C.S. Lewis and the Doubting Heart

What the Oxford Don Discovered About Intellectual Faith, Christian Doubt, and the Reason to Believe

By: Jon Burnham

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

You have said the creed out loud in church while quietly wondering if any of it is true. The prayer you stopped expecting an answer to. The verse that makes less sense than everyone around you pretends it does. The argument you keep running in your head and never once win.

You decided that made you a bad Christian. Nobody warned you it happens to nearly everyone who has ever actually thought about what they believe: seminary students, elders, pastors who smile through the sermon while carrying their own unresolved argument with God.

The instructions were incomplete. Just believe, the teaching goes. Doubt less. Ask fewer questions. Have more faith. And when the doubt does not go away, you decide the failure is yours.

C.S. Lewis spent his first three decades building an airtight case against God, and the next three decades explaining, in public, exactly how that case fell apart. He found the difference between a faith that never asks a question and a faith that has already asked everything and held anyway, and this book carries that discovery straight into the room where you are sitting right now.

Jon Burnham has spent three decades sitting with people in Houston, in hospital rooms, in counseling offices, and in the quiet after someone finally says the doubt out loud for the first time. He brings Lewis's reasoning into that same room, chapter by chapter, organized around the specific question keeping a modern reader from real belief. Lewis argues. Burnham translates. Scripture arrives throughout as relief, tested against real congregations for three decades.

This is company for the exact hour when believing feels like a decision to stop thinking, and a way through it that has already worked for a great many people who assumed they were the only ones still asking.

C.S. Lewis and the Doubting Heart is Book One in The Great Teachers Series.