There’s a discussion in the Washington Post about doubt among the clergy. Some of the entries are interesting. I would especially recommend Martin Marty’s. On the surface, of course, it all seems obvious. How can you continue to do your job, if you no longer have faith?

And put that way, the answer does seem simple. But faith and doubt are not opposites; they can exist simultaneously, the classic prayer of Augustine, “Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief,” being a profound example.

Marty talks about obvious examples where pastors and religious leaders of Lutheran denominations no longer accept elements of the sixteenth-century confessions, that the pope is the Anti-christ, to take one case. The same is true in Anglicanism. It is still the case that clergy in the Church of England have to subscribe to the 39 Articles, but there are very few of them who could accept all thirty-nine.

Part of the issue is that the authors of the study in question understand “faith” in propositional terms; that is to say, they seem to think that to be a Christian pastor, one must accept literal scripture or literally accept the creeds. But neither scripture nor the creeds are propositional; indeed, faith itself is not propositional. It does not operate in the same way that empirical evidence does. We believe the world is round, because it can be proven to be round, in a number of ways.

Religious faith is rather different. The best way I have of understanding it is to see faith as the early church fathers did, as involving not simply assent and certainly not intellectual assent to a proposition. Rather, it involves all of one’s being, and a crucial part of faith, perhaps the crucial part, is will, or to use patristic synonyms, desire, or love.