Embracing Mystery And Wonder
Living in the tension of faith and doubt
Moving from certainty to doubt has been an important part of my spiritual and intellectual journey.
Twenty-five years ago, I was a budding evidential Christian apologist.
I thought answers to most hard questions could be reduced to tidy logically cohesive packages.
Then I became a pastor and lived another two decades.
Guess what?
God and life don’t work like bullet points or mathematical proofs.
Life is messy.
And God’s essence is ineffable, as all the great world religions attest.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware writes in The Orthodox Way:
[It’s] not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.
Today, I’m certain about not being certain.
I’m increasingly comfortable living in the tension of faith and doubt.
Mystery and wonder are formative friends.
