Podcast: How Should We Respond to Our Doubt? (Randy Newman)

February 26, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Facing Our Questions

In this episode, Randy Newman discusses how all Christians struggle with various questions about their faith, and he explains that rather than viewing these questions as roadblocks to faith, we should see them as the natural twists and turns that accompany our lives as Christians—twists and turns that can lead us to a deeper trust and confidence in our heavenly Father.

Questioning Faith

Questioning Faith

Randy Newman

In these honest stories about spiritual searching, doubt, and belief, apologetics teacher Randy Newman gives sincere inquirers the opportunity to investigate faith and encounter God’s love.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:09 - Living with Doubt

Matt Tully
Randy, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Randy Newman
It’s great to be with you. Thanks so much.

Matt Tully
As Christians, I think we all know what it is to struggle with doubt at different points in our lives—lots of different kinds of doubts that might be related to all kinds of things. And yet sometimes it can be hard to know how to talk about that or what to do with that doubt as believers. I wonder if you could start us off today by answering the question, If you were to sit down with a Christian right now—kind of like we’re sitting down right now, maybe at a coffee shop with some coffee in hand—and that person were to come to you and say, Randy, I’m struggling with doubt, and that scares me, what’s the first thing that you would say to them?

Randy Newman
I think the first thing I might say is that I also struggle with doubts because I want them to know that they’re not alone—and I do, so I’m not just using that as a line—and that I think doubt may be more common than most people think. So I want to kind of soften the tension there. I think also I want to try to express that even really strong, solid, mature believers have times of doubt. And I think that there’s an image of the mature Christian—whoever he or she is—that they never have doubts. I don’t think that that’s realistic for most people. I can’t pass judgment on the people who say I never have doubts. I know where my mind goes. I doubt that they’re telling the truth, or I doubt that they’re in touch with all of their struggles. But that’s not the point. I think the teaching of the New Testament has places in it that imply there will be times of doubt and struggle and frustration. And so it’s not a question of, How do I get rid of this? I have doubt. I want to get rid of it. No, it’s, How do I dig into it and work through it and live with it rather than I’ve just got to get rid of it? So that’s the starting point I think of dealing with doubt.

03:17 - Switchbacks in the Journey of Faith

Matt Tully
One of the things I really appreciated about your book is the ways that you approach these broader issues of our spiritual journeys with a very nuanced lens where even things like doubt can have very multifaceted dimensions to them. It’s not always a simple answer that we’re looking for that really is going to resolve that. You say in the book, “I’ve come to see that spiritual journeys resemble a series of twists and turns more than a direct ascent from one belief to another. My own story certainly fits that description.” So I wonder if you could just give us a brief summary of how your own life story has been marked by these twists and turns and even struggles with doubt at times.

Randy Newman
First, I’ve heard a lot of stories of people’s lives about how they’ve come to faith, and for a while a lot of them fit in a very short, linear fashion. When I was this old, I believed this. Then, I learned this. Then, I found this. Then, I became a Christian. Straight line.

Matt Tully
Yeah. Very simple.

Randy Newman
Yes, very simple. I come from a Jewish background, and being raised in a Jewish background, we don’t want anything to do with Jesus. I mean, when I was growing up the only time Jesus was mentioned was attached to “those people” who are our enemies. They’re the anti-Semites. They’re the people who persecuted us. Germany was a Christian nation, and look what they did during the Holocaust. And so we don’t want anything to do with them. So for a long time when I had Christian friends who would say things like, You ought to read the New Testament, No, no, no! I don’t want anything to do with that! And yet at the same time there was this attraction of, Why is it that these people seem to know God in a personal way? They talk to him about everything. They pray about everything. They pray in English. And so there was sort of this, No, I’m repulsed by this and I’m drawn to it. It’s this back and forth kind of thing. I begin the book telling about how I went on this mountain climbing experience with my son, and I learned what switchbacks were. And switchbacks make it possible for people to get up mountains. They go back and forth and back and forth. I know this is audio so you can’t see my hands, but I hope you know what a switchback is. It’s this back and forth kind of thing that just moves gradually because the alternative is you have to climb straight up. I didn’t bring a helicopter that day. That’s the only way I could have gotten up.

Matt Tully
Or climbing ropes.

Randy Newman
Climbing ropes. You’ve got to have hammers and nails, but a switchback enables you. And I think that’s more the image about how people come to faith. I make some level of ascent, and then I turn back the other way. Then, maybe I stop and rest. I know in my own story there was a time in high school I knew a bunch of Christian friends. They shared a whole lot with me. That got me thinking. Then, I went off to college and for the first year and a half I didn’t think about God or Jesus or anything. I thought about beer and music and girls. Every Friday night I went to a party and got drunk. Every Saturday night I went to the Philadelphia Academy of Music and listened to some of the greatest music in the world. I was looking for something. On Friday nights I was looking for escape. On Saturday I was looking for some kind of transcendence. And both of them were tremendously disappointing. That was my freshman year in college and most of my sophomore year until a friend of mine died in this really tragic accident, and then I had to say, Wait a minute. Wait a second. Music is not going to help me with this, beer isn’t going to help. I’ve got to find something deeper. And that’s when I started reading C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, I read the Gospel of Matthew, I read a lot of the New Testament. But again, it was this back and forth, indirect switchback kind of thing. When I got to a point of faith and belief and turned around and looked at where I had been, it’s like, *Oh, this was kind of a meandering that took three and a half or four years.

Matt Tully
Do you think that those switchbacks, the searching for something and not always knowing what’s next and what the right answer is, did that continue after your conversion? Does that also characterize our lives as Christians sometimes?

Randy Newman
Oh, sure. I definitely think so. There are certain truths of the Christian life that the first time you hear it, for a lot of us it’s exactly the opposite of what you were indoctrinated with. And I think there’s probably a hundred different examples, but for me it was all about Jesus. I was steeped in the view that Jesus was a good teacher—a very good teacher—that’s it. And so when friends said, Well, no, he’s God, are you kidding? No. Well, he claimed to be God. Well, then he’s a nut! The whole idea that God could take on flesh, that’s crazy! And so there are a whole bunch of ideas that you have to first say, Wait a minute. Hold it. Okay. A lot of people really believe this, s maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive. And for some people, that just takes a while. For some people, it’s that God actually chose to reveal himself in a book for a whole lot of people. That’s just crazy! Really? God wrote a book? Well, no, he didn’t write a book. He revealed himself, and people wrote a book. Well, how did that happen? And again, people need to kind of sit with that. I think we as Christians think we just state the idea. There. It’s out there. It’s true. It’s a two-edged sword; it will cut through. Yes, it is true and it is a two-edged sword. But for a whole lot of people, they need time to kind of sit with it. Because the essence of becoming a Christian is admitting that you’ve been wrong about a whole lot of stuff—a whole lot of really big stuff. I was wrong about who God was, I was wrong about who I am, I was wrong about this thing called sin, I was wrong about who Jesus is, I was wrong about the Bible. So realizing, Oh, there’s another way to look at this. I might need to re examine this. And then, as you say, even after we become believers, there’s just a whole lot more of, Oh, I’ve always thought this, but you know what? It’s different. And it’s better. It’s a million times better. But that takes some time. It’s not just, Let’s transfer the information from the book into my brain. There. That’s done. Wouldn’t it be lovely if that would be that easy? Let me just plug myself into this information source, and now it’s in me.

Matt Tully
It’s not the Matrix.

Randy Newman
No, it’s not the Matrix. And it’s not medication. I mean, medication works that way sometimes. We think, I just need a shot of theology.

Matt Tully
It doesn’t always work like that.

Randy Newman
No.

10:02 - The Influential Power of Stories

Matt Tully
One of the things that’s notable about your book is how many stories you include in it. And it kind of got me thinking about the role of stories as we think about both our journey coming to faith and even our journey as Christians and maturing in our faith and addressing some of the doubts and the struggles that we have related to the faith. How would you summarize the importance of stories for how we think about these things?

Randy Newman
I’m tempted to want to answer your question by telling a story, but I can’t think of one right now, so that’s not going to work. Let me just back up a little bit. I’ve written several books about evangelism, and they’re written for Christians about how you do evangelism. And in all of them I talk about the importance of pre-evangelism. There are conversations we need to have before we have the conversation about the gospel. And there’s a million conversations we can have. We can talk about music, we can talk about art, we can talk about family, we can talk about so many things. And then I say how those things are pointers, pre-evangelism. And at some point I thought, I should practice what I preach. I should write a pre-evangelistic book. And I tried out these ideas as a talk, and I convinced friends to set me up in places where I could talk to both believers and non-believers on college campuses and different places. I gave this talk that I called “Considering Faith in the Twenty-First Century.” And all I was trying to say to people is, I’m trying to ask you just to consider or, in some cases, reconsider. And it was very pre-pre-pre-pre-evangelistic. I wasn’t presenting the gospel. I was saying, I want you to consider some ideas like, for example, we all approach this topic of faith with a whole mix of motivations, not just curiosity. It’s not just intellectual curiosity. It’s a whole lot of things playing. And then I would say things like, I’d like you to consider that maybe faith is inevitable, not optional. Maybe everybody has faith. And what I did was I would state the point first, and then I would tell some stories that illustrate it. So, I met with someone who knows about the world of books and publishing, and I said, I got this idea, I got this talk. And I told him about it and he goes, Well, that’s a really good talk but a really lousy book. Thank you very much! He said books work the opposite. In books, you tell the stories first, and then you draw the point. So a book begins with, Let me tell you about this story. Let me tell you this story. Let me tell you this story. Let me tell you how these stories are similar, which leads me to the point that we all bring different motivations to the topic of faith. So that’s how I wrote the book, telling these stories. And it does work better as a book that way than as a talk. There was also this sense, as I heard people’s stories and I read famous people’s stories, I thought people need to hear these stories. They’re just amazing. And nobody knows this part of that famous person’s life. For example, can I give you an example? Lots of people know who Christopher Hitchens was—an atheist, he wrote the book God Is Not Great, young atheists just love him. He tells a story in a memoir he wrote, and then I heard him on an NPR interview where he talked about his mother’s suicide. His mother had taken up with another man after she got divorced from Christopher Hitchens’ father, and the relationship didn’t work out. And so they both took their lives. They committed suicide together. He tells this on NPR radio. You could look it up online. He says, My mother tried to call me right before she killed herself. My mother tried to call me, and I didn’t get to the call in time. I just missed it by a few minutes, but I feel like if I would have gotten the call, I don’t think she would have done it. I could have stopped her from doing that. And then he says, So I’ve been trying to write myself out of that ever since. I remember I was driving in a car. I had to pull over to the side of the road. It was so upsetting. Trying to write myself out of that ever since—he feels like he could have stopped his mother from committing suicide. And all of a sudden, everything I had heard and read by Christopher Hitchens, because he’s a brilliant writer and I had read a lot of his stuff, all of a sudden had a whole different feel to it. Oh my goodness, this guy is just racked with guilt and pain and horror every single day. And he’s trying to write himself out of this mess, and it ain’t working. He was famous for how much alcohol he consumed. It wasn’t just alcohol. He was really trying to self-medicate and cover over a pain so deep. I think people need to know that about him. And so I found out those kind of things about famous people. And then I also talked to ordinary people and I heard their stories about how they became Christians, and they’re just ordinary people and they’re never going to be famous and they’re not going to write books and they’re not going to go on TV shows, but man, their stories are incredible. I want people to hear these stories. You did what? So I try to weave those kind of stories together in the book and say, Doesn’t this make us think that perhaps . . . ?

15:30 - Addressing Doubts and Questions in Faith

Matt Tully
Stories can add so much color and an understanding to the things that we say, the things that we feel as we talk about this. When it comes to talking with people, you’ve spent countless hours talking with unbelievers and believers alike, hearing their stories of journeys to faith, hearing them articulate their doubts and their struggles with the Christian faith. I wonder if you can, thinking about all that experience you have, can you complete the following sentence in as many ways as makes sense to you: If someone comes to you with their doubts, don’t . . . ?

Randy Newman
So I’m giving advice to the person who’s hearing someone share their doubts to them?

Matt Tully
Right. Whether they’re a believer or unbeliever, you’re giving some advice.

Randy Newman
You’re the Christian, and a Christian friend of yours comes to you and says, I’m having doubts.

Matt Tully
Or a non-Christian friend. I think either of those.

Randy Newman
Alright, well I’d like to do both. So the Christian comes and says, I’m having doubts. I would counsel the counselor to tell them they’re not crazy. They’re not losing their salvation. This probably is more common than they realize. The Christian life does have a bunch of times that We have doubts. C. S. Lewis talked about it as “undulations” in The Screwtape Letters. I think that’s just the reality of being human, living in a fallen world, living in a time between the times. We have the revelation of the cross, but we’re still waiting for the second coming, so I think doubt is probably going to happen a lot. I might tell hat person that if all of their Christian friends say, Oh, I never have doubts, I would say you should try to find some different friends. Did I just say that? Is that going to get edited out? I do think that there are pockets within the Christian world where they say, I never have doubts. I know that I know that I know. And I don’t think they’re reading their Bible as fully or as accurately as they should. So, wow, I wonder if you’re going to get some mail about that. If it’s a non-Christian who says, Well, I just can’t believe because I have too many doubts. I would try to say you can believe and still have doubts. You don’t have to be 100 percent certain. And then I would try to say there are all sorts of things in life that we live without 100 percent absolute certainty. For example, I recently had to go to the eye doctor, and he prescribed some eye drops. And then I had to go to the pharmacy and get the eye drops. And then I came home and I put the eye drops in. Now, I never tested these drops to make sure that they weren’t going to drive me blind, or that they were sulfuric acid and that my eyes were going to burn up. I had faith that the eye doctor knew what he was talking about when he looked at my eyes and said, Oh, you need this, and that the pharmacy was able to read his handwriting (maybe that was a step of faith) and that they prescribed the right thing. So I had a very high level of confident faith in the eye doctor and the prescription and our medical process. But did I have absolute certainty? No. And there’s just all sorts of things that we need to live in life with a high level of confidence. I believe God has revealed such tremendous truths to us. But in that truth, in the Bible itself, He tells us there are some things he’s not going to tell us. Deuteronomy 29:29 has got to be one of my favorite verses: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us.” There are things he hasn’t revealed yet. Or Paul talking about “now we see through a mirror dimly (darkly).” Or Paul saying in 2nd Corinthians 4 “we are afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not despairing.” There is perplexity. There are puzzles. And there are times we need to say, I don’t know why God did that.

Matt Tully
Do you think sometimes Christians are guilty of, whether it’s talking to unbelievers or talking to other Christians, we’re guilty of presenting the Christian faith as the ultimate answer to all of life’s questions, and if you kind of just accept this, all those perplexities will disappear?

Randy Newman
I think that has happened a lot. I think a lot of very thoughtful questioners have been told to stop asking so many questions. I think that’s a terrible thing to say to people. Let me just back up. I went for a doctorate, and I wanted to get a doctorate in evangelism or intercultural studies, and I went before the committee and said, What kind of research do we need to do? And they said, Well, we should interview a whole lot of people who became Christians and hear their stories. I thought, Oh, that’ll be great! And I knew that the standard in that kind of research was to interview about thirty people. So I thought I’d go low and say I’d like to interview twenty-five people, and they said, No, you have to interview forty. And I thought, okay, now it’s my turn to come back with thirty. And I said thirty, and they said forty. And I said thirty, and they said forty. So I interviewed forty. Actually, interviewed more. I ended up doing more. And since then, I just loved the process so much I’ve been interviewing and I just hear lots of these stories. But in a formal, sit-down setting, recording every word, transcribing every word, I interviewed forty college students who had become Christians within the last two years. That was the limitation we put on it. And there was this one guy who that’s exactly what he was told. He was told in the church where his parents brought him growing up, You ask too many questions. You just need to believe in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and he’ll take away all your questions. And he thought, Well, that must be a religion for stupid people. And he was a really smart guy. He knew he was smart. He was getting good grades. He got a full ride scholarship to a really good university. And he thought, I don’t need Christianity because I’m smart, and Christianity is for stupid people. But then he went to an event because people invited him and there was free pizza (that’s really why he went), and it was one of these question and answer kind of things about God, and he only went to make fun of the Christians. And he would ask wise guy questions, but they were really nice to him. So he started going to a Bible study. The Gospel of Mark. And he met a group of people who respected his questions. At one point in the interview I said to him, Was there one major obstacle that you had to get past? And I’m thinking evolution, how we got the Bible, philosophical arguments for the existence of God. He said to me, Remember that story where Jesus cast the demons into the pigs? What’s up with that? And I thought, That’s your biggest objection? That’s really what’s holding you back? I said, Did you ask this in the Bible? The first thing the Bible study leader said to him is, Gee, I don’t know. I said, Oh, that’s a bad start. He goes, No, that’s a great start. It was great. It was great when somebody admitted they didn’t know something because I thought Christians are all a bunch of know-it-alls. But then the next thing the guy said was, Well, I guess what this story tells us is we really shouldn’t mess around with demons and that there must be something really different between being a person and being a pig. And I thought that sounds pretty good. It’s not the most thorough answer. I said, So did that satisfy you? He goes, Yeah. And the next thing he said was the most important. He said, You have to understand I was raised in a place where they kept saying stop asking questions; you don’t need answers to your questions. When this guy respected my question and gave me a pretty decent answer, I thought, ’Oh, Christianity isn’t for stupid people. There are answers’. And then I said, So did you ask a million questions He goes, No, I didn’t need to. I figured if there’s a decent answer to that question, there’s probably decent answers to my questions. I became a Christian soon after that.

Matt Tully
That’s such a profound story because it does speak to the posture that we have sometimes as Christians speaking to unbelievers, speaking to weak believers who are struggling with different doubts, that can make all the difference. It’s not always, as you kind of said before, intellectual download of the right answer.

Randy Newman
There is a posture that I’ve seen, and I see it far less today, but there was a time around thirty years ago where the posture in the apologetics world was we have the answers, we can answer all their questions. And the implication was their questions are stupid, but we’ve got the answers. And sometimes it’s, Their questions aren’t real questions. They’re just smoke screens. Well, sometimes they’re just smoke screens. Yes, but not always. I remember hearing one apologist say when people ask this question, they’re not really asking this question; they have a moral problem in their life. There’s some kind of immorality going on in their life. And I remember thinking that that might be true in some cases, but how can you make such a blanket statement? That’s not being respectful to people. Remember, Peter tells us to do all of this apologetics with gentleness and respect. And there was a time when it wasn’t very gentle and it wasn’t respectful. I think we’ve come a long way. I think there’s tremendous gentleness and respect now in the apologetics world and in the evangelism world. I’m very encouraged about the trends.

25:02 - I Doubt Because of All the Pain and Suffering in the World

Matt Tully
I want to run quickly through a number of different reasons for doubt that both unbelievers and even some Christians might struggle with in their lives. I wonder if you can, as an example and as a model to those Christians who are listening who want to be a support to their friends, but maybe even for someone who’s listening right now who himself would be struggling with some of these reasons to doubt Christianity. I wonder if you can give us an initial stab at how you would respond to somebody who expressed this to you. The first one: I’m struggling with doubt because of all the pain and suffering that I see in the world around me. Every day we hear of new tragedies around the world and sometimes in our own homes that I just can’t reconcile with the God of the Bible.

Randy Newman
Yeah, and I think this is very, very common, and whatever help I might be or whatever help you find, don’t be surprised if you’re going to need more help with this again in the future because there will be other things that come along. I’ll be very honest. I’m struggling at this very moment because of the horrors that are taking place in Israel and Gaza. I’m having to go back to lessons I’ve learned and repeat them and rethink them and re-wrestle with them and get on my knees and wrestle with God like the Lament Psalms model for me. How long, O Lord, will you let this kind of horror continue? So I think that there is a lamenting mode of being a believer in the world at this point in God’s plan or stage of history. I want to tell people don’t be surprised by these doubts, and I want to say to doubt your doubts. But I want us to dig into them and, either for the first time study or remind yourselves when you last studied, what are some of the best answers that have been given about this problem? So if it’s about the problem of pain and evil and suffering, I would read C. S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain, or Peter Kreeft’s book Making Sense Out of Suffering, or Tim Keller’s book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. And these are difficult books to read. We don’t want to read them and we don’t want to watch the YouTube videos of people giving good answers to these because it’s painful to dig into it. But I also want to say that there is a temptation to walk away from God in these times. Well, then what? That’s walking into a worse place. The living apart from God’s answers leaves you with another set of answers that are terrible, that are pathetic, that are weak, that are no help at all. There are a lot of people who are atheists, and they became atheists because they saw suffering, so they walked away from Christianity. The atheist explanation for suffering has no hope in it whatsoever. No resources to be a good friend when somebody else is suffering. You’ve walked away from the resource of prayer that can give you a sense of hope in the midst of not having intellectual answers. So with all of its incompleteness, the Christian incomplete answer is a million times better than the skeptic atheist answer. And we need to look at the ugliness of that in its raw ugliness and say I’m going to cling to the Christian one because, yeah, I still have questions. If I drew a pie chart of how I handle this, there’s a big chunk of the pie chart that says “I don’t know.” But there are a whole bunch of the slivers of the pie chart that help me tremendously get through pain and suffering.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful answer because, again, it seems like it does two things at the same time. On the one hand, it doesn’t over promise what Christianity will do and can fix in the midst of the suffering of this world. We don’t have an easy answer for why all these things happen. We don’t have a definitive way to put an end to all of it because we believe we live in a broken world. And yet your answer also reminds us that the grass isn’t always greener. I think sometimes as Christians we maybe are the most tempted, when we’re struggling with doubt in this area, we’re the most tempted to think that maybe there’s some other way of thinking that makes this easier. But you’re kind of saying that’s a fool’s errand.

Randy Newman
You don’t have to dig too far to find some stories of skeptics and atheists and what they said about death and how they face their own death. And it’s pretty empty. And some of them try to joke about it and crack jokes. And you go, that’s not really that funny. And then it’s also good to look at some people who have really, really suffered who are strong Christians and they say, Here’s why I cling to it. Joni Eareckson Tada’s many writings. We need to look at that and ask why would a woman who’s in a wheelchair and a quadriplegic for fifty years still say, I sing praises to Jesus because I love him? And there are lots and lots of people like that. I mentioned this just almost as a little aside in the chapter I wrote on suffering in this new book Questioning Faith. Why is it that so many African Americans have become Christians and became Christians at a time when they were enslaved by white people who claim to be Christians? Why in the world would they latch onto the religion of their slave owners? There must be something about that faith that is strong and solid and good apart from people who claim to be Christians who really aren’t or people who are some of the worst hypocrites. Frederick Douglass said some really, really beautiful things about the Christian faith. As best as I can tell, I think he became a Christian. But he had a slave master who beat him every day except on Sunday because that’s the sabbath. That’s the kind of nonsense hypocrisy he was immersed in. And yet, when he heard the gospel preached, he found it irresistible. Those kinds of stories need to grab us and say wait a minute. Okay, I got doubts. I’ve seen evil and suffering. Nobody’s ever beaten me six days a week, claiming that they’re doing it because they’re a Christian. So I can learn some things from Frederick Douglass and other people and compare the very, very disparate stories of belief and non-belief.

31:54 - I Doubt Because of the Hypocrisy of Christians

Matt Tully
That’s a good segue into another reason that we sometimes struggle with doubt. How would you respond to somebody who says, I’m struggling with doubt because of the hypocrisy of Christians? We often hear stories of Christians—those who supposedly have a relationship with the true and the living God—of them being just as selfish, just as cruel, just as deceptive as anyone else. So how can I really believe that Christianity is true when this is how Christians behave?

Randy Newman
It’s very disturbing. I wouldn’t try to minimize it if people bring this up. I don’t want to say, Well, you know, that’s a pretty small minority. I don’t know how small of a minority it is. I do think it is a minority, and I would try to at least talk about that like, Do you think that that’s the norm? Do you think that’s what most Christians are like? But we can’t minimize that too much. We somehow want to make a distinction between those very bad displays of the gospel and Jesus. We want to look to him. I hope I get to deliver this line sometime. I haven’t recently, but I hope someone asks this question, and what I want to say is, Yeah, that’s really terrible. You’re right. I still think Jesus is worth following. When I wrote my first book Questioning Evangelism, I decided to go after this topic and I titled that chapter “If Jesus Is So Great, Why Are Some of His Followers Such Jerks?” And I had to kind of sell that a little bit to the publisher, but they liked it. So that’s the jerks chapter.

Matt Tully
You hear this a lot from especially ex-Christians, people who have walked away from the faith of their younger years and the faith of their family and their parents, is they can say, I grew up in the church, and I have just seen the hypocrisy and it made me question whether or not this was all even real.

Randy Newman
And there have been some terrible, terrible things. Maybe the starting point is yeah, I understand that. I think if I would have seen some of that stuff then I might have also walked away. I might have, I don’t know. But when I step back, I look at Jesus. There are people who have followed him who are not hypocrites. They’re really beautiful people. They’re broken, they’re sinful, they admit it. But there are some Christian people who do some really amazing things. So I just want to get the landscape as full as possible. I think what some Christians want to do is they want to take all those hypocrites and just get them off the table. Get them out of the picture. No, no, they’re in the picture. They are. But so is Jesus. And so is his resurrection. And so are some really godly people who do amazing things. And I don’t know where, but at some point I also want to point out, and I don’t know the best way to word this. So listeners to the podcast, please do not quote me on this, but at some point we want to say there are a whole lot of non-Christian jerks too. I mean, there really are. There are a whole lot of non-Christians who are hypocrites. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in the world. They’re all over the place. And they’re not just Christians. Christians don’t have a corner on the market of hypocrisy.

Matt Tully
Okay, another area of doubt.

Randy Newman
See? He just wants to move on from that. We’re going to talk to the editors about that.

Matt Tully
No, that’s so true, and it is a good reminder. I think sometimes to Christians that can come across as, You guys are the ones who claim to know God. You’re the ones who claim to have this moral code from God that should make you better than the rest of us.

Randy Newman
It should. There is an outrage in that that is appropriate. There is an outrage, and we want to join them in that outrage. You’re right. and we want to point to the fact that this bothers us is a pointer to the fact that there is such a thing as right and wrong. And wrong and sin should disturb us terribly. So we don’t want to minimize any of that. Anyway, you wanted to move on. I stopped you.

35:45 - I Doubt Because of All the Other Religions

Matt Tully
Another source of doubt for us can be the person who says, *Look at all the different religions that exist in the world. If the God of the Bible is real, then why isn’t he 1) at least more universally accepted and recognized, and 2) how can I be totally sure that Christianity, out of all the religions, is the actual right one?

Randy Newman
When people say, Look at all the religions of the world, I want to say, Yeah, let’s look at them.

Matt Tully
So you’re not afraid of that challenge?

Randy Newman
Well, I’m afraid of people who only look on the surface. And on the surface you’re not really seeing what’s really at the heart of things. So I do think it’s good to study and learn and to see how they’re different. And there is a point where we want to say God has revealed himself, and it’s possible for people to miss that or look elsewhere or try to find answers elsewhere. But this has always been a problem. This isn’t just a problem for our day and age when we’re so very well connected because of globalization. It’s more obvious, but it was a problem in ancient Israel for Jewish people to only worship the true God. And you read the Prophets, and they have some really, really strong condemnations of worshiping other gods. And that’s what other religions are—the worshiping of other gods. So this has always been a narrow problem for believers. God’s people have always been surrounded by people who believe other gods. I think it’s a very recent, modern thing, only in the last 100 years or so when people say, Oh, you know what though? No, they’re really worshiping the same God. They just worship him in different ways. Well, if you really dig in, or if you have a good conversation with a sincere adherent of another religion, you’ll find out no, they don’t think they’re worshiping the same God. A devout Muslim does not believe that Allah is the same God as the God in the Bible. They think the Bible got it wrong. The Bible distorted it. You talk to a Buddhist who really knows his Buddhism, they know Jewish people worship one God and say that belief in other gods is false. Buddhism says there really isn’t a personal god that you would talk to that would have a name. And so it’s sort of these people who are on the outside who look on a very surfacy kind of way who say, I think they believe the same things. Andy Bannister has written a whole book on do Christians and Muslims worship the same God. And he really digs into the Qur’an. He has a doctorate in Islamic studies. He’s a Christian who has a doctorate in Islamic studies, so he knows the Qur’an and he knows Islamic teachings. They don’t think they’re worshiping the God of the Bible. That’s some kind of a secular thing that secular professors of religious studies classes have come up with. But it doesn’t have much substance to it.

38:56 - I Doubt Because Christianity Is So Restrictive

Matt Tully
Another area of doubt that people might struggle with is just the idea that biblical Christianity forces people into a very small box. The Bible defines us, it defines who we are, who we should be, how we’re supposed to live, who we’re supposed to love. All of these things are very restricting on our identities as people. And this feels like this is kind of an issue that has a lot of resonance today perhaps. Issues around like, Who am I? Who do I get to be and make myself to be? Christianity is just so restricting. How would you respond to that?

Randy Newman
Well, let me back up and say I think the task for us as Christians in preparing how to answer questions has a three stage process of answering. The first stage is I want to make sure I’m really understanding the question. I hear the question and I ask more questions to clarify. I want to make sure that I’m really answering the question the person’s asking. Secondly, I want to think, Okay, so what’s the answer? What does the Bible say? But then there’s the third, and it’s the one that I think people ignore the most, and it’s, What do I say? I don’t just start with, Well, here’s what the Bible says. There. God said it, I believe it, that settles it. I mean, that may be theologically right and philosophically watertight, but it didn’t really help the person that we’re talking to understand or move from error to truth. And so there’s a lot of wisdom. We need to do our homework and know what the Bible teaches about that. But then there’s, Okay, where do I start?*I’m not ignoring your question.

Matt Tully
It’s the question of how do I persuade or how do I help someone to understand something that, again, sometimes it’s more than just intellectual understanding that needs to be addressed in some of these doubts.

Randy Newman
So we need to study the methodology of Jesus’s answering of questions. Because he didn’t always answer, or at least he didn’t give an answer right away. The classic case. The guy comes up to Jesus, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? All right. That’s a pretty straightforward question. What’s the answer? What some of us would have said in that situation was, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and receive him as your savior and Lord, and you’ll be saved. Or we would say, Well, your question implies that you’re trying to work your way into heaven, but you know, works don’t work. By the works of the law no one is saved. That’s the theology we would communicate. And that’s right. And that’s true. And eventually that’s what that guy needed to hear. But what did Jesus say? Jesus said, “Why do you call me good?” Wait a minute. I always picture the disciples in the background going, He gave the wrong answer. Go tell Jesus how to answer this question. This was an easy one. “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” What’s he doing? He wants to get the guy at the root of his question. His question is, If I just know what to do, I’ve probably already done it. Because then when Jesus does quote commandments, what does the guy say? “All these things I’ve kept since I was a youth.” And Jesus is thinking, You still haven’t gotten to the point of realizing how impossible it is for you to save yourself, so I’m going to have to make you very uncomfortable by saying something that will show you, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that’. So he quotes about giving away everything and the guy goes away sad. So what’s the question that’s being asked? What’s the answer? And then, what do I say? So with your question—Isn’t Christianity narrow and confining? And by the way, I think when someone asks that question, I think in a lot of cases it’s about sex. It’s telling me I can’t sleep with whoever I want to sleep with. So what’s the biblical answer? Well, the biblical answer is no, you can’t sleep with whoever you want to sleep with. God is very narrow. It’s one man, one woman, within marriage. Okay, yes, that’s the answer. But if you just quote that at bumper sticker level—Well, no, God says it’s one man, one woman for life—you didn’t really help the person. You didn’t meet them where they’re at. You didn’t connect with them in gentleness and respect. So what we need to do is a bunch of brainstorming of, Now, what do I say to people? And so what I want to say to people is, Don’t we need some limits? Shouldn’t there be some limitation? I’m a married man. I’ve committed myself to be faithful to one woman. If I said to my wife, Hey, I think this is too narrow. I want to go do things with other people, I’m doing terrible harm to her. I’m hurting her deeply. I’m violating things that I made commitments before God. I said I would be faithful till death do us part. I’m setting an example for my children and my grandchildren about how to live in ways that are destructive for them. So I want to say, Shouldn’t there be some limits? And I want the person to go, Yeah, there should be some limits. Okay. How do we figure out what those limits are? And what I want to get to is God does set limits because he’s a loving God. He knows what is best for us. And we think unlimited is best. Well, that’s a very modern, secular view that just came along fairly recently. People have committed immorality for a long time, but they knew that it was immorality.

Matt Tully
Yeah, they hid it.

Randy Newman
They knew they probably shouldn’t be doing it, but now it’s celebrated. Well, shouldn’t there be some limits about what we say? And what I’m trying to say is, in this third category of what we say, we need to make people uncomfortable before we bring them the comfort of the good news of the gospel. Many people are very comfortable. Well, I just think that’s too limiting, and I feel very comfortable. And I want to get them to be uncomfortable about unlimited. If you really live that way, would that really be good for you? At some point, wouldn’t you say, Oh, wait a minute? I love Sam Allberry’s book Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? And he just turns it on its head. The very first chapter is “Why Do We Care Who We Sleep With?” And his point is we do because it’s a very big deal. It makes a very big difference. And if it makes a big difference to us, well then it would make sense that it makes a big difference to God. You just turn the question around long enough to help people think. I want to help you think about this, because I think for our culture that likes slogans, tweets, things no more than 140 characters, some topics are just a lot more complex than that.

46:09 - Our Longings Lead Us to Jesus

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, Randy, at the end of your book—a book where, again, you look at lots of stories of people wrestling with the faith, wrestling with what it means to be a Christian and what they think about God, wrestling with some of these doubts that we’ve even talked about today—you turn to the topic of beauty. You include this really wonderful quote from C. S. Lewis that we’ve mentioned a few times already today. I wonder if you could read that quote for us first, and then unpack a little bit what do you think Lewis was getting at, and why does that maybe serve as a fitting conclusion to our conversation today?

Randy Newman
I do love that quote. And this has such an important role in my own coming to faith because I used to go to those concerts at the Philadelphia Academy of Music every Saturday night and think, Someday I’m going to hear a piece of music that does it for me. I’m going to find my piece of music that connects me to the transcendent God. And it never quite came. Some of the pieces came closer than others, but then the piece of music was over and it was gone. So Lewis said that all those things are pointers. They’re not the end itself. They’re just pointing us in the direction that we should be looking. This was in his sermon “The Weight of Glory.” He said, “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to [sic] them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” I just love that quote and that insight that if you trust in it, if that’s where you put your trust, it breaks the hearts of its worshipers. If you find a person that you think, Ah! This is my perfect soulmate, give it a week. They’re going to disappoint you. You found the piece of music that just does it for you; the piece of music is going to come to an end. And the next time you listen to it, it’s just not going to be quite as good as the last time. Or you go to a place and say, Oh, I met God in this place! And then I went back and, I don’t know, they cut the lawn differently. But if you remember that those things are just pointers to the God who created them, it’s what Jesus said to the woman at the well. It becomes a spring of water from within that just keeps overflowing and overflowing and never leaves you thirsty.

Matt Tully
Randy, thank you so much for taking the time today to help us to address some of the doubts that we can, even as Christians, wrestle with and point us to that spring of water that lives forever.

Randy Newman
It’s my pleasure. Thanks.

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