Yesterday I read parts of a book called Is There a Text in this Class by Stanley Fish.  It is a book that looks at alternatives to literary theory, centring on reader response and arguing, contra some post modernists, that there are limits on interpretation determined by the unspoken rules/norms of an interpretive community.  (Are you impressed I wrote that? I am!).  Anyway, I found what follows in a chapter that explores the limits of what is, essentially, interpretive orthodoxy.

"doubting is not something one does outside the assumptions that enables one's consciousness; rather doubting, like any other mental activity, is something that one does within a set of assumptions that at the same time be the object of doubt.  That is to say, one does not doubt in a vacuum but from a perspective, and that perspective itself is immune from doubt until it has been replaced with another which will then be similarly immune.  The project of radical doubt can never outrun the necessity of being situated; in order to doubt everything, including the ground one stands on, on must stand somewhere else, and that somewhere else will then be the ground on which one stands."

The argument goes on for a lot more words and I can't claim to  grasp all of it, but it seems to say 'you can only doubt from a perspective of belief, otherwise there would be nothing to doubt.'  I found this quite fascinating, and potentially liberating for those who fear doubt (or questioning) as somehow indicative of loss of faith.  If I've understood him correctly, and if Fish is right, then bizarrely doubt/questioning actually demonstrates that belief is still there.  If belief goes, then the doubt evaporates as irrelevant.  Alternativley, so long as someone continues to doubt, they must also, to some degree, believe.  Lack of doubt might be more about lack of willingness to risk thinking or testing ideas rather than certainty.

I think there are some ideas here I might want to lodge for something I'm involved with next year where it just might be useful.  For now, I think I have found something helpful for pastoral situation where people express doubts or raise questions.