by Peter Enns
Life was great. But this newfound freedom and elation would also come with a cost, as I found out after about six months.
A fuse blew and faith went dark.
What happened?
My spiritual community with clearly defined boundaries and all sorts of intellectual no-go zones was suffocating, but it had one thing going for it: a spiritual territory was clearly marked out for me. I “knew” what I believed. I had some freedom to stroll about, of course, but guards were stationed at the towers to discourage me from venturing too close to the electric fence. Thinking for myself wasn’t necessary and in fact was actively frowned upon. The heavy lifting was done for me. I just needed to agree and sign on the dotted line (literally—we signed a detailed statement of faith). That made for a safe, predictable life of faith.
In this model, true faith and correct thinking were two sides of the same coin—and that mentality had deeply formed my own spiritual identity. That’s why faith went dark for me a few months after I left.
With no boundaries, nothing to sign, no Big Brother watching over my shoulder to make sure I maintained correct thinking, I was flying solo for the first time in half my life. It was up to me, not someone else, to forge a spiritual identity—just me and God with no one running interference.
And I wasn’t ready for it.
A question began forming in my head, as if imposed by some outside force: Well, Pete, you got what you wanted. No one’s telling you what to think. So what do you think?
Being confronted with that question was frightening—not frightening like The Silence of the Lambs or Trump 2016, but frightening like when you lose your bearings, when your life narrative looks more like a confused and jumbled mass of words on a page rather than the familiar story you knew and loved so well. Religious structure provides a sense of self. And now without it, I felt utterly alone, with no idea where all this was heading:
What do you really believe, Pete, when no one is telling you what to believe? Who is God to you? Is there a God? How far are you willing to go to accept the challenge of this new journey where you can barely see your own hand in front of your face? What familiar road map are you willing to leave behind? What will you do now that God is no longer a turned back page in a familiar story you can flip to whenever? What will you do now that God is far off, out of sight? And how will you handle the likelihood that things will never be as they were?
Seeking answers to those questions meant accepting the challenge of an unsettled faith. That takes courage, and if there is one part of my spiritual life that atrophied over the previous twenty years it was courage—the courage to think, to be honest, to be. I didn’t know how to “do” faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.
For over a year, at home alone and out of work, I felt adrift at sea, treading water with no shoreline in sight, not knowing where the tide was taking me—and just as often not even caring.
My faith had transformed from “I know what I believe” to “I think I know.” Then, as if bicycling down a steep hill with no brakes, it moved more quickly to
I think I thought I knew,
I’m not so sure anymore,
I don’t really know anymore,
Honestly, I have no idea,
Leave me alone.
It felt like pressing factory reset so my software could reload. And as it did, I began to wonder, Maybe . . . I need a major shift in my thinking.
Maybe knowing, as I had been taught to know, is overrated.
Knowing like that doesn’t last.
Knowing has its place, definitely, but not at the center of faith.
And then for me, the bottom line:
I can choose to trust God with childlike trust regardless of how certain I might feel.
I’ve come to see this process as sacred and ongoing. And it also takes courage—more courage and trust in God than I could have understood before.
What’s So Sinful About Certainty?
Our beliefs about God—which is to say our thoughts about God—are precious to us because they give us a sense of who we are and our place in this chaotic world. And we often can’t imagine any other way of being “us.” And so when our beliefs are threatened, the instinct, understandably, is to guard them fiercely, to resist any move as long as possible, to make the stress go away, and to stay in the comfort of our familiar spiritual homes.
But in resisting, we may actually be missing an invitation to take a sacred journey, where we let go of needing to be right and trust God regardless of what we feel we know or don’t know.
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.
“What are you talking about, Enns?! My faith doesn’t rest on my thoughts!”
Are you sure?
In ways we do not even perceive, we all create God in our own image. We may mean well and we may be motivated by our devotion toward God. But even when these ideas about God have proven very helpful to us, they become a hindrance to growth when the cement dries.
“Speak for yourself. I’m not creating God in my image. I’m just following the Bible.”
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’re human, in other words. We can’t help but think of God in broken and limited ways, as creatures limited by time and space.
But that isn’t the problem. In fact, the Christian faith declares that God freely and lovingly entered the human drama uniquely in one member of the human race, Jesus of Nazareth. God is okay with our humanity.
Here is the temptation: we can forget that we are human and delude ourselves into thinking that we can transcend our tiny place in the human drama and see from on high, as God sees. It turns out that is not really one of our options. Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking. But that is hard work. We like our ideas about God. We need them. And that is really the deeper problem here.
When we are held captive to our thinking, moving to what is not known and uncertain is automatically seen as a fearful development. We think true faith is dependent on maintaining a particular “knowledge set” and keeping a firm grasp on a tightly woven network of nonnegotiable beliefs, guarding each one vigilantly, making sure they all stay above the water line no matter how hard the struggle—because if what we “know” sinks, faith sinks right down with it.
Correct thinking provides a sense of certainty. Without it, we fear that faith is on life support at best, dead and buried at worst. And who wants a dead or dying faith? So this fear of losing a handle on certainty leads to a preoccupation with correct thinking, making sure familiar beliefs are defended and supported at all costs.
How strongly do we hold on to the old ways of thinking? Just recall those history courses where we read about Christians killing other Christians over all sorts of disagreements about doctrines few can even articulate today. Or perhaps just think of a skirmish you’ve had at church over a sermon, Sunday-school lesson, or which candidate to vote into public office.
Preoccupation with correct thinking. That’s the deeper problem.
It reduces the life of faith to sentry duty, a 24/7 task of pacing the ramparts and scanning the horizon to fend off incorrect thinking, in ourselves and others, too engrossed to come inside the halls and enjoy the banquet. A faith like that is stressful and tedious to maintain. Moving toward different ways of thinking, even just trying it on for a while to see how it fits, is perceived as a com
promise to faith, or as giving up on faith altogether. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the “sin of certainty.”
It is sin because this pattern of thinking sells God short by keeping the Creator captive to what we are able to comprehend—which is the very same problem the Israelites had when they were tempted to make images of God (aka idols) out of stone, metal, or wood. For ancient people, images made the gods present for the worshippers, something tangible to look at to let them connect with the divine realm. But Israel’s God said no. Any images shaped by human hands limit God by bringing God too far into alignment with ancient conceptions of the divine.
We don’t make physical images of God. But we do make mental ones.
I don’t mean that our thoughts of God are no different than images of wood and stone. The images we read about in the Bible always limit God, because they confuse the Creator with creation. Thoughts about God, on the other hand, are not only often helpful but downright inevitable. When we confuse God with our thoughts about God, however, those thoughts can become idol-like—getting in the way of the real thing, hindering rather than aiding a life of faith.
When we grab hold of “correct” thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God. We have turned away from God’s invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.
The need for certainty is sin because it works off of fear and limits God to our mental images. And God does not like being boxed in. By definition, God can’t be. I believe we are prone to forget that. God is good to remind us—by any means necessary, if we are willing to listen. God understands our human predicament and is for us.
Thinking Is Good
Let me be abso-posi-lutely clear about something so we don’t get off on the wrong foot: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with thinking about God or even seeking to think “correctly” about God.
Thinking about what we believe, learning more about what we believe, and disagreeing and deliberating with others, are normal for people of faith. At least I hope so, because I’ve just described pretty much the entire history of Christianity and Judaism, both of which are broad and deep when it comes to thinking and disagreeing about God. And as we’ll see, debates and disagreements about God are in the Bible, too, because thoughts matter.
We humans are unimaginably complex psychological, physical, and spiritual beings. And thanks to a huge cerebral cortex, we are capable of something quite amazing: abstract thought, pondering the deep mysteries of life, ultimate meaning, and faith. The capacity to form thoughts about God, our place in the world, and how the two come together, is not only okay but an inevitable and sacred occupation given only to our species, a gift from God, I believe, that God invites us to use.
Personally, I can’t help but think about the big questions of life and my own faith in particular. I went through nine years of seminary and doctoral work in biblical studies, not just to avoid getting a real job, but because I am naturally drawn to thinking about what I believe and why. I also like talking about what I think and tossing ideas back and forth, which is why I teach, blog, and write books like this one.
So I hope we are all on the same page here. I’m not saying that the life of the mind and working toward forming deeper thoughts about God are all bunk. The life of faith and the life of thought are not opposite ends of the spectrum.
Rather, I’m talking about a deeper, subtler, even subconscious problem that definitely isn’t limited to Bible students or other sorts of eggheads but is part of the daily struggles of normal everyday Christians.
The deeper problem here is the unspoken need for our thinking about God to be right in order to have a joyful, freeing, healing, and meaningful faith.
The problem is trusting our beliefs rather than trusting God.
The preoccupation with holding on to correct thinking with a tightly closed fist is not a sign of strong faith. It hinders the life of faith, because we are simply acting on a deep unnamed human fear of losing the sense of familiarity and predictability that our thoughts about God give us. Believing that we are right about God helps give us a sense of order in an otherwise messy world. So when we are confronted with the possibility of being wrong, that kind of “faith” becomes all about finding ways to hold on with everything we’ve got to be right.
We are not actually trusting God at that moment. We are trusting ourselves and disguising it as trust in God.
Holding our thoughts with an open hand, however, is a way of communing with God—like an offering to God, incomplete as it may be.
This book is about thinking differently about faith, a faith that is not so much defined by what we believe but in whom we trust. In fact, in this book I argue that we have misunderstood faith as a what word rather than a who word—as primarily beliefs about rather than primarily as trust in.
Let me say again that beliefs themselves are not the problem. Working out what we believe is worthy of serious time and effort in our lives of faith. But our pursuit of having the right beliefs and locking them up in a vault are not the center of faith. Trust in God is. When holding to correct thinking becomes the center, we have shrunk faith in God to an intellectual exercise, a human enterprise, where differences need to be settled through debate first before faith can get off the ground.
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.
Christian faith is trusting in God, a personal being, rather than an abstract force. That’s why we often refer to faith in God as having a “relationship” with God—which sounds like a Facebook status update, but it’s true.
My beliefs or thoughts about a person are unavoidable, and often helpful in deepening the relationship—but they may not always be right, and the relationship shouldn’t rest on getting them right. After all (and I know this may be hard to believe), I occasionally (by which I mean often) have mistaken beliefs regarding my wife, which she is only too kind to point out to me. But this skewed knowledge does not nullify our marriage.
Our marriage is not based on accurate knowledge of each other we hold with confident certitude. Our vows are based on our commitment to trust and pursue one another, whether or not we understand each other correctly and regardless of whether the relationship is moving along swimmingly. Even if we don’t like each other, annoy each other, or can’t stand the sight of each other, the commitment to trust is fundamental. In fact trust is actually fundamental to being human. Children, as soon as they are conscious, trust their parents unconditionally and without deliberation. As we mature, trust is at the heart of any healthy relationship. Our relationship with God is no different.
Trust works regardless of where our thinking happens to be at the moment. But when correct thinking is central to faith, we transmit onto God our own distorted mental image of God, with all its baggage, hang-ups, and deep fears. That is a tense faith, which we cover up with cleverness and arrogance, and which slides easily to anger and hatred toward those who think differently.
When trusting God is central—even just the simple act of trying to trust when we might not feel like it—we are walking a holy path. When we learn that it is okay to let go of the need to be right—that God is not going to pounce on us from behind the corner and give us a whipping but actually welcomes this step of faith—only then will the debilitating stress of holding on to correct thinking begin to fade. Then we are giving control over to God, wh
ich is a more secure place for faith to rest than on the whims and moods of our own thinking.
The focus moves from ourselves to God, in whom we trust—what Jesus calls “dying” and “losing” our lives.
I believe this journey of learning to let go, of moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and thus learning truly to trust God is a journey of great courage and humility, and one I believe God wants us all to take, each of us in different ways, different times, different lengths, and for different reasons.
This journey is sacred and transforms us. And without that transformation, we will not be able to do the very thing both the Old Testament and New Testament* of the Christian Bible call our greatest religious obligations: to love God and neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18; Luke 10:27).
That’s what this book is about, and here is a bit more about where the book is headed.
First we’ll look at how the preoccupation with correct thinking came to take such a hold on the Christian experience today (chapter 2). How did we get into this mess? Where did we make the wrong turn? And then we’ll see what kind of faith the Bible models for us, a faith where we don’t always feel certain but trust remains (chapters 3–5).
Watching how the biblical writers looked at faith as trust rather than certainty helps us through our inevitable uh-oh moments from a different perspective. These moments are not proof that faith doesn’t work, but only that a certain kind of faith doesn’t work—one that needs correct thinking in order to survive (chapter 6).
We’ll end by looking at how God’s absence is God’s way of addressing the sin of certainty (chapter 7), to cultivate in us a habit of trust that doesn’t depend on certainty to survive (chapters 8–9).
A final note here: I do not want this book to be seen as merely for those who experience “problems of faith” or “crises of doubt” (though it is for those people). The problem is bigger. When we think of “strong” faith as something that should be free of uncertainty or crises, I believe we have gotten wrong an important part of who God is and how the Christian life really works. This book is about how we might address that problem.