There are two types of people who are like two madmen strapped together back to back. They are the dogmatist and the doubter. The dogmatist is the person who has reduced his religion to dogma. This person has everything worked out. He has all the rules and regulations and rubrics in place. He knows all the moral regulations and restrictions. Every ‘i’ is dotted. Every ‘t’ is crossed. He not only knows it all, but he knows that he knows it all. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to dogma, but religion is more than dogma, not less, and the dogmatist has boiled it all down to the rule book.
The doubter seems to be the opposite of the dogmatist. He takes pride in debunking everything and doubting all verities. He has no time for the revelation, the rules, the restrictions, the rubrics and the regulations. He does not believe in God. He despises religion. He doubts spiritual realities. He debunks dogma, scorns sacraments, castigates the clergy and repudiates prayer. The doubter doubts everything, but never doubts himself. In this respect his belief system is as watertight and impermeable as the dogmatists.
Both the dogmatist and the doubter take refuge in their neat and tidy, self made and self defended little fortress. Both feel safe and secure, and both are just as locked tight in their own hypocrisy and narrow mindedness.
The true believer, on the other hand, takes what is good of all things and reconciles them. In other words, the true believer is both a dogmatist and a doubter. He believes in his dogma, but not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. He knows he needs dogma, but not to bolster his defense system, but as a map for his journey. The true believer relies on dogma as a man relies on a ladder–as a tool to help him climb. As a result, he spends time making sure the dogmas is right as a man check the ladder for broken rungs before he climbs. However, he does not mistake the ladder for the climb. The former serves the latter (if you’ll excuse the pun)
The true believer is also somewhat of a doubter–in fact he is a more radical doubter than any secular doubter for he doubts the very foundation of belief that the secular doubter takes for granted: he doubts himself. The true believer doubts his own perceptions and perspectives. He has learned that he is a product of a particular upbringing and set of assumptions. He is the product of a particular culture and a particular age and a particular mix of genetics. The true believer doubts himself most of all because he has learned that there is more in the world than himself, and he has accepted that most shocking truth of all–the truth that mortals dare not contemplate lest their universe disintegrates–that he is not the center of the universe.
The true believer trusts his dogma because it points beyond dogma, and he doubts himself because his self does not point beyond anything at all. The two together enable him to look beyond himself to that force called Love–the force by which all things were created and hold together, the force that ‘moves the Sun and the other stars’ a force which his dogma tells him took human form and was reflected in the movement of the stars, affected the movement of human history and effected an everlastingly new transaction between God and Man.
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I am sorry, but I find myself disagreeing with you. I think that your initial point was good but that somehow doubting and debunking are a good thing is something I do not see. Rather, it seems that, yes, faith is more than just following the rules, its living them. However, to call one who follows those rules strictly narrow minded and hypocritical is narrow minded yourself. How can you know that they are like that? What if they are like Luther was, worried so much about his own salvation that he became super meticulous in his life of dogma. But because he was ignored and insulted, he ended up dividing the church and leaving it a heretic. Those who are pure dogmatists are very different to the doubter (or the relativist catholic) in that they know that there is a power much higher than they and that they follow it not out of love, but out of fear. DO not insult the ignorant because they might turn around and bite back.Finnally, the true believer does not doubt himself because his self points to nothing but because his self is pointed toward God, and because of his Fear of the Lord, he doubts his worthiness, as he should. In Christ, DanielUD