Doubt, Faith, and Crevasses on My Mind

by Peter M. J. Hess

Things did not look promising the evening before the summer solstice.  I stood alone at nearly 11,000 feet on Mt. Shasta’s Whitney Glacier, after eight hours of exhausting trail pounding and bushwhacking through scrub pine, over high rocky moraines, and down into dry glacial beds.  Standing on the glacier in shorts and a clammy t-shirt with darkness approaching and a cold wind blasting across the ice, I began to have doubts about this climb.

It was June 19, 2009, and the partners with whom I had planned to rendezvous and ascend the Whitney Glacier route on Shasta had gone on ahead without me.  Approaching the glacier I had experienced an extended hypoxia-induced visual and auditory hallucination and was convinced that I heard Conrad and Kevin talking with other climbers in front of their tent.  Now I realized I had only been hearing the wind whistling around seracs, giant glacial blocs jumbled up in the lower icefall, and that I was profoundly alone.

Glacial Contingencies

I decided I had to bivouac on the glacier immediately or face hypothermia and possible death.  At that late hour retreat was not feasible, and I had no tent with me as we were traveling “alpine style” – light and fast – and shared equipment (I carried the stove). I briefly contemplated sheltering under a cliff face to my left that was out of the fierce wind slicing down the glacier, but I found no flat ground there, and then thought better of courting such close exposure to rock avalanches. Instead I selected a six-foot-high gravel esker in the middle of the ice field.  It was a good choice, too:  the Whitney Glacier between the first and second icefalls is a virtual shooting gallery, with both Mt. Shasta (14,179) and its satellite cone Shastina (12,335) constantly dumping rock fall that threatens the unwary traveler.

With my ice axe I dug a six-foot-long trench – like a shallow grave – and in it I placed my bivy sac with my thermal pad and down sleeping bag.  At the head of this trench I erected a rock and gravel berm eighteen inches high and covered it with my parka pinned down with rocks to fashion a solid wind break. When the evening wind died down enough to light a match I cooked a very salty freeze-dried meal of chicken and rice on my backpacking stove, and for once my body was craving such a high-sodium meal! I melted snow for the morrow’s three liters of water, and retreated into the shelter of the bivy sac.

From my cozy zero-degree down bag I enjoyed a gorgeous sunset, and was serenaded to sleep by the song of coyotes howling in the scrub pines below.  At two o'clock in the morning a tremendous crash shocked me awake. I sat bolt upright, heart pounding in terror, transfixed by a tremendous roar of tons of rock falling right onto the spot where I had initially contemplated camping.  The rocks skittered across the ice and came to rest just on the other side of the gravel esker which served as a protective barrier for my bivouac.  During the rest of the night I heard and even felt deep bumps and creaks and groans emanating from the glacier below me, as if it were a living organism.  The sound of a glacial crack carries a long way through ice, and it's almost impossible to determine the direction of origin.

In the wind and darkness my doubts from the evening before loomed large.  Should I be worried about this or that menacing noise? Would the next day dawn stormy?  Could I successfully thread my way alone through the crevasses of the upper icefall and then negotiate a crossing of the bergschrund, the massive crevasse where the glacier is pulling away from the mountain?  Could I catch up to my mountaineering partners far above me?  Could we safely descend the north ridge if a storm arose?

At daybreak the sunlight falling on Mt. Shastina to the west was spectacularly beautiful, a reminder to me of why climbers pursue this arcane and perilous activity!  After tea and some oatmeal and a protein bar, I laced on my crampons and started up the glacier. Since by circumstance I was climbing solo—with no backup for rescue in case of a crevasse fall—I followed as exactly as I could the route my comrades had taken before me. My vivid hallucination from the night before had subsided, but occasionally I had the impulse to call out to the seracs that looked like hooded Trappist monks solemnly processing in their white habits up the icy slope. Looking behind me down the Whitney Glacier I saw an unusual and ominous thunderhead roiling up to the north of the mountain.

I reached the top of the glacier and confronted the yawning bergschrund crevasse.  I didn’t relish the thought of climbing down into the crevasse, and I was unequipped for an ice climb up the other side, so I searched for a snow bridge.  West along the crevasse I finally found the last unmelted snow bridge across the bergschrund. I tested it, prayed it would not cave in, and then gingerly stepped out onto it.  Amazingly it held!

All the time that I was negotiating the glacier and bergschrund and ice bridge, my mind kept flickering over questions with which I’ve been preoccupied for the last two decades:  the meaning of life and death, the function of doubt and faith, purpose or randomness in suffering, how God might act in the world, whether non-human animals have “souls,” and the nature of the human person in an evolving biosphere.  This was my mental nourishment as I toiled up a long, steep, snow slope to 13,000 feet where I hoped to catch up with my partners.

I also thought about theology and how the tasks of theology are in important respects parallel to the challenges facing a mountaineer. The objective of mountaineering is to descend alive and in one piece, and to summit if conditions are favorable. The objective of theology is to explore possible articulations of faith through close study and contemplation while respecting traditional texts and insights—and (when conditions are favorable) to suggest new interpretations.  The climber’s tools are ice axe and crampons, helmet and ropes, harness and carabiners, ice screws and the support of the rope team.  The theologian’s tools are hermeneutics and language, textual criticism and theological models, historical and cultural understanding, and the critical feedback of the believing community.

Plunging the handle of my ice axe into the snow to protect each step, my mind wandered to thinking about methodological doubt and how my faith in the solidity of the snow bridge over the crevasse was a figure of the interdisciplinary dialogue between religion and science. The ice on both sides of a crevasse is more solid than the seasonally temporary snow bridges that span it and then collapse as summer advances. Likewise the bridges connecting the disciplines of science and theology are delicate and sometimes collapse. I thought, too, of other parallels between climbing and theology:  both endeavors can involve hope and fear, experience and naïveté, long-term planning and quick response, confidence and faith and doubt. In this essay I will look only at the last of these.

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The Role of Doubt

Doubt can be seen in both a negative and a positive light. On the negative side it can be a crippling impediment to the mountaineer who magnifies out of proportion all the subjective and objective dangers of climbing:  fatigue, lack of nutrition, inadequate training or equipment, rock fall and avalanche potential, failure to make a self-arrest, hypothermia, sudden storms, hidden crevasses, cerebral edema, etc. Magnified doubt can leak into our normal consciousness, overwhelming us and  hindering the effectiveness of our climbing.

Self-doubt can similarly be a problem for the theologian:  am I equipped to undertake this interpretive project? Am I unconsciously reifying what is only a model? Am I legitimately interpreting theology in light of growing human knowledge, or am I carelessly compromising essential doctrine?  Do I adequately understand both the theology and the science?  Am I engaged in self-aggrandizement that leaves the self-correction of the believing community behind? Magnified intellectual doubts can leak in and overwhelm our normal consciousness, hindering our theological creativity.

But doubt is an essential part of the toolbox of both climber and theologian, playing the same role methodological doubt plays in science. A climber procedurally doubts and tests every rock placement, every snow anchor and ice screw, and double checks crucial moves with other team members. Analogously, Australian theologian Frank Rees proposes an intriguing model of theology as dialectical movement between doubt and faith:

These dynamics of doubt and its quest for understanding have given rise to the theological metaphor of God as conversationalist, a God who questions, invites responses, and is continually seeking a living consensus. The life of faith thus essentially involves questioning and being questioned. Doubt, protest, and a quest for new ways of responding to God are appropriate expressions of a living faith. (Frank D. Rees, Theological Reflections on the Journey of Faith (Liturgical Press, 2001, p.228)

There is no single right way to scale a mountain: on a team climbers are always in communication about route, equipment, pace, weather, and safety precautions.  And just as truly, there is no one right way to believe as theists, or more specifically as Christians: theology is always a conversation among believers who have different backgrounds, talents, and life experiences. Just as we use doubt to double check every aspect of the climb, so we use doubt to double check our theological assertions.  The trick in both theology and mountaineering is to assess when our doubt is a legitimate cautionary factor helping correct overly risky claiming or irresponsible theology, and when excessive doubt hinders our climbing or our articulation of belief.

Let me illustrate this interplay of doubt and faith with one example. In mountaineering the “crux move” is the single hardest maneuver encountered on a given climbing route. If the gradual theological appropriation of evolution were a climbing route, the “crux move” would be accepting the idea of human evolution into the imago Dei. Most theistic evolutionists have no trouble conceiving of the Big Bang as the ground of God’s generativity, or with abiogenesis as one locus of divine creativity or with God’s playing dice through a billion years of sentient suffering. However, where popular audiences–and even some theistic evolutionists–have serious problems is with the acceptance and interpretation of the idea that Homo sapiens has seamlessly (over tens of millennia) evolved into personhood, or “ensoulment,” or the image of God.  In my experience it is when I challenge the doctrine that “all humans and only humans have immortal souls” that the tomatoes are likely to start flying toward the lectern.

Evolutionary anthropology is more fraught with risk for theology than are most other scientific ideas, because it is intricately bound up with so many central aspects of Christian doctrine, such as the “Fall,” sin, moral consciousness, Christology, soteriology, suffering and theodicy, eschatology and the far future of the cosmos. The crux move of integrating human evolution into theology has not been made at all by some.  Pope Pius XII in Humani generis (1950) explicitly refused the move by putting a protective belt around the soul: Catholics are permitted to entertain the hypothesis of evolution insofar as it pertains to the human body, but not at all to the soul, which is created immediately by God. (Humani Generis, 37, 1950.) How unfortunate that Pius XII’s protective belt should seal off forever from psychology or neuroscience the study some of the most interesting and important questions about what it means to be human: how our spiritual response to God is related to the evolutionary history of human consciousness.

Doubt is an essential constructive principle for anyone wishing to integrate evolution into a theological framework.  That includes doubting the traditional theological formulae hammered out in a pre-scientific era. Considering the evolutionary trajectory of Homo sapiens, we need to rethink the theology of the “soul” and of human personhood in a way that is faithful to scriptural revelation and doctrine, and yet is responsive to human experience and reflects rather than contradicts what science progressively reveals about the universe and our place in it. How can Christian theology integrate a naturalistic evolutionary account with questions in theological anthropology—questions about the nature of the soul, the nature of human personhood, and the doctrine of the imago Dei? How might we both affirm divine sovereignty and maintain the integrity of biological and genetic science, and the view that humans are “stardust become conscious of itself”? 

The warrant for such an integration lies in the sacramental nature of Christianity. In its theology of creation Christianity affirms not only the infinite transcendence of God, but also the divine immanence. Because nature exists within the divine reality (in a panentheist model) nature itself is capable of manifesting the divine through bread and wine, oil and water, fire and light. Divine creativity operates though the secondary causes of a universe capable of endlessly bringing forth wondrous forms, from the first eukaryotes to Homo sapiens in the image of God. Although the bible does not contain a well-developed doctrine, the imago Dei is the foundational assumption of the scriptural teaching about the nature of human existence. The moral and spiritual response of humans to the Word of God is intelligible only in light of the imago Dei:  only if humans reflect God’s image are we able to comprehend and respond to Jesus’s invitation. Rees notes that, "At the core of the Christian faith is the invitation to respond to Jesus Christ, in whom the divine-human conversation is embodied…In faith, belief, and doubt, we offer our living response to this the most central question God asks.” (Rees, Theological Reflections)

Blizzard and Crevasse Fall

During our climb of the last thousand feet of Shasta a severe storm developed, and on the summit plateau we faced winds of nearly eighty miles per hour and temperatures well below freezing.  Lingering on the summit for photos was out of the question, but I did take a sip of my favorite scotch – Talisker from the Isle of Skye – to celebrate the climb.  Periodic bursts of thunder accompanied the beginning of a serious blizzard. We descended the steep and icy ridge on the north face between the Hotlum and Bolam Glaciers in a virtual whiteout, which nearly led to disaster.

In whiteout conditions the horizon disappears, and so did the usual longitudinal surface depressions that are the telltale signatures of lurking crevasses. Unwittingly we strayed into the dangerous crevasse field of the western lobe of the Hotlum Glacier.  Plunge-stepping down the slope, my right leg suddenly punched without warning through a snow bridge into the black void of a concealed crevasse.  I kicked wildly and felt nothing below me, but fortunately the slot was not wide and I managed to snag the lower wall with my crampon fangs. With my forward momentum and a well-placed ice-axe strike I was able to extricate myself and sat down trembling to wait out the storm. When the intense ground-level whiteout lifted partially I saw with horror the yawning bergschrund crevasse above and to the right of me – in my descent I had missed it by only a few feet!

We reached timberline wet and cold, the clouds obscuring all major landmarks that might to direct us to the trail back to the road head. I cooked a last supper with our remaining gas and we made a second cold, damp bivouac in fast falling snow, growing colder with every minute.  We were almost out of food and fuel, and completely out of water, sucking on snow for hydration.  In idle desperation I phoned my wife, knowing that there was no cell coverage on the mountain.  To my astonishment – and I don't take “miracles” lightly – my son Michael answered, and I had a thirty-second conversation with Viviane before the signal was lost.  She phoned the other climbers’ wives and the climbing ranger station in Weed to alert them that we were still on the mountain.

Conclusion

I awoke on the summer solstice to the feeling of large flakes landing silently on my face, and we shook off an inch of fresh snow that had piled up on our bivy sacs. As we decamped and hiked out through a winter wonderland, I thought about the role that both doubt and faith had played at many points in our climb and survival.  The elements that had sustained us – skill and experience, judgment and equipment, conversation and community – had enabled us to meet both anticipated rigors and unexpected challenges. And this contingency reminded me that the theological task is likewise a pilgrimage undertaken by a believing community, a journey that must remain ever open in faith to whatever lies in store for the evolving human species:

The ‘resolution’ of doubt is not through finding a form of belief without questions or struggle. Rather, as we journey with the questions we discover that doubt and belief, perplexity and praise, struggle and rest are all gifts of the same Spirit who bears witness with our spirit, gathering us into the eternal, divine conversation.” (Rees, Theological Reflections)

That weekend we humans at the same time seemed only of trifling significance before the power of nature on a huge mountain, and yet resourceful in shaping, managing, and interpreting our experience.  I remembered that Mt. Shasta is 600,000 years old and will erupt again, and that God is the ground of all being.  Mountaineering and theology are complementary constituents of my own engagement with the world, and in my lifelong pursuit of summits and truth, I find in both endeavors a comingling of doubt and of faith, of transience and of permanence:

Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed," says the LORD (Isaiah 54:10)

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Peter M. J. Hess earned his M.A. in philosophy and theology from Oxford University in 1984, and his Ph.D. in historical theology from the Graduate Theological Union in 1993. His scholarly work focuses on the complex interactions between science and religion in early modern Europe, particularly on the impact of science on natural theology, and the appropriation of the developing sciences by theologians during this period. 

He has taught theology at the University of San Francisco and other Bay Area institutions since 1985, and has recently completed six years of service as Associate Program Director of the Science and Religion Course Program (SRCP) at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, CA. He and his wife Viviane have two sons, and he is an avid mountaineer and rock climber.

Peter is also the author of Catholicism and Science, a Greenwood Guide to Science and Religion.