The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our "Correct" Beliefs

by Peter Enns

No one just “follows” the Bible. We interpret it as people with a past and present, and in community with others, within certain traditions, none of which is absolute. Many factors influence how we “follow” the Bible. None of us rises above our place in the human drama and grasps God with pure clarity, without our own baggage coming along for the ride. We all bring our broken and limited selves into how we think of God.

we have misunderstood faith as a what word rather than a who word—as primarily beliefs about rather than primarily as trust in.

A faith that rests on knowing, where you have to “know what you believe” in order to have faith, is disaster upon disaster waiting to happen. It values too highly our mental abilities. All it takes to ruin that kind of faith is a better argument. And there’s always a better argument out there somewhere.

But we also have to remember that we are more than walking brains, and truth isn’t limited to what our minds can conquer.

For most of my evangelical Christian life, the faith modeled for me was largely faith as an intellectual exercise, a series of information sessions, diagrams, handouts, and overheads so you could be certain about what you know you believe and go through life with unwavering confidence, ready and able to withstand attacks on your faith from your atheist college professors, Roman Catholics, CNN, or Oprah.

In time, Protestant denominations were popping up like dandelions—Baptists, Anabaptists (Mennonites), Calvinists, Methodists, and on and on. They all agreed that getting the Bible right was the first priority, because getting the Bible right was the key to getting the Christian faith right. The problem, though, was that they each thought they carried that key in their pocket and kept it safe for the rest. And this is why Protestant church softball games even to this day sometimes end in a brawl. (I was actually in one once.)

It’s hard to imagine talking like this in church. Letting your guard down and bearing your soul with this degree of raw honesty is risky. You might find yourself in the middle of a protect-you-from-atheism intervention prayer phone chain faster than you can say “Bill Maher.” Or you might be judged as a weak or uncommitted Christian and shunned.

At one point, he said (and I’ll leave out his more colorful “sentence enhancers,” as SpongeBob calls them), “You know, Pete, a guy who really believes all that . . . well . . . you can’t kill a guy like that.”

God’s grand act of faithfulness is giving his only Son for our sake. God is all in. Jesus’s grand act of faithfulness is going through with it for our sake. Jesus is all in. Now it’s our move, which really is the point of all this.

The Adam and Eve story is about what happens when knowing is elevated above trusting.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Humans have been around for a long time, doing humanlike things—far longer, more widespread, and more complex than the simple stories of Genesis. We have ancient art in the form of cave drawings forty thousand years old. In Göbelki Tepe, Turkey, archaeologists uncovered the oldest known temple. Whoever these people were, they were worshiping some deity or deities about eleven thousand years ago, predating creation in the Bible by five thousand years.

But once you are left with one God who is also all knowing and all loving, “Why do senseless and horrible things happen?” is a lot harder to answer. That’s the monotheist’s dilemma: a schizophrenic God who is all loving and caring one moment and then distant and uncaring the next.

Is what we believe the only way? Are we right and is everyone else wrong? Do I believe as I do simply because of where and when I happened to be born? Would I be a committed Hindu or Buddhist, just as certain about the truth of what I believe, if I were born elsewhere? Can we really say with credibility and a straight face that Christianity—let alone my version of it—has a monopoly on truth?

How naïve and sheltered had I been to think that how I saw things was how they are?

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.

I’ve learned to accept this paradox: a holy book that more often than not doesn’t act very much like you’d expect it, but more like a book written two thousand to three thousand years ago would act. I expect the Bible to reflect fully the ancient settings in which it was written, and therefore not act as a script that can simply be dropped into our lives without a lot of thought and wisdom. The Bible must be thought through, pondered, tried out, assessed, and (if need be) argued with—all of which is an expression of faith, not evidence to the contrary.

It is so easy to slip into “right thinking” mode—that we have arrived at full faith. We know what church God goes to, what Bible translation God prefers, how God votes, what movies God watches, and what books God reads. We know the kinds of people God approves of. God has winners and losers, and we are the winners, the true insiders. God likes all the things we like. We speak for God and think nothing of it.

One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our model for this.

When faith has no room for the benefit of doubt, then we are just left with religion, something that takes its place in our lives along with other things—like a job and a hobby. Doubt is God’s way of helping us not go there, though the road may be very hard and long.

Like he had heard a question where I only made a statement. Like God was saying, “Move over, Enns. I’ll ask him myself.”

the need for certainty is at best a debilitating spiritual distraction, and at worst, simply destructive.

I need a God bigger than my arguments.

So here is my point: when it comes to living day in and day out in a messy world where things keep drudging on as they have been since forever and will continue on for the foreseeable future, the New Testament sense of urgency is hard to connect with.

I am certain that Paul’s suffering had to do with hostilities at the hands of the Romans and those who opposed his work. He may not have been thinking of faith crises like we have in our overly intellectualized modern Western world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t see our faith crises as a form of suffering. And I think we should.

When the quest for finding and holding on to certainty is central to our faith, our lives are marked by traits we wouldn’t normally value in others: • unflappable dogmatic certainty • vigilant monitoring of who’s in and who’s out • preoccupation with winning debates and defending the faith • privileging the finality of logical arguments • conforming unquestionably to intellectual authorities and celebrities

Adopting and intentionally cultivating in Christians a culture of trust in God, rather than raising up soldiers for holy wars, would neutralize such public perceptions and reveal a bit more of the true Christian faith—and of God. Such a culture of openness to God’s future is not a compromise to faith but a demonstration of it.