Can Faith Include Doubt?

Whether faith can include doubt depends on what you mean by faith and by doubt. According to James, faith is not just a set of theological beliefs, but a lived, embodied trust in God that can only come through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This personal faith can vary from weak to strong or from little to great, and it always includes some degree of struggle with what we don't know or can't understand. The struggle is what we sometimes call "doubt" or "unbelief." By contrast, the word translated "doubting" in James 1:6 is about hedging your bets, putting some of the weight of your life on God's promises and the rest of it on other sources of hope. This kind of "straddle doubting" forfeits your access to the wisdom of God, which only comes through active trust in the person of God.