"People don't abandon faith because they have doubts. People abandon faith because they think they're not allowed to have doubts."
Too often, our honest questions about faith are met with cold confidence and easy answers. But false certitude doesn't result in strong faith-it results in disillusionment, or worse, in a dogmatic, overweening faith unable to see itself or its object clearly.
Even as a pastor, Austin Fischer has experienced the shadows of doubt and disillusionment. In Faith in the Shadows, he leans into perennial questions about Christianity with raw and fearless integrity. He addresses contemporary science, the problem of evil, hell, God's silence, and other issues, offering not only fresh treatments of these questions but also a fresh paradigm for thinking about doubt itself. Doubt, Fischer contends, is no reason to leave the faith. Instead, it's an invitation to a more honest faith-a faith that's not in control, but that trusts more fully in its Lord.
"As I was completing my PhD studies, I found myself living in liminal spiritual space and walking on the shoals of skepticism. What is more, my recognition that any number of Christian pilgrims had walked a similar rough-hewn path before me did little to buoy my sagging spirits and to buttress my nagging doubts. Would that Austin Fischer's Faith in the Shadows had appeared some twenty years earlier! Be that as it may, Fischer's book is both a barb and a balm-it calls us to be honestbefore God and assures us that skeptical saints do not scare God. My hope is that this timely, lively book will be widely disseminated and thoroughly ingested, as it will help us hear and join a swelling chorus declaring, 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.'"
Todd D. Still, Truett Seminary, Baylor University
"Fischer writes with a wonderful combination of keen intellect and unflinching honesty. He hits all the necessary topics, from fundamentalism to theodicy, while drawing on our best Christian thinkers, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to David Bentley Hart. But what Fischer does best is invite the reader into his own struggles with doubt. . . . Ultimately, the hero of Fischer's book is not the brilliant Christian apologists (though we appreciate their fruitful labors) but the beauty of Christ's love that is the only credible answer to interrogations of doubt."
