Doubt Is a Ladder, Not a Home
Churches should welcome questions. That doesn’t require embracing perpetual doubt.
What makes Christianity hard?
There are many possible answers to this question. How you answer it reveals a great deal not only about yourself—your temperament, your station in life, your mind and heart—but also about the context in which you live. Christians in different times and places would answer quite differently.
Suppose, for example, you live in Jerusalem just a few decades after the crucifixion of Jesus. What makes Christianity hard is not belief in the divine or the great distance separating you from “Bible times.” You’re in Bible times, and everyone believes in the divine. No, what makes it hard is the suffocating heat of legal persecution and social rejection. Confessing Christ’s name likely makes your life worse in tangible ways: Your family might disown you; your master might abuse you; your friends might ridicule you. The authorities might haul you in for questioning if you strike them as a troublemaker.
Or suppose you’re a nun in a medieval convent. You’ll live your whole life here, never marrying or bearing children or having a home of your own. You are pledged to God until death. You’re what people will later call a “mystic,” though that’s a rather dry term for having visions you often experience as suffering: ecstatic glimpses of the consuming fire that is the living Lord. What makes Christianity hard? You certainly don’t wonder about the existence of God—you’ve seen God with your own eyes. Nor are fame and wealth a source of temptation; your life is hidden away from the world. But your life is not easy. Faith remains hard.
Or imagine you’re someone else, somewhere else: a priest at a rural parish in early modern ...