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

by Peter Enns

  One option is definitely not open to us—replacing trust with the safer option, belief, of being left alone with controlling God and turning God about in our heads. The entire idea of true faith seems designed to make sure that kind of faith—clinging to certainty in our beliefs—melts away like an ice cube on a red-hot skillet.

  If I were king of Christianity, after limiting church services to forty-five minutes and sermons to ten, as well as outlawing church “share time” altogether, I would proclaim a kingdom-wide decree that, at least for a while until we get it, “believe” should be stricken from all of our Bibles and replaced with trust.

  The content—the what—has its place. But if the who is not central, if it’s not personal, the what doesn’t count for us, at least not when life turns sour. I believe that God is more interested in the who. And that means walking the walk, not just talking the talk.

  Better: it means walking the walk when no words are left. That is trust.

  But, But . . . What About . . . ?

  I imagine some might be thinking of Bible verses that do seem to focus on believing and having faith as content words, of knowing what you believe, and they might want to know what to do with them.

  For example, James writes that those who lack wisdom need only ask for it, but to

  ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:6–8; emphasis added)

  It looks like faith is an intellectual word because faith means “never doubting,” and doubters receive nothing from God. So I suppose we’d better be certain about what we believe without a shred of doubt creeping in.

  But no. For one thing, if faith means never ever doubting, some psalmists, Qohelet, and Job are in big trouble. They clearly don’t do what James says here, but I don’t think we want to cancel their voices out as “double-minded and unstable in every way”!

  The Bible is a book of diverse voices that speaks into diverse situations and says what needs to be said then and there. One verse doesn’t cancel the other out.

  We also need to look at the verses above this passage. We see that James is writing to those who are facing personal trials—probably hostility and physical threats because of their faith in Christ. Sometimes in the life of faith we need to hear “God will not abandon you when you are struggling with trusting God.” Other times, in the heat of threats that many of us can’t relate to (at least I can’t), we might need to hear “This, right now, is NOT the time to dwell on your struggles with trusting God, but the time to trust God completely.” Persecution tends to simplify our choices.

  Still, I often hear that true faith means having steel-hard certainty about the truth of Christianity—not only for our own sake, but to be a good debater, win arguments, and be locked and loaded to defend the faith and convince people that Christianity is the one true religion.

  Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you. (1 Peter 3:15)

  But here too we need to look at the surrounding verses. Just as with the book of James, 1 Peter was written during a time of persecution. The persecuted readers aren’t being told that they need to be intellectually certain of God’s existence and communicate effectively to atheists and pagans how they know they’re right. Rather, in the face of persecution, Peter wants them to be prepared at any moment to bear witness to the God they trust with their very lives.

  Peter isn’t recommending a tutoring session so they get the right information down. He is encouraging them not to be overcome by fear but to trust God and be able to say so when the executioner is sharpening his ax.

  Yes. Always be ready. Cultivate trust so it is strong when you need it.

  I’ve known people suffering from terminal illness who say they’ve been preparing for this moment their whole lives without knowing it. They’ve been in all sorts of situations and seasons of life where they needed to let go of control and trust God. And now, facing the biggest letting-go moment, as we all will, their training is paying off. Trusting God has been a habit, which is now ready and able to strengthen them in their hour of need. They are ready to give to those around them “an account of the hope” they have.

  Peter isn’t giving debate tips. He’s talking about trusting God in life and death.

  Belief and faith always have content—a what. But a faith that looks like what the Bible describes is rooted deeply in trust in God (rather than ourselves) and in faithfulness to God by being humbly faithful to others (as the Father and Son have been faithful to us). That’s basically it—though it’s anything but easy.

  A life of faith that accepts this biblical challenge is much more demanding than being preoccupied with correct thinking—because that deeper faith is self-denying.

  That is the kind of faith we are all called to, and I am glad the Bible models it for us—a faith where our first impulse in the face of life’s challenges is to trust God rather than figure out what God is doing so we can get a handle on life.

  Ah yes. Life. Ready and waiting to deliver those challenges right to our front door with no warning and when we least expect it.

  Life’s challenges mock and then destroy a faith that rests on correct thinking and the preoccupation with defending it. And that is a good thing. Life’s challenges clear the clutter so we can see more clearly that faith calls for trust instead.

  Chapter Six

  Uh-Oh: When Certainty Is Caught Off Guard (and Why That Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea)

  Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help.

  —Psalm 22:11

  But sir, if the LORD is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all his wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us . . . ?

  —Judges 6:13

  When Life Happens

  Life happens, and when it does, it wreaks havoc with our neatly arranged thoughts of God, the world, and our place in it. These are moments where deep down something shifts and a quiet voice says, “Uh-oh. I don’t like that feeling at all. How can I make it go away?”

  These uh-oh moments can happen while watching a Disney movie on a plane; channel surfing and landing on a show where something clicks; reading a novel that challenges our way of looking at the world (and makes more sense). Oh heck, simply being conscious, living and breathing, working, raising a family, having friends, and meeting new people give us ample opportunity to field challenges that come at us from any and all directions.

  And each time we do—each time we deal with something outside of our familiar patterns of thought and have to think on our feet and decide how to proceed—our ordered world grounded in a certain faith gets left behind bit by bit until “certainty” becomes past tense.

  It seems to me that life is a series of challenges to any notion of faith that is preoccupied with correct thinking. And life can be hard enough without having the added pressure of thinking we need to be able to have it all make sense and fit within the structures of our minds. But a faith that requires us to hold on to what we “know” becomes, we eventually discover, inadequate for handling the peaks and valleys of our humanity. It’s also exhausting to try to hold it all together as it once was.

  I think there is another way forward, and it is by listening to our uh-oh moments. Paradoxically, the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them.

  What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those roadblocks you keep running into? What are those issues that won’t go away and make you wonder why you keep on believing at all?

  These are q
uestions I asked on a survey I gave on my blog in the summer of 2013. Nothing fancy. I just asked some questions and waited to see what would happen. In the days to come, I was overwhelmed with comments and e-mails from readers, many anonymous, with bracingly honest answers often expressed through the tears of relentless and unnerving personal suffering.

  I didn’t do a statistical analysis (who has the time, plus I don’t know how), but the responses fell into five categories.

  1.The Bible portrays God as violent, reactive, vengeful, bloodthirsty, immoral, mean, and petty.

  2.The Bible and science collide on too many things to think that the Bible has anything to say to us today about the big questions of life.

  3.In the face of injustice and heinous suffering in the world, God seems disinterested or perhaps unable to do anything about it.

  4.In our ever-shrinking world, it is very difficult to hold on to any notion that Christianity is the only path to God.

  5.Christians treat each other so badly and in such harmful ways that it calls into question the validity of Christianity—or even whether God exists.

  These five categories struck me as exactly right—at least, they match up with my experience. And I’d bet good money they resonate with a lot of us.

  All five categories have one big thing in common: “Faith in God no longer makes sense to me.” Understanding, correct thinking, knowing what you believe—these were once true of their faith, but no longer are. Because life happened.

  A faith that promises to provide firm answers and relieve our doubt is a faith that will not hold up to the challenges and tragedies of life. Only deep trust can hold up.

  God Did What, Now?

  In the Bible, God is often portrayed as approving or commanding physical violence and death as a means of punishing the wicked and disobedient—not as a last resort, but as God’s preferred means of conflict resolution. God appears to be cruel, merciless, and reactive, a sovereign we are afraid to cross. More Jess’s God than Leslie’s in Bridge to Terabithia.

  For my blog readers, this cringe factor was mentioned as much as any other: “I was always told to read the Bible every day and accept it as God’s word. I did that, and now I wish I hadn’t.”

  Why does God’s word make it so hard to believe in God? Why was my faith better off before I decided to read through the Bible book by book and find a God who reminds me more of Idi Amin or Chairman Mao than Jesus? And the pressure from Christian peers and leaders to stop “undermining” or “attacking” the Bible by asking questions like this doesn’t help ease the problem but only makes it worse.

  Readers mentioned the flood and Noah’s ark (Genesis 6–9). The Old Testament contains 923 chapters. By the time we get to the sixth one—the sixth one, mind you—God’s patience has already run out on the world he created, and he apparently can think of no better solution than to drown every creature, except the chosen family of Noah and two of each kind of animal.

  This story isn’t for kids. When our children were young, we had hanging over our bedroom door a large wooden carved plaque of smiling cartoonish animals meandering onto the ark while a Santa-like Noah looked on, smiling approvingly. The caption read, “God’s promises never fail.”

  That may be, but I’m not sure that captures the gist of the story. How about “God is so angry and so very sorry for creating humans that he drowns all humans (and animals) except for a small fraction of the population”? I’m not sure where that plaque is now, but it’s not on our wall.

  High on the list of violent acts was God’s command that the Israelites enter Canaan and exterminate every last one of the inhabitants of the land—men, women, and children—and take the land for themselves (Deuteronomy 20:10–18). In one of the battle scenes, Joshua (the leader of the Israelites after Moses died) captures and executes five enemy kings and hangs their bodies on trees until evening (Joshua 10:26). In another scene, Israel’s army kills the entire male population and all the women who aren’t virgins of nearby Midian, keeping the virgins (which included young girls, to be sure) and dividing them among themselves along with the other spoils of war (Numbers 31).

  The New Testament doesn’t get off the hook. In the last book of the Christian Bible, Revelation, we read of “one like the Son of Man” (Jesus, apparently) on a cloud with a sickle in his hand, ready to cut down the clusters of grapevines of the earth (Revelation 14:14–16). After being cut down, the vines are tossed into the “great wine press of the wrath of God”—a metaphor for divine retribution against the enemies of God (here, the Roman Empire), where blood “flowed from the wine press, as high as a horse’s bridle, for a distance of about two hundred miles” (verses 17–20).

  All this (and more) raises a perfectly reasonable question: How is any of this different from the many forms of religiously and ideologically motivated slaughters and pillagings that marked the twentieth century, that we see in the news on a regular basis still, and that Christians are quick to condemn? How can Christians condemn brutal tribal warfare today when the Christian God commanded brutal tribal warfare yesterday? What kind of God are we dealing with here?

  It’s hard to know what the take-home message is for us. The message seems to be that when God gets angry, he kills a lot of people. Just like other ancient tribal overlords or deities we know from the ancient world of the Bible.

  Both Jewish and Christian thinkers have pondered how to think through this troubling tendency in the Bible; some approaches are better than others. But I’m simply pointing out that one of the most basic questions we could ask of the Bible, “What is God like?” becomes a serious challenge when we take the time to read the Bible. Uh-oh moments jump off the page like fleas off a bloodhound. And we have a hard time explaining this God to unsympathetic friends—or to ourselves.

  Is the faith in God really supposed to be this hard? With a Bible like this, what are we supposed to think about God?

  Being certain of what you believe and expecting the Bible to provide that information sounds like a spiritual safety net, and many take it on faith that this way of thinking is normal and nonnegotiable for Christians. But what happens when the Bible becomes a source of trouble and doubt instead—not a source of certainty, but a cause for questioning what you had been so certain about?

  I’ve heard it said more than once: the best book to read if you’re thinking of becoming an atheist is the Bible. That’s a bit extreme as far as I’m concerned, but by portraying God as violent and retributive, the Bible itself, rather than clarifying the matter, raises some self-evident challenges to what we think God is like.

  Our Pale Blue Dot

  It’s no secret that the Bible and science don’t exactly see eye to eye when it comes to explaining how the world and cosmos came to be and why things are the way they are.

  Evolutionary biology, genetics, astrophysics, and geology—to name just a few—have explained much of the universe around us through analysis, experimentation, and observation (some of which we glimpsed in chapter 2). These explanations are compelling and universally accepted among people educated in those fields (with occasional pushback on some details from a small minority). But they don’t square up with the Bible.

  The Bible gives us a different cosmos altogether, some of which is laid out in the very first book and chapter, Genesis 1. We read there of an earth as a flat disk, a few thousand years old, that sits stationary in the cosmos with the heavenly bodies moving around it. A solid dome of some sort arches from one horizon to the other and keeps back the waters of the “deep” that lie above—the waters that represent the threat of chaos to make the Earth uninhabitable. Rain, hail, and thunder are in heavenly storehouses that God may use as reward and punishment for obedience or disobedience (Jeremiah 10:13; Deuteronomy 28:12, 22). All that we see around us—animal, mineral, or vegetable—was created by God as is.

  Most Christians I know don’t lose sleep over these sorts of things. But they also see a deeper issue, a nagging buzz of discomfort that gets louder the mo
re they think of it—and this has been a big issue for me, too: the immeasurably vast size of the universe. I know I mentioned this before, but it’s unsettling enough that I want to mention it again.

  Our universe—to be precise, the “known universe”—is about 13.8 billion years old and 546 sextillion (546 plus twenty-one zeros) miles across; travelling at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), it would take about 93 billion years to go from one end to the other. This universe contains billions of galaxies, with each one containing billions of stars that are millions of light-years apart. Add to all this the notion that about 85 percent of the universe is made up of something called dark matter. We live in a universe that is truly unfathomably large and awe inspiring, to be sure. But the thought of all this makes me freeze in my tracks.

  Our cosmos isn’t just what we see up there, as it was in antiquity. The writer of Psalm 19 praises God for creation, for he sees God’s glory in the heavens: “The heavens! Just . . . wow. Look up there! Isn’t God awesome?!” Hooray for him. This may be all fine and good from an ancient Iron Age perspective, where physical reality is restricted to what you see with your eyes. But my “heavens” aren’t “up there.” There is no “up.” The “heavens” surround us and just keep on going—infinitely, for all intents and purposes.

  Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.” I’m with him. The thought of the “heavens” is numbing, disorienting, and unsettling to me, enough to make me want to sit down and stop thinking about it all—which is what some of my survey takers also pointed out.

  The universe is immeasurably large and old, and our speck-of-dust Earth in one solar system on the outskirts of one lonely galaxy seems insignificant on the grand scale science has revealed. Our home planet, as Carl Sagan put it, is a “pale blue dot,” precious to us but of incalculable insignificance on the grand cosmic scale.