Finding Faith in Honest Doubt: A Spirituality of Teaching
Some skeptics in my classes, of course, get no further than to agree
with Freud that religion is nothing more than a universal obsessional neurosis;
or with Marx that religion is an opiate; or with Feuerbach that religion is
simply a projection of human qualities onto an object of worship. Others
less cynical come to appreciate the opportunity in a professional course to
search for ultimate meaning on the chance that they might discover some
irrefutable, all-embracing value underlying everything. Only a few students,
I find, are content to ponder the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, words that
have long guided my own interior life and directed much of my teaching in
recent years: “There is more faith in honest doubt than in all the religious
creeds of the world.” 1 Sadly, more students, rather than less, agree with
Augustine when he said: “I would not have faith…if the authority of the
Church did not compel me.” 2
In this late stage of my career, I have been trying to create a pedagogy
I call a “spirituality of teaching.” In all the classroom work that I do as a
college professor, I am driven by Tennyson’s aphorism, by the unwavering
conviction that, for me, a genuine faith must somehow find a way to wrestle
with the demons of honest doubt. The objective is not to overcome the
doubt, because this is neither possible nor desirable, but to fully incorporate
it into any final declaration of belief and call to action. For me, honest doubt
is a believer’s intuitive sense that no ecclesiastical leader, or dogma, or
doctrine, or sacred book, or teaching, or ritual can ever capture the fullness
of life’s ultimate mysteries. It is the humble understanding that, when
everything is said and done, one’s frail and wavering faith is all that is left to
fill the interval between saying too much and saying too little about what is
essentially incommunicable.