What Is a Crisis of Faith? Doubt, Scripture and the Way Back

A crisis of faith is a time when the faith you lived by stops holding: prayer feels empty, God seems absent, or questions you cannot answer shake what you trusted. It happens to sincere believers, and Scripture is full of them. Many came through it with a faith that was quieter and stronger than before.

One of them was Asaph, whose name stands over Psalm 73. He begins with what he had always believed, “Truly God is good to Israel,” and then confesses at once, “But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped” (Psalm 73:1–2). He watched the wicked prosper while he suffered, and he came close to deciding that his faith had been for nothing: “Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain” (Psalm 73:13). He did not hide this from God. He wrote it down and put it in the hymnbook of Israel. We pray his words still.

If a crisis of faith has left you in despair, or thinking of ending your life, please reach out now. In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free and at any hour. Anywhere else, call your local emergency number.

It is more than a single question. Most believers have passing doubts, about a hard verse or an unanswered prayer, and they settle with time. A crisis comes when the doubt reaches the foundations: whether God is there, whether he is good, whether any of it is true. It can last months or years, and it touches everything, from Sunday worship to the way we pray at night.

It usually has a cause, and Scripture knows most of them:

• Suffering. A death, an illness, a loss that makes no sense. “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” the prophet Habakkuk complains (Habakkuk 1:2).
• God’s silence. Long seasons when prayer seems to go nowhere. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1), the cry Jesus prayed from the cross.
• The unfairness of the world. The psalmist’s own trouble: “these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world” (Psalm 73:12).
• Questions of the mind. Science, history, other religions, or a teaching that no longer seems to hold together.
• Hurt from the church. A leader’s sin, a cruel word, a community that failed us when we needed it. When believers wound us, God can seem to have done it.

Yes. Some of the greatest believers in the Bible went through it, and God did not cast any of them off.

John the Baptist had pointed to Jesus at the Jordan: “Behold the Lamb of God” (John 1:29). Later, sitting in Herod’s prison, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3). Whether John asked for his own sake or, as John Chrysostom believed, for the sake of his disciples, Jesus did not scold him. He sent back what was happening, “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk”, and then told the crowd that “Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist” (Matthew 11:5, 11:11). The man who sent that question from a prison cell was the man Jesus praised.

Elijah, after the fire on Mount Carmel, sat under a juniper tree and asked to die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). Thomas would not believe without touching the wounds (John 20:25). A father whose son was tormented by a spirit cried out the prayer many of us have prayed since: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24).

The struggle did not end with the Bible. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, canonised by Pope Francis in 2016, wrote in letters over several decades of a “terrible darkness within me” and a sense that Jesus had abandoned her. Many of the letters were published in 2002 and later gathered in the book Come Be My Light (2007). Sister Nirmala Joshi, then head of the Missionaries of Charity, the order Mother Teresa founded, said, “Mother (Teresa) did not doubt God, she continued to love him.” She went on loving and serving him to the end of her life, without feeling him near.

Churches answer in their own terms, and with care.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church separates a doubt we choose from a doubt that happens to us. Voluntary doubt “disregards or refuses to hold as true what God has revealed and the Church proposes for belief”, and it is a sin against faith. Involuntary doubt is something else: “hesitation in believing, difficulty in overcoming objections connected with the faith, or also anxiety aroused by its obscurity.” The Catechism warns only that doubt “deliberately cultivated” can lead to spiritual blindness (paragraph 2088).

The Westminster Confession, the Presbyterian confession of 1646, speaks of the believer’s assurance of salvation. It says that true believers may have their assurance “shaken, diminished, and intermitted,” sometimes by sin, sometimes “by God’s withdrawing the light of his countenance.” Yet they are never without “that seed of God, and life of faith,” and by it, even in the dark, “they are supported from utter despair” (chapter 18).

Scripture asks us to be gentle with one another in this. The King James Bible reads, “And of some have compassion, making a difference” (Jude 22), a verse the New International Version renders “Be merciful to those who doubt.” And Matthew applies to Jesus the old promise, “A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench” (Matthew 12:20). A faith that is only smoking is still a faith he will not put out.

Not by forcing a feeling. The psalmist’s turn came in the house of God, and the way back is still made of a few plain things.

First, tell God the truth. Pray the doubt itself. The Psalms give us the words: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God” (Psalm 42:5). A prayer as short as “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” is enough for a night when nothing else will come.

Then keep going to worship, even when it feels hollow. The turn in Psalm 73 comes in one line. The writer tried to think it through alone, “it was too painful for me; until I went into the sanctuary of God” (Psalm 73:16–17). Sing what you cannot yet say for yourself, and let the prayers of others carry you.

Let someone else believe for you for a while. Before Peter’s worst night, Jesus told him, “I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Luke 22:32). Our faith is not only ours to hold. Tell a pastor, a priest or a mature friend what you are going through. You do not need to have your questions solved before you speak.

Take your questions seriously; God is not afraid of them. Read one Gospel through, slowly, and look at Jesus himself. If your question is suffering or God’s silence, others have thought hard about it before you; our pages on why pain exists in a world with a loving God and on God’s apparent absence are a place to start. Some questions will stay open. Paul himself said, “now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

And care for your body and mind. When Elijah asked to die, God did not first give him an argument. An angel woke him twice and said, “Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee” (1 Kings 19:7). Exhaustion, grief and depression can feel exactly like the loss of faith. Sleep, food and a doctor’s help are not a distraction from God. Sometimes they are how he reaches us.

Then you are still welcome, and the way back is still open. When many disciples walked away from Jesus, he asked the twelve, “Will ye also go away?” Peter began his answer with a question of his own: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:67–68). Many have come back by that road, with some questions still open, because nothing else they found had the words of life.

And when the son in Jesus’ parable came home, “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). The father did not wait for him at the door. More verses for this season are gathered in 20 Bible verses about doubt.

The writer of Psalm 73 came out of his crisis without an answer to every question. He came out held: “Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand… My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever” (Psalm 73:23, 26).

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• 20 Bible verses about doubt
• What does Mark 9:24 mean?
• How do we reconcile God’s apparent absence with his promises?
• Why do pain and suffering exist in a world with a loving God?
• Prayers for strong faith