Facing Doubt in Seminary: How to Grow Through Uncertainty

I am often asked a version of the same question. A parent leans in and says, “If my child goes to seminary, will their faith hold up?” It is a fair question. People imagine a classroom where professors dismantle everything they ever believed, and where students walk out of the door with nothing left to hold on to.

I never dismiss the concern. History gives it teeth. Following World War I, some seminaries traded orthodoxy for cultural relevance and the “assured results” of modern scholarship. Over in Germany, David Friedrich Strauss and The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1902) treated Scripture as a myth to be peeled back, exposing a Jesus who was more a moral teacher than the Son of God. By the late-twentieth century, the Jesus Seminar was voting down miracles with colored beads.¹

One can see the reason for concern.

So allow me to chart a way forward: How can one maintain faith honestly with questions and even doubt? Wrestling with different theological formulations of the faith is not a denial but an opportunity to deepen that faith.

Questioning as a means of formation

I once joked with a faculty member teaching first-year hermeneutics that their students “know” more than our doctoral candidates. That is what I call freshman syndrome: the audacity and confidence in a theological system that has never been tested.

I recall my own year as a freshman, writing a paper on a doctrine I was passionate about. The grade came back a B-minus, and the professor was being kind. He pointed out that I had loaded my sources with authors I agreed with. Had I used a wider range of sources, I might have written more honestly. Later, when I finally took his advice, I found myself uncertain about positions I once thought immovable.

And here is where the concerned person may wrongly assume, by false comparison, that my experience was equivalent to Crossan or Strauss. It was not. To the contrary, if a professor is doing his or her job right, students will be pressed to examine the theology they carried into the class. That is not betrayal. It is formation. And if you want formation, you will eventually have to ask questions about some of the things you once thought you believed.

A classroom that leaves every easy answer untouched is not protecting faith. It is stunting it.

This does not necessarily mean a rejection of the faith or an abandonment of core doctrines. It does not mean a professor despises the authority of Scripture or is smuggling in Crossan’s hermeneutic of suspicion. It means the student is being invited to wrestle. And wrestling is not the end of faith. Wrestling is the sign that faith is alive (Gen 32:22–32).

A classroom that leaves every easy answer untouched is not protecting faith. It is stunting it. The questions sharpen us. They strip away presumption. And if history teaches us anything, it is that faith grows when it has to fight its way through the questions (Jas 1:2–4; 1 Pet 1:6–7).

Theology as both a guardrail of truth & invitation to mystery

Karl Rahner, in his essay “Current Problems in Christology,” says theology works in two ways.

First, it produces clear and precise formulas to protect truth and guide practice. In this way, clear doctrine is not disposable. Far from it. As Rahner contends, once we

pay attention to a reality and a truth revealed by God, the final result is always a precisely formulated statement. This is natural and inevitable. In no other way is it possible to mark the boundary of error and the misunderstanding of divine truth in such a way that this boundary will be observed in the day-to-day practice of religion.²

Marking such truth is the professor’s job—and it is where Crossan and the higher critics went wrong.

But where we sometimes go wrong is in assuming that theological statements are merely an end point and not “also … a beginning.”³ The professor’s task is not only to guard truth, but also to remind students that every theological formulation is a doorway into mystery (“the knowledge of [God’s] incomprehensibility”), an invitation to deeper reflection, communion, and discovery. Seminary becomes beautiful when students learn to hold the tension between clear doctrine and the inexhaustibility of divine mystery (Rom 11:33).

In fact, these truths are living and thus must be expounded. Rahner writes, a theological formulation

preserves its significance, it remains precisely living, by being expounded … because it cannot really be said with much confidence that someone who monotonously keeps on repeating it—dressed up with a few “clarificatory phrases”—has in fact understood it.⁴

If you just keep repeating “two plus two equals four,” you have not really grasped it. You have to ask questions about it and master the ability to use it. Buy two apples, add two more, and see why the formula holds. Then face the questions that naturally follow: What if I add still two more? What if it is not apples but oranges? What if it is three, or five? Understanding grows not by mere repetition of formulas, but by pressing the truth into new situations. Simple truths stay alive because we expound them, not just repeat them.

Maturing by complexifying the simple

And in the classroom, this often means discovering that what looks simple is in fact more complex.

Take the question of the millennium. The Apostles’ Creed states that Christ “will come to judge the living and the dead” and affirms “the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” The Nicene Creed adds only that Christ’s “kingdom will have no end.”

Now imagine a freshman from an evangelical church, raised premillennial, reading Three Views on the Millennium (Zondervan, 1999). Suddenly they discover that not all Christians read Revelation 20:1–10 the same way. And yet all three views affirm, confidently, the creeds. Home for Thanksgiving, the student remarks to their parents that the “thousand years” could be symbolic, and that Satan may have been bound at the cross (cf. Mark 3:27 and Rev 20:2). Mom drops her fork, emails the administration, and insists her son’s professor is Crossan in disguise.

Rahner would certainly say no. He might even suggest that the creeds themselves give us a starting point—Christ will come again and his kingdom will have no end—but they do not settle the question of how to read Revelation 20:1–10. That is why books like Three Views on the Millennium are helpful: They explore the starting point, rather than pretending the creeds affirm only one tradition’s reading.

So the son’s doubt has not lead to denying clear doctrine. He is not walking in the door saying Jesus will not return. He is learning that doctrine is the place where the conversation begins. He is discovering how the church has variously read Revelation 20 across the centuries. As Rahner puts it, the reason we contemplate a doctrine is not to abandon it, but

to understand it with mind and heart, so that through it we might draw near to the ineffable, unapproachable, nameless God, whose will it was that we should find him in Jesus Christ and through Christ seek him.⁵

4 possible benefits of doubt

From this, we can glean four principles for how to maintain faith while wrestling with doubt.

1. Doubt is not a desertion of faith but an opportunity for its refinement

Rahner insists that the reason we contemplate doctrine is not to abandon it, but to understand it more fully.

For instance, a deep reflection on the atoning work of Christ will raise important metaphysical questions that a mere biblical theology will not necessarily answer with a smoking gun. A historical survey introduces us to multiple atonement theories, all of which have convincing aspects. Doubting one, even the one you began with, does not mean you have abandoned the doctrine of sin or denied that Christ is our redeemer. It means your understanding of how Christ redeems is maturing. And that is a good thing.

2. Doubt can protect you from idolatry

The moment you think you have captured the infinite God through doctrinal formulas, totally and completely, you have shrunk him into an idol of your own making.

Doubt actually plays a healthy role here. It dismantles the illusion that our knowledge of God is God himself. Those who think they possess God with their finite thinking often begin to act as though they are God. Questions tear away at this idolatrous thinking and remind us who is finite and who is infinite—and enables us to act accordingly.

The moment you think you have captured the infinite God through doctrinal formulas, totally and completely, you have shrunk him into an idol of your own making.

3. Doubt can further lead us to Christ

Rahner suggests that the aim of our questioning should be Christ. If the questions you face lead to Christ, then your doubt is working toward a good end. You may lose confidence in an old framework or become curious about a new tradition. But if the process drives you toward the Christ who remains the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8), you are still winning. Christ is your anchor (Heb 6:19) when you feel like you might be “carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14).

4. Doubt can invite us into deeper communion with other Christians

The purpose of doing theology, according to Rahner, is communion—communion with Christ and communion with one another. When we take seriously that God is ineffable and that doctrine is a starting point, we are more likely to find unity across traditional lines.

I think this is happening today. Pentecostals are finding greater appreciation for the Eucharist, evangelicals are awakening to a greater experience of the Spirit, and Catholics are rediscovering the centrality of Scripture.⁶ Each tradition brings something to the table, and our questions can move us, not away from God, but toward each other with Christ at the center.

A final word

Let me end with a personal anecdote. Having done a PhD in the book of Revelation, I get asked a lot of questions, many of which are wrapped up in pretense, the inquirer hoping I confirm what they already suspect. But I relay to them what my PhD supervisor told me at the beginning of my research: “Chris, how is it that everyone thinks they know so much about a book that the historic church knew the least about?”

After six years of studying Revelation, here is what I don’t doubt: Revelation points us to Jesus as Savior, gives us clear expectations that Christ will return, assures us that suffering is not in vain, and reminds us that God is faithful. But how will he come? When will he come? I would rather hold those questions with an open hand—with doubt—than with a brute fist. Otherwise, I risk turning a tradition into an idol and missing out on the communion that uncertainty offers with those who also love to think and contemplate the great and ineffable God.

Doubts are no cause for panic. They are not proof that one is in crisis. Doubts can grow you. Take it from someone who doubted—that is, questioned—his way through seminary and a PhD and still comes to church every Sunday and recites the Nicene Creed with conviction and tears.

Chris Palmer’s recommended resources on faith and doubt

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