A Review of Dominic Done’s “When Faith Fails”
Between Faith and Unbelief
There was a period in my life not too long ago where I really doubted in the existence of a God. I was unemployed, I was being Twitter shamed for trying to actually make money and be productive by using IndieGogo in a new and novel way, and just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Luckily, that was only a season of my life and things have gotten better for me — to the point where perhaps I take God for granted (which should be the subject of an entirely different book review). I wish I had Dominic Done’s debut book, When Faith Fails, during that fallow period of my life. Here’s as good of a recommendation for the book as any for you: it might have helped make things better for me a whole lot faster. Maybe.
The book is structured in three parts, with the first part being an underpinning of what doubt looks like. This was an astonishingly eye-opening part of the book for me, because Done basically posits that doubt has been rigged into the system. Using Genesis as a guide, Done notes that when God created the Earth, he ended his day by saying “and it was good.” Note that God didn’t say “and it was perfect.” By lowering the bar a few notches, Done speculates that God has engineered doubt or what’s less than certain or less than perfect into things to draw humanity closer to him. That, to me, is a whole new way of looking at doubt — after all, in most churches (thankfully not mine), doubt is looked upon with cynicism and is seen as being akin to a sin.
Done goes on to note that doubt is different than unbelief. Doubt, in fact, is the point between belief and unbelief that will either draw people into a richer, deeper and more meaningful relationship with God (and draw them into a relationship with God, period) or will encourage people to chuck everything over the shoulder in favour of atheism. Again, this was a new way of looking at how doubt works for me — and I suspect this may be true of most people — so the first part of the book was revelatory. The only segment that didn’t work for me was the chapter on Done’s struggles with belief. It was really a case of “I read too many books by atheists at university, but once my wife got me to read more spiritual writers to counterbalance everything, all was right in my world.” I think the personal story could have been supplanted with deeper stories from other people and a more journalistic lens be brought to how people struggle with faith.
One thing that is unique about this book amongst its Christian peers is that Done sprinkles in not only the personal memoir-esque bits, as most Christian authors are wont to do, but he draws upon classic literature to make his points. H. G. Wells and Jules Verne stories make noteworthy appearances in unique ways in the text for Done to make his arguments about what doubt really is. This, to me, is a different approach to ticking off boxes — particularly when it comes to secular points of view not drawn from Scripture (though Done does liberally quote from the Bible, too). This technique kind of elevates When Faith Fails above its brethren.
The second part of the book looks at four different ways doubt can manifest itself into our Christian lives: we can doubt what parts of the Bible say, we can have doubts due to scientific discoveries that seem to be at odds with our faith, we can have doubts that a God even exists due to the existence of suffering in our world, and we can have doubts when God is seemingly silent and doesn’t answer our prayers. Done offers convincing antidotes to these doubts, and even — and this nearly made me poop my pants because the author is seemingly an evangelical writer — notes at points that when we have doubts, it may be from reading the Bible way too literally (!). In this section, Done comes across as straight-laced and even-keeled, and shows how one can be rational in a scientific manner without having to sacrifice the poetry in believing in God.
The third and final part of When Faith Fails offers suggestions on how to deal with crises of faith, and this part of the book is admittedly a little overwritten. That’s because the final three chapters that make up this part largely say the same thing: if you have doubts, you’re going to have to lean in, dig deep and really wrestle with them to make any sense of them or come up with a definitive answer to the question “Will I Stay or Will I Go?” as it relates to religion and Christianity.
Overall, a lot of the material for the book feels borrowed from other sources (as the endnotes will attest). You could take a chapter on how God allows suffering and really write a whole book on the subject matter, so what you’re getting with this book is kind of a bird’s eye view. There are opportunities to dig deeper into the material by going to other sources, but I suppose that goes back to Done’s view that wrestling with doubt is a personal matter and each person really has to draw their own conclusions as to how the world works for them and what they want to believe in. And that involves research and work.
What is refreshing is that Done seems to see doubt as a mechanism to grow closer to God — assuming you’re not like me and suddenly are off taking him for granted. (One thing I should mention, Done uses non-capitalized pronouns for God, so I’m doing the same here.) Whatever faults that pepper When Faith Fails are minor due to the fact that this is a book that is almost universal — aside from a notion that Done has that certain things in Scripture are not to be messed with. It certainly was food for thought for me, and if you’re someone who has, is or will go through a period of doubting God and his motives, this will be an indispensable guide to getting through the hard times and coming out the other side a better person.
Dominic Done’s When Faith Fails: Finding God in the Shadow of Doubt was published by Thomas Nelson on February 19, 2019.
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