Doubt and faith
Philip Barron on the tension between two kinds of faith
Many people in search of a living faith have doubts but, as Harry Emerson Fosdick put it, doubt is not the enemy of faith, it is ‘the growing edge’ of faith.
Some religious people think that unbelief is sinful, but no-one can make another believe until he can ‘so exhibit the truth that the mind of the would-be believer cannot do other than leap out and grasp it and make it his own’. What is sinful, Fosdick suggests, is for a person to assert that he does not believe, after truth has authenticated itself in his own mind, or if he refuses to contemplate all the evidence, which one is so prone to do if it is offered by someone on other grounds.
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