enough. And it's probably never been enough. There are all these iterations of Christianity throughout time, but especially today. In the context in which we both live, which is the United States of America, we have some real hard questions on the table about just the nature of faith and the implications of that.
David: We do, and a quick one I've been saying a lot lately, Christianity, when it isn't fascism, is a moral movement, a peasant philosopher movement. So, of course, Jesus and the prophets, beloved community, let's have it. But when Christianity names Christian supremacy, or when Christianity means that I get to, uh, subject the population to my brutal fantasy concerning God, myself, and others, that's pretty messed up.
And we need to be protected from it. Yes, freedom of religion. But we also need to be free of other people's religion. Freedom from religion, if you like. Yeah, we're in a bind with this word Christian. And we're even having, to the extent that critical race theory or critical theory itself is viewed as this, uh, kind of punishable offense or this thing that shouldn't be happening in the classroom to even ask, well, wait, how do you define Christian? Unless we think—I refer to the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party as public servant 45 as a way to avoid saying a name that invites an unclean spirit into the conversation—but I want to say very quickly that 45 didn't start the fire, to borrow from the Billy Joel song.
Pete: Yeah, of course not. No, not at all.
David: And so for me, I go back to, um, 2000 or so when then candidate George W. Bush was asked who his leading influence was. This was during the Republican nominee primary. And he said, “that's easy, Christ.” And I thought, oh boy, here we go. And, uh, it would have been nice if someone had said, “now when you say Christ, I assume you're referring to Jesus of Nazareth. If that's the case, how would Jesus of Nazareth affect your position on the death penalty, war, preemptive military strikes, all those things?” But when he said Christ, it was like code for “we're not even going to get into that.”
Christ is why I'm no longer on the sauce, or Christ is why I'm turning my life around. And Christ, in that sense, reduces Jesus to the personal private ghost friend, whose blood means that I am not morally responsible the way other people are. I do think that often that is the shorthand for Christ. But if we want to get into the Sermon on the Mount, the teachings of Jesus, the prophets? Wonderful, that's some good politics there.
But Christ as this minimizing of that witness or absolute cancellation of that moral witness in some sense is as dangerous as, well, I mean, words, I don't want to say are dangerous, but how we deploy words can get really corrupt really quick.
Pete: Well, I'm wondering how, I guess I'm getting at the issue of doubt as a holy task or something sacred. Maybe a dose of doubt would be wonderful.
David: Yeah, doubt is necessary in our relations with one another. I can be in communication with somebody that I feel some enmity toward, or I can be in a communication with somebody that I have known and love for decades.
The holy work of doubt in both instances is knowing that a person is a process and I do not know what they're going to say or how they're going to respond until they do. So I think we get to bring doubt to our characterizations of people. I think we get to bring doubt to the perceived opponent, enemy, other, and there's something lovely about not knowing that—you can never know for sure where a person is at and what they're going to be. Doubt is being sort of prepared and willing to be surprised. Yeah, I'm all about the doubt.
This might be a weird word, but when I see a movie, I may hate the movie. But then I talk to the person who recommended it and even at 54, I can be really upset over a movie somebody wanted me to watch, but then we discuss it, and maybe an hour later, I've gone from thinking, I don't think this movie should exist, to, this movie's amazing, I just needed some time, I needed to have more doubt when it comes to that painting, that essay, that poem, that album. So I think doubt in many ways is what we can bring to each other. Not, not in a crippling shadowy way, but maybe I don't know what I was talking about. Maybe I get to change my mind.
Pete: And that even includes thoughts about God, right? Not just over movies or things like that. I mean, maybe especially about God and the way I see it, I mean, part of, you didn't quite say it this way, but what I'm hearing is um, something that doubt does in the life of faith is, I think it helps introduce elements of maybe curiosity.
David: Oh, sure.
Pete: And of humility, which, you know, people throw that word around, but I think the Apostle Paul talks about humility about as much as anything else that he talks about. It seems to be a pretty important concept. So, you know, maybe that's something, too, that doubt, it just brings us as human beings into the larger conversations of meaning from that position of curiosity and humility rather than “I have the answers in my tightly packed system and my job is to get you to agree with that.”
David: Yeah. To be prepared In conversation over these things to receive the other person's testimony, words, experience as a form of revelation. Or even to cross traditions a little bit, I think Karl Barth said that in the passing of the peace of Christ, if you don't have a difference with the person with whom you're saying peace of Christ be with you and also with you, the peace isn't there. Yeah, because there's no difference. There's no distinction. There's just I think what you think which is not at all a relationship, because difference is the sunshine.
But a slightly differing tradition if we want to think of it that way, what is called the Buddha bow, I've watched Buddhists have at it with each other and then before one of them walks away, they do this little bow where they're kind of looking at one another in the eye as if it's very important that they not leave one another's presence without having a, um, the Buddha in me calls out to the Buddha in you, or the enlightened part of me is one with the enlightened part of you.
So I think that too is the curiosity. I don't know what my mother or my spouse or my daughter will say when I ask them a particular question and I, I get to be curious, I get to listen closely. What William Stringfellow says is that listening is a rare happening among human beings, because often we're only pretending to listen. We're actually preparing what we're going to say when the other person stops. So there's a kind of self emptying kenosis, perhaps, where I have to come to another person somewhat empty, less I just project on them my own fear, suspicion, accusation. Of whatever it is. I imagine they're bringing to the table.
Pete: Yeah. Maybe another element of doubt in addition to things like humility or curiosity could just simply be silence.
David: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Pete: Which I've been reveling in for you and not—I hate it. Yeah. But I'm trying, I'm trying to shut up every once in a while, you know, and just be and be present and sense God's presence without talking because I talk all the time, you know, and, and we get used to our words and, you know, doubt is something that for me, and actually I want to get to this about you as well, but doubt for me is something that has led me to not argue much and to not feel like I have to have the answers because the older I get, I mean, I'm a little older than you. I'm 63 now, but every day I see things that I should rightly have doubt in, even if they're very important to me.
And for me, there's a kind of solace, there's a peacefulness to it even, knowing that I can't wrap my head around all this, and I shouldn't pretend that I can.
David: Yeah, I'm thinking of the Bruce Cobran line, he says, everything's bullshit but the open hand which is this love. And I have truly taken that into some of my conflicts and my feeling attacked by people or feeling belittled by people.
It's like, I've got to hold my hands together like I'm trying to receive water into my palms in order to be present, in order to not imagine that I have to, uh, talk someone out of something. I can receive their witness, however complicated or difficult it is for me, instead of trying to manage or control. And it's hard. That recent memory comes to mind, I was in a meeting and there were two Black women in the meeting that I've really come to esteem. And one of them offered an assertion of you know, the matter at hand, and then the other one said, “I know what you mean when you—” and then she stopped herself and said, “Sorry, I think I know what you mean—”
Pete: Oh, right. Awesome.
David: And I, I was being schooled in a whole different way of, I don't want to other anyone, but it's like, oh my goodness, that is the, that is the way to communicate where you don't presume that you are rightly characterizing the other person's words. You say, “It seems to me that you're saying” to which the person can say, “That's exactly what I meant,” or the person can say yes and, you know, so there's just all this room. We, we have the split screen of the news program in which people are talking over each other and trying to make sure that they get their moment in. But most of us are not on a television news show hardly ever, and certainly not in the whole lives.
So we truly can take it slow. Yeah. Someone can say something to us or even ask us a question. We could say, “I don't think I have any wisdom on that.” Like, what you just told me, “I don't think I have, I have no light to share, but I'm going to mull it, and if something comes to me, I'll get back to you.” But we, we really can take it slow rather than staking out positions.
Pete: Well, I wonder, David, if you wouldn't mind letting us know a little bit about yourself, namely your spiritual journey that is part of a process that eventually led, I guess, to embracing, you know, to quote one of your books, the sacredness of questioning everything. There are people out there who are maybe at some point in a similar journey. And to hear others and where they came from and where they ended up is, I just think very, very important for people listening in.
David: Thank you. So I'm 54. I am David Dark of Nashville. I have been an educator of some sort for most of my adult life, or I should say I've tried to impersonate an educator in exchange for financial compensation. Yes, so very much of Nashville, it's become important in recent years, I suppose, since what I call George Floyd summer to acknowledge my investment in whiteness.
Now, I really am going to offer some bio, but I'm trying to locate my sort of, check my privilege, recognize my privilege. So one thing that I do when I do that is I acknowledge that I spent 12 years in what I now refer to as a segregation academy. So Nashville private school, it wasn't just a segregation academy, but it's become important for me to recognize that it was at least that.
So I went to one of those private schools that was founded to provide white kids with an alternative to being in school with black kids. Obviously, I don't say that proudly. But I just say it to note some of my background. So the Confederate flag would have been very much a part of our sports teams and that kind of thing. This is growing up in Nashville. I went to a state school for, um, undergrad, middle Tennessee state university. And by going to a state school, I was exposed to a more diverse group of people, people who, when they found out I loved Rush Limbaugh, thought, huh, what's that about? Now, I will say I also loved REM and Public Enemy and Doctor Who and Star Trek and stuff.
So I had people who would note the little Rush Limbaugh part and think, well, surely that's not all there is to this person. And I gradually got weaned off of that. Lest I be misunderstood, I'm going to say that my parents were Jimmy Carter evangelicals. So they were not Reagan Falwell evangelicals. They were social justice evangelicals. So, grew up in a thing called the Church of Christ. The Bible was taken very seriously, but my family, I almost want to say, I hope I don't risk misunderstanding here, but we were a little more Jewish rabbinic in a way, in terms of our consideration of scripture. If the person who is delivering the sermons on Sunday morning—
Pete: This is in your home or in the church?
David: In the home. We went to a particular church, but when we had lunch, none of us would defer to the pastor or anything that was said. So I sometimes say of my father, he was a little bit like Atticus Finch and Columbo fused together, a lawyer. And my mom, who's still alive, is a lifelong public school teacher, something of a mystic in a way.
And we could watch what we wanted, so long as we could explain why we liked these comic books or that kind of thing. And we loved movies. I worked in a movie theater in high school. And so culture, pop culture, has always been a kind of saving presence in my life. Also spent some time in Northern Ireland working for the Y and the, um, sectarian violence of, uh, Northern Ireland helped me kind of—radicalized me in the sense that it made me aware of some of what was going on in Tennessee.
I had a friend with whom, we were working with children or teenagers from the small towns in Northern Ireland where the Catholic Protestant divide was really strong. We would bring them to the Y, we would canoe with them, and we would do these exercises where they would draw maps of their town, and the Catholic kids would realize that the blank spots on their map of the town could be filled by the Protestant kids, and vice versa.
A friend and I did the same thing with Nashville, and I realized, oh, there's TSU, there's Fisk, There's where Oprah went to school. So by trying to think a little more critically of the culture of Northern Ireland, I then got to thinking more critically about Nashville and I guess I'll throw it here. Eventually, when I got back, I became a high school English teacher at a PCA church school, Presbyterian Church of America. So Governor Bill Lee's kids and Marsha Blackburn's son were in my English classes. So I am very, when I think of the political situation, including the Covenant shooting in Nashville, these are my people in a lot of ways. These are the families, the faculty.
When I walk around Nashville, there's a good chance that I'm going to see somebody who was in my high school English class. Or somebody that I taught when I was an adjunct at Lipscomb, TSU, Vanderbilt, and now Belmont. Belmont, I eventually landed here and I'm associate professor of religion in the arts. I've been here for about 12 years, but yeah, always education, always pop culture.
And in Northern Ireland, if I didn't know it already, I realized that while politics isn't always theology, theology is always politics. So that divide between religion and politics as if there's a firewall between them, I've never believed in that firewall.
Like, I know that there's a time to say, okay, look, the voice of God in your head doesn't get to decide curriculum decisions for everyone else. Right? Like, so there is that very necessary line that we have, at least for now, is an agreement in American society. But that it's always been a little fictitious, that divide. And I'm somebody who listened to a lot of U2, I'm referring to the punk rock band from Dublin. U2 has very much informed my view of the world. Yeah, and so here I am now. I teach religion and science fiction. I write books, the latest is called We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other in Worlds That Demand Our Silence.
And so I, I review music and film, I teach Bible and world religion, and I try to challenge all of the dividers that estrange us from ourselves and others.
Pete: So you know, it sounds like you've spent a lot of your life in more conservative spaces, not exclusively, but It seems from what I think you're saying is that your family, and maybe your church to a certain extent as well, maybe made this move towards the normalization of doubt a little bit easier.
David: Yes.
Pete: I don't want to oversimplify that because not everybody who comes from your background will move to those spaces as well. So you didn't have barriers, you know, that some people, I didn't have the barriers either. My parents were immigrants from Germany. They just, you know, believe in God, just only “Don’t get out of hand, you know, just, just, just be calm about it.”
David: This is great. This is helpful. I haven't thought about this. The barriers have been there every so often, but I've had friends and family that kind of joke, cajoled, questioned me out of those barriers. I have this community of mentors who have helped me not divide one thing off from the other people, who've helped me expand the space of the talkaboutable in my consideration of whatever's on the screen or what's coming or whatever I'm reading.
Pete: You mentioned the Bible before. Maybe we can just take a couple minutes to talk about that. So in your view, you know, you teach some Bible, right?
David: I do. Yeah.
Pete: So, um, let's talk about the extent to which the Bible can be a help or a hindrance or maybe both to accepting the normalcy of doubt in the life of faith. Does the Bible work for you, you know, or, or, or do you think it works for other people? I mean, cause some people say, no, I just, I don't really want to deal with it too much because it's been too toxic. Others say, no, it's actually giving me a way forward. So where might you be on that spectrum?
David: Yeah, I would say, you know, I don't know if it was a hundred years ago or a little more or a little less, but the words “biblical worldview,” a kind of marketing scam, in my view, have been part of my experience. So I no longer—I now view “biblical worldview” for instance, as a rhetorical weapon that morally serious people will not take up. I will refer to the biblical witness if we're just referring to all the crazy things that are in the collection. I tell, on the first day of class with Bible, I'll say, here's the deal. Don't say “the Bible says.” Because the Bible can't say any more than Queen's Greatest Hits Volume 2 can say. It's a collection. And if I'm feeling provocative, I'll say you're sinning against the Bible when you say the Bible says.
Pete: You have a low view of the Bible.
David: Yeah, so let's not do that. I do have you may not recall this, but I tweeted at one point and you said you liked it, a definition of the Bible. So here's my definition of the Bible.
Pete: Okay,
David: “The Bible is the composition notebook of a centuries long caravan of asylum seekers.”
Pete: Yeah, I can imagine liking that.
David: Okay, so I write that on the board, or I say it over and over again on the first day of class. And then we get into it. I sometimes say the Bible is the most formidable array of social criticism the world has ever seen. If I'm being really provocative, I'll say the Bible is critical race theory. So I'm pretty crazy about the Bible, and I think I come to love it more the older I get. But I'm also really defensive about it because I know it is used to destroy lives, and so I'm not gonna tell anybody that they ought to read the Bible more because I know for some the spiritual abuse is such that in order to hold on to their mental health, they just need to stay away from it. But I think I can say I love it. I really think I love it. I'm fairly late in life. I realized that the first verse of Luke is Luke saying, “Hi everybody I'm Luke. You've got there's a whole lot of stuff out there about what happened with Jesus. This is mine.”
This is my go—I did enjoy, and so I'll read that and then I'll say, listen for the word of the Lord. It's like, well, I can't even hear God in that. It's a guy called Luke who's just talking to me now. And so we do that in class. And I hope that those students will hold on to that. Because within no time, someone else is going to be making claims for that text that are very different.
So we're kind of, maybe we're fighting for our lives with any text that we're working with. I think too of Luke, Yoda telling Luke, you're going to have to go in that cave. And you know, he goes, hopefully this isn't a spoiler, but he goes into the cave and he ends up fighting an apparition of Darth Vader and cuts his head off and all that. But before he goes in, he says to Yoda, what's in there? And Yoda says, only what you take with you. And I think that's, I'm not saying the Bible is a tarot deck or a crystal ball or something like that, but kind of sorta like we see what we're looking for and we need to be really careful about what we're looking for.
Pete: Yeah. Well, David, we only have a couple of minutes left here, but I did want to end on maybe a very practical question that maybe you could help people with. How might you respond or engage with those who see doubt as incompatible with faith? I mean, we know what, we know what you'd be thinking about that, but how.
I'm thinking of, you know, some of our listeners who get together at Thanksgiving and they're like, I don't think like these people, I don't even know how to talk about this or how to respond when they say, you know, I never have doubts in my life, all that kind of stuff.
David: Hmm. First thought, have compassion on yourself. Be a body in a body. There's nothing wrong with being a body. For some reason it occurs to me too. One's mind wanders. We dream. There was a time when I used to think that I had to confess my dreams as sinful, like I sinned in that dream. And a dream is just a dream. We feel what we feel. We breathe. Yeah, I try to inspire a kind of relaxed meditative approach to all of the different emotions and feelings and fears that are understandable for us as creatures.
And on the Thanksgiving dinner thing, I don't have to answer questions nobody's asking me. I can hang back. And I can remember, and I'll share this because I think if I've spoken a sentence that will be remembered a hundred years from now, I think this is it. To love a person is to love a process. And to love a self is to love a process.
So something about process, something about viewing others as a process and knowing you can't step in the same David Dark twice. I'm a different person than I was before we started this conversation. So go easy and have—Oh yeah, here's a quick one. Jon Stewart said, maybe a comedy writer wrote it. He said, love your neighbor as you love yourself. And if you hate yourself, maybe leave your neighbor alone for a while. Which is just lovely, because truly, when I'm in a place of self hatred, or self contempt, and I really am a lot of the time, I need to hang back to be a safe person to myself and others. So, self compassion, self love, and if it helps to think of loving God and loving others in that, that works.
But whatever lore helps you love yourself and others more is lore enough.
Pete: Well, that's wonderful. David, thank you so much for taking the time. And like I said, it was a long time coming. Glad we finally had a chance to chat, and let's do it again.
David: Let's please do. I'm into it, and I'm very grateful for your work.
It is a help to me.
Pete: Thank you David.
[Music signals start of Quiet Time segment]
Jared: And now for quiet time with Pete and Jared. Okay. Pete, you talked to David about doubt and led off with the question, what is doubt? So I'm gonna lead off our quiet time with throwing that back at you. What would you say Doubt is?
Pete: I think doubt is, is a normal part of the human experience that you simply don't have certainty.
It's as simple as that. Now, the thing is that we doubt things all the time. But I think doubt usually is in the context of things that are deeply meaningful to you. Like God, you know, or the nature of reality and But doubt is a part of that and it's inescapable. I think that's part of being human and, you know, that's one of David's points that he made.
And, uh, that's, that's how I define it. It's not, it's not complicated. It's dealing with the uncertainties of our existence and accepting them. And the name we give that is doubt. Mm hmm. What about you?
Jared: Yeah, I mean, I just think that's a, you make an important point because sometimes I think it's helpful to normalize these things that feel so scary or far off and to say, well, doubt is anything we don't have certainty about, uh, and we don't have certainty about a lot of things.
So we actually have a lot of doubt. It just feels, which is understandable, really deep when it's something really important to us. Because, to not be certain about very important things can be very unsettling.
Pete: Especially if you've been told that your whole life. Which is why doubt is the enemy for many people, and there are examples of people having doubt in the Bible.
Right. It's part of the reality of it. But, again, I think the reason why it's such a controversial thing to talk about is because people have been conditioned to think that people of faith don't doubt. Right. And what David is saying, and I think what we're saying too, is that, well, no, how can you not have doubt?
doubt permeate your existence. It's not just like every once in a while, I'll doubt a little thing. It's maybe even fundamentally doubting fundamentally things, but moving forward anyway and trying to live into that and to see where that takes you. And that could be a sign of respect.
Jared: Well, then to go a step further with you personally, how has doubt shown up in your life of faith?
And You know, David has this interesting way of putting it, that doubt is lovely, and I think that could be a really hard phrase for people to stomach, maybe with where they are in their life of faith. So, for you personally, how has it shown up?
Pete: Well, I mean, I would, I like that phrase, that doubt is lovely, because for me, it's, doubt is there.
The question is, what do you do with it? And if you acknowledge it and embrace it as a normal part of our existence, what it does is it makes this easier, you know, and we're not fighting against ourselves all the time. We're just acknowledging our experiences and who we are and how we think and how we've come to understand.
God and the world and how those two things relate to each other. So, for me, it's lovely because it's freeing. I don't have to have the answers to everything, and the more I seek answers, the more I realize how little I understand. And, so, I think what it does, one reason it's lovely, Jared, is because It does, it, doubt forces you almost, if you're going to take it seriously, really accept the challenge of doubt.
What it does is it takes the intellectual dimension of the Christian faith and moves it over a little bit, not, that's not the center of it, that's an aspect of it. Sometimes we feel a sense of certitude, and that's great, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes you will doubt that certitude.
What's wrong with you? The walls are crumbling and now you have to build the walls back up again. Maybe doubt says, demolish the walls. Don't worry about that. And live that way, even if you don't always understand. You know, so you sort of believe in a hope of like getting a certain kind of understanding, but not understanding about everything and understanding that has to be flexible in and of itself.
Any new understanding we come up with, we should be ready to have that squished a little bit and made less comfortable over time. And to me, all that is. A mark of a vibrant life of faith. That's why I think it's lovely.
Jared: I'm going to say this more succinctly. I have a little logical statement to make and that is, doubt is the feeling of not knowing and not knowing is another word for that is ignorance, literally in the Greek, not knowing.
And ignorance, not knowing is necessary for learning and learning is growth. So, if I know something, I cannot learn it. That's just by definition. I have to not know something to learn something. And I always want to be growing. I always want to be learning. In my faith, I want to be growing. And so if you back that logic up, doubt is the beginning of learning.
Doubt is the beginning of growing. And that is a sign of health and life in every other aspect in our, in our existence. Why wouldn't it be in our faith as well?
Pete: So, would you say that I want to throw the word humility into that too, right? Because I think it takes some humility to say, I don't know, or maybe just common sense.
But I think, again, if you've been conditioned that the strong Christian will say, I believe, I have no doubts. And then you do, I think there's a, maybe humility is not even the best word. There's a humiliation factor involved in that. And you have to be willing. To live your life that way if you're going to doubt.
Jared: Yeah, but I think that's for me what I'm trying to get at is like, it does, it's not humiliating because we do this all the time. It's just somehow we have specially marked off faith as a place you can't do this, which is to say in your workplace or in your relationships, it's very common to hear someone say, I have a growth mindset.
I always want to be growing. I want to be learning. The only way you can do that is to presume that you don't know everything. And if you don't know everything, then you have doubt.
Pete: But what, yeah, I agree with that. But how about, it's not just growing on a sure foundation. It's when the foundation itself is casting a doubt.
Right. Which happens all the time. That's people deconstruct because it's not just, I have a couple of questions on the periphery. If you're
Jared: assuming that faith, the foundation of faith is knowing. Exactly.
Pete: Yeah. And that's why doubt is like, it's almost like pressing reset. It's like, you've got it all wrong.
Jared: You gotta find a different foundation. Right. Because now, doubt's your roommate whether you like it or not. And, and it ain't going nowhere. Right.
Pete: And it doesn't pay a lot of rent.
Jared: But if you can find a different foundation, you can see it as a lovely thing because it is the engine of growth. Yeah. And the engine of learning.
Pete: Well, I think, yeah, I, I agree. There's, um, if you don't mind the little story I tell and one of my books, I say it engaging Mother Teresa. And when, I forgot his name, but a philosopher came to visit her in Calcutta and he was having a crisis of faith doubt. And he said, can you pray for me? She goes, what do you want me to pray for?
She says, pray that I have a sense of certainty. And she goes, I will not pray for that. It goes, how come? Because certainty is the last thing you're holding onto and what you have to let go of. When I heard that is like, Yeah, that's it. I mean, we crave this certainty, which we don't get in most areas of our life anyway.
We don't get it in our relationships. We don't get it in our jobs. But we want the one thing that is our foundation, religious faith, to be free, Of doubt. And there's a lot of wisdom in what Mother Teresa said. This is you're clinging to that and you have to let go of it, right? And if you don't let go of it, you're never going to be happy.
You're always going to be, you're always going to fall short of that certainty that you crave. And again, this gets back to me why it's, it's like, I want to say, thank you. This is, it's so good to hear that because it takes the pressure off and it puts the responsibility on me too, to keep intentionally moving forward and putting the pieces together as best as I see fit and not worrying about whether I'm.
I'm going to take a theology exam one day.
[Outro music plays]
Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Outro: You've just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
