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

by Peter Enns

  All it took to rock my certainty was a conversation over lunch.

  I don’t claim to have the answers for many of the things that challenge my faith, but this I do believe: I see these moments are invitations to leave my comfort zone and trust God from a place of childlike vulnerability, rather than from a position of power and authority.

  And yes, that can be unsettling, unnerving, and even frightening. Leaving home usually is, but I don’t think that trust in God is cultivated unless we do.

  When Christians Eat Their Own

  A preoccupation with correct thinking isn’t just a problem for one’s own faith. It can and does have disastrous spiritual consequences for others.

  Many in my survey told stories of being badgered, beaten down, betrayed, and bulldozed over the edge by fellow Christians and Christian leaders. And so they stopped going to church, walked away from institutional Christianity in any form, took a long break from God, or simply walked away from the faith altogether.

  You can only be misled, mistreated, emotionally abused, manipulated, looked down upon, or lied to by religious leaders and other “brothers and sisters” for so long before packing it in and joining the Rotary Club.

  Why did this happen? Because they questioned what they were told to believe. When knowing what you believe is the nonnegotiable center of true faith, questions and critical self-examination pose a threat. It didn’t matter how gently and slowly they started conversations. All that mattered was that “the system” was under attack and measures had to be taken.

  I’m not talking about simply having disagreements or even arguments where things get out of hand and everyone feels bad later on. That happens, and people of goodwill eventually admit their faults, group hug, and move on.

  I’m talking about plain old nastiness as a game plan, a strategy, a badge of honor, evidence of strong faith that protects certainty at all costs and takes no prisoners.

  For many in my survey, this was their biggest uh-oh moment to question what they believed. The other four uh-oh moments from the survey called into the question the intellectual certainty of their faith—whether it makes sense. But this one involved relationships and communities that let them down, which undermined their faith on a deeper—and for some irreparable—level.

  When Christians feel crushed by such “people of God,” faith is exposed as something that just doesn’t work here and now. And if something doesn’t work, intellectual arguments for staying in the faith lose their appeal over time. Why bother?

  A faith that eats its own not only drives people out but also sends up a red flare to the rest of humanity that Christianity is just another exclusive members-only club, and that Jesus is a lingering relic of antiquity, rather than a powerful, present-defining spiritual reality; a means of gaining power rather than relinquishing it. And who needs that, really?

  Some readers relayed stories that have become all too familiar—caught in the sharp-cutting machinery of church and institutional politics. The dark underbelly of Christian organizations can look more like the dirty political scheming of Francis and Claire Underwood* than the Sermon on the Mount.

  Under the high-lofted banner of “defending the gospel,” backroom politicking, gossip, maligning the character of their enemies, lying, vengeance, and even destroying people’s livelihoods are excused as regrettable yet necessary tactics in their holy war (battle metaphors abound) to root out traitors harboring unbelief. And such causalities, unfortunate as they are, are nevertheless deemed necessary when truth is compromised and the gospel is at stake.

  But it seems for some the gospel is always at stake. They have mistaken their own thinking about God with the real thing. They have become so enamored of their own self-referential God talk and believe their own propaganda that they can’t tell the difference.

  Of course, all organizations, Christian or not, have lines that define who they are. Having boundaries is not the problem. The problem comes when Christians in positions of authority and power (or those seeking to gain it) become tyrannical, strangers to reason, and mow down the opposition all in service of God and God’s kingdom. I have heard with my own ears such sub-Christian behavior defended as “just business, nothing personal.” You might recognize these words from The Godfather movies. This is what is said to someone who is about to get a bullet to the back of the head.

  The difference between this uh-oh moment and the other four is glaringly obvious: this one is completely in our control. We can’t make Bible difficulties, the modern world, pain and suffering, or contact with other religions go away. But we can stop being mean and ugly. Anytime we want to. If we want to.

  And we need to. Jesus says so. And the gospel really is at stake. People’s lives are at stake.

  Preoccupation with correct thinking and holding on with zeal makes us horrible people and those around us miserable. But even here, these can be God moments if we have ears to hear.

  Perhaps even here God is present, opening up pathways to other communities of faith for us, to a new way of being Christian, where holding on for dear life to what we “know” isn’t front and center. I’ve found that we can be tied hard and fast even to abusive religious homes, and we don’t leave until things get so bad we simply can’t stay. Like an abused woman who stays with her abuser because she can’t conceive of being anywhere else—until that last time he comes home drunk and violent, and it becomes a matter of survival.

  There’s nothing like being subject to Christians of ill will to expose the dark underbelly of where the preoccupation with correct thinking can get you—and to begin seeing the value of a different kind of faith. Rather than being the end of faith, these moments can introduce us to a faith rooted in trust rather than certainty.

  God Is Not My Father

  Here’s a story about a time I knew I was absolutely right and therefore simply knew I was God’s appointed mouthpiece at the moment—but God closed my mouth because I was about to say something arrogant and harmful.

  I was a new doctoral student in the photocopying room at Harvard Divinity School. The room was a snug fit back in those days, with barely enough room to fit two photocopiers and two high-energy students who each needed to make photocopies for that thing they’re working on that would, given time, likely change all human knowledge—or even better, actually land them a tenure-track job. (Cue the sound of God laughing.)

  I entered with my load of very heavy and serious books and journals to find someone already furiously at work—a mere underling master’s student, and so I doubted very much what she was working on was nearly as important as my world-changing project, the topic of which I can’t quite seem to recall at the moment.

  She gave me a quick “you’re invading my space, get out” glance before refocusing on her work—like a lioness shielding her kill from a pack of hyenas, which, sadly, is par for the course in academia (“My knowledge! Keep away!”).

  Seeing that we were the only two around, and as I always thought of myself as a friendly chap, I thought I’d break the ice.

  “Hi, I’m Pete. What are you working on?”

  She turned slowly, like in those movies where the totally calm but crazy killer—who is in no hurry because she knows she’s in complete control and she’s going to kill you either now or later, it doesn’t matter to her one way or another—turns around slowly to face the camera and by the time you see her eyes you know it’s too late.

  With her hellish red squinting eyes aimed right at me—a cross between annoyance and rage—she spoke through teeth grit so tight she might have started a fire in her mouth.

  “I’m . . . writing . . . a paper . . . on why . . . God . . . shouldn’t be . . . thought of . . . as . . . father.”

  And with that, here’s how God showed up that day.

  It might help to know that at this point in my life as a Christian in my late twenties I was somewhere between a pretty nice guy and an arrogant know-it-all. It just depended on the day. On this particular day, my reflex was
to ask to her, kindly, without the slightest hint of condescension, and bathed in the light of Christ, how she could be so stupid.

  Hadn’t she ever actually read the Bible? God is male and one of the things this male God is called is “Father.” Look it up. Deal with it. The most famous prayer in the world (for heaven’s sake), the Lord’s Prayer, that one we say in church every Sunday (you do go to church, don’t you?), the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, starts “Our Father”—not just “my” but “our.” We get to call God “Father,” and Jesus said so.

  So back off, photocopying master’s student who doesn’t know her Bible, doesn’t really take Jesus seriously, or doesn’t believe in God. Kindly stop annoying the rest of us by making God conform to your half-baked ideas and don’t dignify your “theory” by writing a paper about it. I mean, seriously.

  “God shouldn’t be thought of as father.” Those words were like the Bat-signal, and I was there to save the day. But I will make this as painless as possible. I am merciful. She’ll never know what hit her.

  In a flash, this is what was going on inside my head.

  But I didn’t say any of that. All that came out of my mouth was, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” Some crime-fighter I turned out to be.

  I turned back around and kept copying. I felt a bit guilty for not having the guts to accept this golden opportunity, orchestrated by God directly, no doubt—for this misguided, clearly wrong, utterly lost master’s student to meet God. And I blew it.

  But in time I came to see that I hadn’t blown it. God had actually kept me from blowing it by stepping in and gagging me.

  You know, Pete (I talk to myself a lot), maybe . . . maybe . . . you need to listen more than talk. Maybe that student has a story to tell. Maybe she has had a rough life, a bad father.

  Maybe she was sexually abused.

  Maybe thinking of God as father brings up all sorts of memories and pain. You saw how angry she got!

  Maybe my little “defending God” speech that I was so sure about would have done more harm to this person that my theology also tells me is made in God’s image and therefore precious and of inestimable worth.

  (I’m not finished. Come back here.) And rather than thinking you are right about God just because you’ve convinced yourself that you are, maybe you don’t have a handle on God like you think you do and you have a few things to learn—like the parts where God actually does love the world and has nurturing patience like a mother and isn’t sitting around to use you to squash others.

  This wasn’t my only moment of awakening, but I remember this one clearly, perhaps because it happened early on in my life at Harvard. And like other big moments in life, it took me by surprise while I was just going about my business on autopilot.

  I believe God mercifully gave me a moment of clarity. Looking back, I see there is much more I could have said to express God’s love to this student. But at least I didn’t do any harm. I’ll take it. 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.

  In fact—and here is the real mind bender for a seminary graduate/doctoral student in Bible—maybe I’m not even as right about God as my trickster brain wants me to think. Maybe loving other people, which in this case was simply keeping my trap shut, saying a kind word, and not taking the anger personally, was the truly right thing to do.

  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.

  It’s much easier acting on the need to be right than letting go of that need and risking what we hold dear and loving others without expecting anything back or thinking we are scoring points with God. Love happens whether we feel it or not. Love is an action, a selfless act, something we do for others without thinking of ourselves or how it will make us look. Loving others is the most self-emptying, self-denying, thing we can do, because true love has the other person on the top shelf.

  As Jesus told a listening crowd long ago, when you love others you are acting most like God at that very moment (Matthew 5:43–48).

  The crowd that Jesus addressed was in some ways no different than one would be in our day. Their impulse, as is ours, was to love their neighbor—those most like them—and to hate their enemies—which in Jesus’s day most likely referred to the Romans, who did not share much of anything with the Jews, least of all religious beliefs.

  But Jesus stared right into this “us vs. them” mindset and told the crowd that they should love their enemies, too. In fact, they should pray for them, even when those enemies were persecuting them (which happened now and then with the Roman government in charge).

  When “us vs. them” is your way of life, loving a “them” is hard enough. Praying for a “them” is harder still. We want to pray down God’s blood-curdling war cry of wrath and pestilence—or at least pierce and wound them with our sharp words while making photocopies. But Jesus says enough of that. To be like God means to be perfect in love (verse 48). To love as God loves means loving not just others like us, but those who are not. And in my case that meant simply keeping my mouth shut when every part of me wanted to speak.

  Two thousand years after Jesus spoke these words, the “us vs. them” mindset is still quite common among Christians. It takes hard work and vigilance to see how we can put Jesus’s words into practice in different ways and places. That’s what Christians do: we read the Bible, written at a different time for reasons that were relevant back then, and ask ourselves, “What does it look like for us to follow Jesus like that right here and right now?”

  At that moment, love meant letting go of something dear to me—being right and winning an argument—even though my brain, like an unruly preschooler, was jumping up and down demanding to be heard.

  We’re not always too happy about letting go of our egos and telling our overactive thought world to take a seat over there and be quiet. “Knowing” has been in charge for so long, we forget all the other stuff we read in the Bible about how we are to act toward each other.

  And here is the risk of love. When we love as Jesus describes, we are changed because we are letting go a little bit of what we were holding to so dearly—in my case, being right and saying so. We relax our grip, step out of ourselves, and truly see things from the perspective of someone else, which is a genuinely selfless act.

  But change is hard. We often prefer forcing change on others rather than looking at ourselves—seeing the speck in our neighbor’s eye rather than the log in our own (Matthew 7:1–5). That’s not love.

  I still think and talk about what I think God is like, but I’ve hopefully learned (feel free to keep me honest here, people) that being right and winning isn’t the endgame here. Loving as God loves is.

  When “Uh-Oh” Becomes “Ah-Ha”

  I probably don’t need to say it at this point, but just in case I do: I’m not the answer man. If I had suggested that there were straightforward answers to these uh-oh moments, I’d simply be replacing one kind of certainty for another. I don’t think we can solve these problems and get back to a time when everything made sense. I want to see where these problems can lead, to someplace we might never have thought to look had we stayed where we were.

  Though for some, that ship has already sailed—like for many of those who answered my survey.

  So without wanting this to sound like a ten-point plan for success in life (especially since I only have seven points), I’d like to lay out briefly how I have reimagined thinking about God and faith in God. Not “Do this and that,” but “Here’s how I am currently seeing the landscape upon which I work out my story of faith, reoriented around trust in God rather than needing to be certain about God.” And all of these come out of the kinds of uh-oh moments we jus
t looked at, and some others I want to come back to a bit later on.

  1. Thank you, modernity. As we’ve seen, the last few centuries of at least the Western and westernized world have certainly posed scientific challenges to the Christian faith. But as I see it, these challenges have really exposed the problems of a certain kind of faith, one that has fused together correct thinking and strong faith.

  The challenges of modernity have shaken our sense of certainty and, in doing so, pushed us toward trust.

  Since our children were very young, we have made the family trek each year to a tree farm to cut down our own tree, thereby stepping into a Norman Rockwell painting and an old-fashioned Christmas. After we (by which I mean I) cut it down, we (I) drag the tree over and place it in a tree shaker, a high-speed vibrating stand that shakes out the dead needles and, as the tree guy told me just last year, to get rid of any varmints that might be living in there.

  If the tree stayed in the shaker the entire season, it wouldn’t be of use to anyone. But it’s needed to get the tree to what it can become: a symbol of joy, peace, and celebration.

  The modern world has shaken our thinking about God—and maybe that needed to happen.

  2. We can’t get our minds around God. I don’t think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.

  As I’ve said before, I am not for one minute saying reason doesn’t matter. I am reasoning as I write this. I mean only that the life of the mind has its place as an aspect of the life of faith because it is a dimension of our humanity, and neither the gatekeeper nor the whole.