By Tim Borys
It ain’t faith if it’s on 3 wheels
Someone said something in an online chat recently that stopped me mid-scroll. They were reflecting on a moment of what felt like risk . . . stepping out of their religious system before they really had all the answers. And they said, with obvious warmth: “I feel like God meets us in a greater way when we go forward in faith.”
It sounds sort of obvious and simple, and I actually think they’re right, but I don’t think it’s that obvious. It highlighted an idea that’s central to a lot of evangelical Christianity, and certainly central to the church I grew up with. I was always taught that being faithful equated to staying put. Like literally staying in the church. Standing firm. There was never actually any “going forward” in my church’s version of growing in faith. Growing in faith simply meant in increased resolve to stay right where you were.
Everyone knows Thomas, yep that one, the doubter. History hasn’t exactly celebrated him. His Doubting Thomas nickname always felt like it pointed to a problem he had. A chronic skeptic. Like someone with a character flaw that needed correcting. I’ve even heard sermons that sort of mock him.
But step back for a second and look at what Thomas was actually being asked to believe. His friend and teacher, the one he’d walked away from everything to follow, had just been publicly executed. In a pretty brutal way I might add. And now, he’s hearing that his friend was alive again.
Come on, let’s be honest, are any of us buying that story? That is no small ask to believe. Thomas wasn’t just being the annoying contrarian at the dinner party, that guy who just finished his first year of Uni, and is trying out his new ‘critical thinking’ skills. No, Thomas was just being honest. And his doubt was pretty reasonable.
And I love that Jesus didn’t shame him for it. He showed up, wounds and all, and basically said to Thomas . . . hey, I get it, you need to wrap your head around this, check out these wounds, I’m cool with that, I just want you to know it really is me and this really did happen.
What Jesus said next is the part that’s really interesting though. And also the part that I think has been skimmed over a bit.
“Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.”
It’s easy to read a bit of a rebuke into that. Sort of a tsk-tsk in Thomas’s direction. Like. . . great, you figured it out, but the rest of the class didn’t have to use their calculators. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think Jesus is pointing to something else. Pointing towards an idea that’s central to the whole Jesus story. This promise that something really neat becomes available when you don’t need to touch the wound, when you don’t need the concrete proof. And dare I say, when you don’t need all the trappings of religion. It’s not a verdict on Thomas, it’s a world changing nod towards a whole new way of thinking about life and hope and creation and God.
Anne Lamott, who I think got it from her priest, and maybe riffing on a Paul Tillich quote, has a line that gets stronger the more you sit with it. Many of you will have heard it, or a version of it: “the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is certainty.”
Just pause for a moment with that, because it runs against almost everything most of us were taught. We were taught that doubt is the enemy, like an early diagnosis of failure, if not catastrophe. We were taught that faith means having no wobble, no questions, no fingers reaching for the wounds. Certainty was the goal. To be so assured in our belief as to render our faith complete. Certainty meant you were doing it all right.
But if Lamott’s right, and I think she is, then certainty isn’t the destination of faith. It’s a thing that sneakily replaces faith. When you’ve locked down all the variables, when the system is airtight, when you’ve convinced yourself you know exactly what God requires, and you’re doing it, you don’t need to trust anymore. You have a formula, a proven process. And however sincerely held those things are, they’re not the same thing as faith. And as Jesus gently told Thomas, they don’t even feel the same. One is “enough,” the other one is fully alive.
A system built on certainty has a built-in immune response to anything that threatens it. Follow the logic: if doubt is the enemy of faith, then it would stand to reason anything that introduces doubt is also the enemy, or an agent of the enemy. So information itself becomes suspect. Basically anything or anybody that doesn’t reinforce the certainty formula becomes dangerous. The shutters are swung closed. And this isn’t done dramatically, it’s done gradually, conversationally, with gentle suggestions about who is safe to listen to and who isn’t. You don’t need to defend the system if nobody inside it has the vocabulary, let alone the evidence to question it.
Paul said we see through a glass darkly, not clearly. At least not yet. What’s ‘certain’ about seeing through a glass darkly? The partial, uncertain, through-a-fog quality of our knowledge isn’t a flaw to be fixed by the right theological system. It’s the condition we’re all operating in as humans. Pretending otherwise, and then repackaging that pretending as ‘faith,’ is sort of the reverse of what Paul was describing.
The tradition I grew up in was built on certainty about religious forms. A specific way the Ministers had to function, right down to numbering them. I’m not making this up. Interwoven into that was a certainty of the church history, or should I say, their narrative of church history. To this day, most people in the church and its ministry will look you dead in the eye and insist this tiny little church is the sole continuation of the original apostles. I’m not making that up either. Those certainty building blocks all result in a certainty of it being the one and only way that “leads to salvation.” (Which is ironic, considering you weren’t allowed to say, let alone think you’re for sure saved). And now I am kind of digressing.
And here’s the thing, speaking of history; the founders of my old church weren’t wrong to question the religious establishment of their day. Late Victorian Christianity had accumulated a lot of stuff. The apparatus had gotten quite heavy. William Irvine looked at all of that and said, somewhat reasonably, let’s tidy this up and get back to basics. Strip it down. Ministers in pairs like the apostles, owning nothing, church in the home, etc. Simple, like the early church. You can see the appeal, can’t you. It had real force as a critique of over complicated religion.
The problem is that in swinging away from one set of forms, they simply picked a new set and started idolizing those instead. The stuff shifted, but the error didn’t. Instead of certainty about robes and cathedrals, now there was certainty about pairs of ministers and home meetings. The table and chairs changed, but the table and chairs were still considered more important than the food on the table.
And then, as institutions tend to do, it progressively tightened. The original counter-cultural instinct, which at least had a sort of reactive energy about it, gradually settled into its own orthodoxy. The screws turned slowly, which is why nobody ever notices them turning. And the theological tool for tightening them was language like “stand firm,” which sounds on the surface, like something a faith community should say to each other. Stand firm when the storms come. Hold your ground.
There’s genuine spiritual wisdom in the phrasing. But in a high-control system based on certainty of form and process, “stand firm” does a specific job. It simply means don’t move. Don’t question. Don’t follow thoughts to wherever they may lead. Keep your eyes on your fries. It doesn’t take a sociologist to see how quickly what’s billed as spiritual courage starts to be spiritual stagnation, and how they look identical in that setting. The stoic resolute quality of it all — incidentally, not UNrelated to the very Irish, very Scottish, very Christian-soldierish roots of the church — gives it a kind of backbone that makes resistance and questions and doubt feel like weakness.
And somewhere along the way, this certainty about forms got repackaged as faith. We have the right way. We’re certain of that. We have found it. Sung into the hymns, preached from platforms, passed down through generations. But certainty about a form of ministry is not faith. Trusting in apostolic succession to certify your salvation is not faith. It’s a system.
Here’s what I’ve noticed, and I’ll admit it’s a generalization, but it’s one I keep running into: the people who’ve left certainty-systems behind, are, by and large, more joyful. And the people still inside, are more dutiful, and more careful, and weirdly . . . more nervous. And in many instances the ones still inside the certainty of the church appear to carry a weight that doesn’t look much like freedom. Which is strange if you think about it. The ones who gave up the supposed guaranteed formula of the approved ministry and the airtight system should be the anxious ones. They’re the ones ‘out on a limb.’ Nothing to be sure of. No apostolic hand on the bicycle seat. But no, it’s actually the other way around.
There’s a moment when a kid is learning to ride a bicycle . . . terror on their face, white-knuckling the handlebars, constantly glancing back to make sure mom or dad is still holding the seat. The certainty of that hand on the seat is everything. The thought of it letting go is terrifying.
And right here, I also want to say, even when the hand was still on the seat, it was pretty fun. And you could see at least some of the neighbourhood. I want to be careful, because it would be easy for this to slide into condescension. A kind of bless your heart, you’re so cute with your home meetings and your paired ministry. That’s actually not what I mean. And that’s not what Jesus modelled with Thomas. Jesus didn’t mock Thomas, He understood him. He was gracious. He gave him the wounds to touch. He met him exactly where he was. But then he pointed toward the open door and said, there’s more. Way more.
And there was more. There was that moment when the kid looks back . . . and mom is ten feet behind, not holding the seat anymore. And for a split second there’s panic, betrayal almost. And then something shifts. The balance fairy arrives (I think that’s called physics). And the kid is riding. Actually riding. Free. Off down the street into parts of the neighbourhood they’ve never explored. A whole new world. And tell me that kid isn’t full of joy! A joy that was never available while they were focused on the certainty of that hand on the seat. Letting go wasn’t a disaster. It was the moment the riding began.
The forms, the traditions, the certainty; I understand why people feel they need them. Apparently I needed them too. But there is something more spacious available. Something that actually looks and feels like real faith. Something uncertain, a bit wobbly, needing real trust, but very alive feeling. Seeing through a dark glass and still moving forward anyway, not because you’ve got the right system, but because something in you recognizes . . . ohhhhh, THIS is how it’s supposed to feel.
By Tim Borys
June 5, 2026
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/thenonprophet/p/benefit-of-the-doubt?