By Aaron Van Voorhis, Pastor at Central Avenue Church, Pasadena, CA
One of my favorite stories in the Gospels is the story of “Doubting Thomas.” Of course, that’s not what the text calls him, it’s the nickname we gave him. Many of you already know the story: after the resurrection, Jesus appears to his disciples in the upper room. But Thomas isn’t there.
When he returns, the other disciples rush to tell him, “We saw the Lord!” And Thomas, being the grounded realist of the group, basically says, “Yeah right. Have you guys been smoking those funny green cigarettes from Lebanon again?” In other words, “I’m not buying it.” He says he won’t believe unless he can see and touch the scars for himself.
And then it happens. Jesus appears again. He turns to Thomas and says, “Go ahead. Put your finger in the nail holes. Place your hand in my side.” Thomas does. And in that moment, he exclaims, “My Lord and my God.”
Now, what I love about this story is what the late Terrence McKenna once pointed out: among all the disciples, it was Thomas (the doubter) who actually got to touch the risen Lord. He was the one who got the direct experience. Why? Because he had the courage to question, to doubt, to say, “I need to see for myself.”
If you’ve ever wrestled with faith, if you’ve questioned what you’ve been told, if you’ve doubted the stories you grew up with, then congratulations. You’re in good company. Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it’s the doorway to a deeper kind of spirituality.
There’s a dialectical relationship, a coincidence of opposites, between faith and doubt. Just like light and darkness, joy and sorrow, atheism and theism, these things aren’t enemies. They depend on each other. Doubt strips away naïve belief so that we can encounter something real — a faith beyond belief.
When we pass through the crucible of doubt and unknowing, we come into contact with the Divine that is beyond comprehension, the God who can’t be contained by any single religion or book. That, to me, is what it means to “touch God.” Thomas, in all his skepticism, shows us the way.
The Fidelity of Betrayal
This leads to a principle that’s been deeply influential on me and others who identify with post-evangelicalism: what my Irish friend Peter Rollins calls “the fidelity of betrayal.”
It’s a paradoxical phrase, and I love that. Rollins suggests that sometimes the most faithful thing a person can do is to betray their religion for the sake of what is true, loving, and good.
Think about it: in a time when so much of the American church is wrapped up in hate, power, and exclusion, perhaps the most Christian thing one could do is to walk away. For some, that has meant leaving the institutional church altogether. For others, it has meant joining communities like ours here at Central Avenue: small, progressive, ragtag gatherings of misfits and spiritual refugees trying to rediscover what Jesus was actually about.
We’ve been called a lot of things: heretics, woke Marxists, wannabe Christians. But maybe what we’re really doing is living out that fidelity of betrayal, being faithful to the heart of Jesus by letting go of the things that no longer reflect him.
Jesus, the Great Betrayer
Of course, the best example of this principle is Jesus himself. His entire ministry was an act of “faithful betrayal” against the religious establishment of his day.
Remember the story of healing on the Sabbath? The religious leaders accuse him of working (a capital offense according to Exodus). But Jesus responds, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath.” In other words, if your religion is harming people, you’re doing it wrong.
Jesus consistently betrayed the letter of the law for the sake of its spirit: love, compassion, justice, and mutual care. That’s the fidelity of betrayal. He wasn’t destroying the faith; he was fulfilling it.
And yet, just like then, most of the church today still has a zero-tolerance policy for this kind of faithfulness. If I preached this sermon in many churches, I’d probably get run out the back door. Which is ironic, because we’re all reading the same Bible, but some of us see a very different message in it.
You Can’t Build Empire on Love
It makes sense why this message doesn’t fly in most institutions. You can’t build a powerful, wealthy empire on ideas like love, inclusivity, and open-mindedness. Those don’t control people. They don’t fill pews or coffers.
To build empire, you need fear — fear of hell, fear of divine punishment, and the promise of heavenly reward. That’s what keeps the machinery running. Love, by contrast, sets people free.
But the earliest Christians understood this fidelity of betrayal. Remember, they were Jews. And yet they abandoned practices like circumcision, kosher laws, and Sabbath observance. Why? Not because they rejected their tradition, but because they believed Jesus had shown them something deeper: that the spirit of the law always trumps the letter of the law.
“Oh God, Rid Me of God”
Centuries later, mystics like Meister Eckhart picked up the same thread. He once prayed, “God, rid me of God.”
That’s a wild thing for a priest to say. But what he meant was that we need to let go of our limited conceptions of God (the idols we build in our minds), so that we can encounter the God who is beyond all names and forms.
It’s the same journey Thomas was on, the same Jesus embodied, the same path we walk today. It’s the fidelity of betrayal: being willing to release what no longer serves love so that we can rediscover the Divine that does.
Where This Leads
This isn’t a rejection of faith. It’s a deeper faith, one that moves past certainty and into mystery, past dogma and into love.
When we dare to doubt, we learn to see how everything is connected; how faith and doubt, belief and disbelief, life and death, all flow together in one great oneness. That’s the “depth dimension” of spirituality. That’s where the fidelity of betrayal leads us: not into despair, but into wonder.
So may we, like Thomas, reach out and touch the mystery.
May we have the courage to doubt and the faith to follow where doubt leads.
Because sometimes the most faithful thing you can do… is to betray what no longer looks like love.
Want More on This Topic?
Listen to our full discussion on this topic at The Central Cast podcast episode titled "10/5/25: Touching the Scars: Why Doubt Leads to Deeper Faith" on YouTube or our podcast page.