The Sin of Certainty

The key to seeing this unsettling discomfort as a sacred rather than damning task is to decouple our faith in God from our thoughts about God. That way faith doesn’t rest on correct thinking.

we also have to remember that we are more than walking brains, and truth isn’t limited to what our minds can conquer. Christians, of all people, should know this, but too often they too seem to have bought into the modern project more than they might realize or want to admit.

means, genetically speaking, we can’t speak of a “first couple”—Adam and Eve—as the Bible says. The study of genetics seems to be a slam-dunk-over-the-defense-break-the-backboard proof for evolution—a first couple is genetically impossible. And the fact that an evangelical Christian, Francis Collins, led an international team responsible for mapping the human genome has made it an even harder pill for some to swallow.

The Bible does not have a good track record of promoting unity among those who read it.

The 150 Psalms we have in our Bible are basically of three types:         1. Everything is fine. God is great. Stay the course. 2. Things are terribly wrong, and I am at the end of my rope, but thank you Lord for coming to my rescue (alternate ending: I know you’ll come to my rescue soon/eventually).   3. Things are terribly wrong, I am at the end of my rope, and to make things worse, Oh Lord, you’re nowhere to be found.

Worshipping other gods or acting unjustly toward others gets criticized about every three sentences, but not this honest talk of feeling abandoned by God.

Ecclesiastes never says “You gotta know what you believe,” but rather “Trust God even when you don’t know what you believe, even when all before you is absurd.”

Believing is a “who” word. If we forget that, we will read into the Bible our own tendency to put what at the heart of belief, which sets us up to be preoccupied with correct thinking. And that misses the point.

Faith isn’t simply something that happens between God and us. Faith is a community word.

Along the way I came to see more and more that being right about God and making sure everyone else agreed with what I knew might not be the most important thing I could do in God’s eyes.

Maybe my purpose on earth isn’t to be the thought police first and love others after all their ideas line up as they should. Maybe my first order of business is to risk my own sense of certainty about God and love others where and how they are no matter how they do on my theology exam.

Doubt tears down the castle walls we have built, with the false security and permanence they give, and forces us outside to walk a lonely, trying, yet cleansing road. In those times, it definitely feels like God is against us, far away, or absent altogether. But what if the darkness is actually a moment of God’s presence that seems like absence, a gift of God to help us grow up out of our little ideas of God?

Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort, familiarity, joy, and sorrow—and of the false sense of control those things give us. Letting go of these things is a dying process.

Of course, we all know that dying, rising again, Christ in me, hidden in God, seated in heaven are metaphors—the use of common language to grasp the uncommon, a reality too deep and thick for conventional vocabulary. Following Jesus is an inside-out transformation so thorough that dying and coming back to life is the only adequate way to put it.

So let me say it in a way that the ancient Israelites couldn’t: when we are in despair or fear and God is as far away from us as the most distant star in the universe, we are at that moment “with” Christ more than we know—and perhaps more than we ever have been—because when we suffer, we share in and complete Christ’s sufferings. And we don’t have to understand that to know we should like it.

Trust is not marked by unflappable dogmatic certainty, but by embracing as a normal part of faith the steady line of mysteries and uncertainties that parade before our lives and seeing them as opportunities to trust more deeply.