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

by Peter Enns

  In other words, I believe that faith in the Creator is necessarily transrational (not antirational) and mystical. I try to remember that as I work through intellectual challenges—and I mean work through, not avoid.

  3. Christianity is a setup for letting go of certainty. The two pillars of the Christian faith express the mystery of faith: incarnation and resurrection. Of course, there’s more to the Christian faith, but two elements make Christianity what it is, and both dodge our powers of thought and speech.

  Incarnation. God becomes one of us. What does that mean, really? What words are we to use to express it, let alone comprehend it?

  Resurrection. The grand reversal of the only true inevitability of all who have ever lived—death.

  Both are utterly beyond what is knowable by most every standard we use to know everything else: experience, observation, and testing. These mysteries are “known” differently—only by trust.

  I don’t mind saying I find it strangely comforting that walking the path of Christian faith means being confronted moment by moment with what is counterintuitive and ultimately beyond my comprehension to understand or articulate. In an unexpected way, God becomes more real to me, not less.

  4. Adjusting our expectations about what the Bible can deliver. This has been huge for me, since I “do Bible” for a living and I can’t get away from thinking about it.

  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.

  5. God-moments. I have had a few God moments in my life. I’d like to have more, but maybe I’m just not paying attention.

  Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don’t work as intellectual arguments for God, but that’s exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren’t enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or later leads to disappointment. God speaks to us through our whole humanity, not just through part of it.

  God moments can’t be proven to anyone else, but that doesn’t make them second best. They are proof—of another kind.

  6. God is not a crutch. As a brain-oriented person, I have tended in my life to look down on those who say things like “If I didn’t have my faith, I couldn’t make it through this,” or “If God isn’t real, I don’t know if I can hold it together.” These sorts of sentiments always struck me as for the weak-minded, those who needed a crutch. If Christianity is true, it has to be for reasons other than “I need it to be true.”

  I’m older now and have left some of my stupidity behind. I see now, as many others have, that those who cry out to God may be perched at the very point where true communion with God begins, because they are in the unique position of surrendering fully from self to God.

  7. Struggling with faith is normal. Journey and pilgrimage have become powerful words for me for describing the life of faith.

  I have come to expect periods of unsettledness, uncertainty, and fear to remind me that who I am, where I am, and what I think do not define reality. Facing and then truly being present with my experiences along the way help me remember that my experiences at any moment are not the entire journey—including those periods where God is distant.

  I have come to believe that periods of struggling and doubt are such common experiences of faith, including in the Bible, that something is meant to be learned from such periods, however long in duration they might be.

  I feel it is part of the mystery of faith that things normally do not line up entirely, and so when they don’t, it is not a signal to me that the journey is at an end but that I am still on it.

  As I reflect on my own experience and that of many others far wiser than I, God seems willing to help that process along.

  Chapter Seven

  God Wants You Dead

  You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep.

  —Psalm 88:6

  The Lie: “It’s All Your Fault”

  Doubt—not fashionable skepticism, but really doubting what you were always so certain of. Many of us—maybe most of us—get there sooner or later.

  Perhaps it was a big catastrophe or (and I think more commonly) a line of smaller things that creep in over time, complicate faith, and make us a lot less certain than we used to be.

  But whatever the reason(s), when we feel that moment coming on, what do we do? We try to push that feeling down, hoping it will eventually go away before God notices.

  It doesn’t and God does.

  Feeling our familiar faith unravel is unsettling, disorienting, exhausting, and even frightening.

  Where did all this come from, and how can I get back to normal?

  There must be something very wrong with me.

  Maybe I’m not smart enough.

  Maybe I’m a faker and finally being found out.

  Maybe I haven’t memorized enough Bible verses.

  Maybe I need to go to church more often.

  Whatever the reason, our reflex is to assume we are doing something wrong: “It’s all my fault. God must be so disappointed in me. I’m so weak.”

  So we do the only thing we know how to do, what we’ve been conditioned to do. We roll up our sleeves and do everything in our power to get out of that state of uncertainty and back to a normal state of rock-solid certainty as quickly as we can; our faith is broken, and it needs to be fixed. Then, when we have our act together and feel we can face God again without shame, we’ll jump back into the way things were before, how they’re supposed to be.

  If none of that works, if doubt holds on too long, here are our choices: live a life of quiet and wretched desperation, shamed or afraid to speak up, or cash in our God chips, press factory reset, and move on.

  But doubt is not the enemy of faith, a solely destructive force that rips us away from God, a dark cloud that blocks the bright warm sun of faith. Doubt is only the enemy of faith when we equate faith with certainty in our thinking.

  Doubt is what being cornered by our thinking looks like. Doubt happens when needing to be certain has run its course.

  Doubt can certainly leave us empty and frightened, but that is precisely the benefit of doubt: it exposes the folly that strong faith means you need to “know what you believe,” that the more faith you “have,” the more certain you are.

  Doubt means spiritual relocation is happening. It’s God’s way of saying, “Time to move on.”

  Doubt is powerful. It can do things spiritually that must be done that we would never do on our own. Doubt has a way of forcing our hand and confronting us with the challenge of deeper trust in God, rather than leaning on the ideas we have been holding in our minds about God. Doubt exposes our frail thinking.

  We might be accustomed to thinking of our faith as a castle—where we go to be safe and protected. That’s a good place to be, and we all need that experience now and then. But what if God isn’t a helicopter parent? What if feeling safe and secure aren’t always signs of God’s presence but a pattern of fear that keeps God at a distance? And what if God wants to close that gap, for our sake, and doubt helps get us there? Doubt isn’t a sign of spiritual weakness but the first steps toward a deeper faith.

  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?

  Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving
God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God, the God within our control, the God who moves in our circles, the God who agrees with us.

  Doubt strips away distraction so we can see more clearly the inadequacies of whom we think God is and move us from the foolishness of thinking that our god is the God.

  Many of us, I would imagine, think we have God figured out pretty well—and for people like me, who get paid to tell people what God is like, it’s an occupational hazard. We read the Bible and are able to quote it to others. We go to church like clockwork and get involved in groups and service projects. We’re doing great, and God must surely be impressed.

  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 loser, and we are the winners, the true insiders. God likes all the things we like. We speak for God and think nothing of it.

  All Christians I’ve ever met who take their faith seriously sooner or later get caught up in thinking that God really is what we think God is, that there is little more worth learning about the Creator of the cosmos. God becomes the face in the mirror.

  By his mercy, God doesn’t leave us there.

  The Truth: “God Wants You Dead”

  Doubt signals not God’s death but the need for our own—to die to the theology we hold to with clenched fists. Our first creeping feelings of doubt are like the distant toll of a graveyard chapel, alerting us that the dying process is coming our way.

  God wants us dead. Or better: God wants us to get used to the need to die, not once, but as a pattern for our lives.

  In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his followers to take up their crosses and lose their lives so they can find them.

  Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10:37–39)

  Jesus isn’t antifamily, telling his audience to blow off mom, dad, or the kids and spend all their time walking two steps behind Jesus. Jesus is making an in-your-face point, as he often does.

  At the end of the day, what is (or should be) most dear to us? When our light begins to fade and when we come to the end of our lives, what is most likely to be on our minds? Family, those on Earth we are connected to more closely than anyone; when they suffer, we suffer; when they die, we are torn apart; when they triumph, we rejoice.

  Following Jesus doesn’t mean making a decision to literally hate our families. He means that following him requires an overhaul of our most basic, otherwise-unquestioned, top priorities—those things we cling to, including our thinking. Pitting family against the kingdom of God gets across how drastic and unsettling that overhaul is.

  As does “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” A cross is certainly a heavy piece of wood, and most people have seen enough Jesus movies with him beaten, sweaty, and bloodied, struggling to carry his cross through the streets and up to Golgotha to be crucified.

  Crosses are heavy, yes, but that’s not the point. You don’t take up a cross simply to carry it. You take up your cross to die on it. That’s the point of crosses.

  Following Jesus isn’t like a burden we carry on our shoulders. It’s an internal process so radical and painful that the best way to describe it for people of that day is as the act of being bound and nailed like a criminal to a piece of wood lifted above the ground where you are left hanging in naked humiliation and intense pain until you suffocate.

  And that’s a far cry from the claim of some televangelists that “Jesus wants to make you rich and successful.” Jesus wants to make us whole. That requires a process up for the challenge.

  Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. 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.

  Jesus sounds more like a mystic than an intellectual lining up correct thinking.

  We have to die, and the choice is ours. If we don’t, we are still holding on to something. And if we are holding on, we aren’t really following. Just sort of following. Standing around.

  [Oh God, what did I sign up for? This Christianity thing is hard. Deep breath . . .]

  The apostle Paul chimes in, too:

  I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2:19–20)*

  The life of Christian faith is more than agreeing with a set of beliefs about Christ, morality, or how to read the Bible. It means being so intimately connected to Christ that his crucifixion is ours, his death is our death, and his life is our life—which is hardly something we can grasp with our minds. It has to be experienced. It is an experience.

  We’re so crucified, in fact, that we read elsewhere, “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Our lives are hidden—strong language, like we’re not even in the picture. And being hidden with Christ and being “in” God sounds downright mystical enough to unsettle—as it should—anyone who thinks that the Christian’s first duty is to make sure to think the right thoughts.

  And all this talk of dying and being crucified and hidden doesn’t describe a one-time moment of conversion when we “become Christians,” as if that’s final. If things were only that easy—a one-time transaction of “accepting Jesus” and then it’s over. Dying describes a mode of existence we agree to once we enter the holy space of being a follower of Jesus—surrendering control, dying, all the time.

  [Oh God, this is so much easier to write about than to do. Keep writing . . . keep writing . . .]

  Dying is the normal mode of Christian existence, a pattern of life, what followers of Jesus are to do not just once but every day, every moment. It is certainly not a problem to be fixed so we can return to “normal,” as we were.

  The choice is always and ever before us: whether we will hold on right here and now to what is dear, to what we know, to the familiar and safe, to twist and bend all of our experiences of God into our own shape, to paint God’s image according to our own blurred and sorry self-portraits—or whether we let go of frantic thoughts, die to ourselves, and let God bring us back to life in God’s way and time.

  That’s what Paul is after. Dying leads to real living—“Christ who lives in me,” a life so deeply connected to the divine that we no longer live, but our lives are “hidden with Christ in God.”

  Dying “with” Jesus leads to new life now, what Paul calls a movement “from death to life” (Romans 6:1–14). This is good news, the best news. When we “die,” God doesn’t leave us dead. God brings us back to life—“raising us from the dead,” as Paul puts it. We die in order to be raised, and not just in a future one-day-at-the-end-of-the-world way we talk about at funerals. Dying and rising is how followers of Jesus live and experience God in the present.

  Being “saved” by God is an ongoing process of growth and transformation, of dying and rising, of being “conformed to the image of his [God’s] Son,” as Paul puts it (Romans 8:29). Following Jesus means experiencing the taste of resurrection and ascension now—whether doing laundry, paying bills, or leading nations.

  Getting there is all about dying, and each cycle of dying and rising we come to in our lives brings us, I believe, to greater insight into our deep selves, where Christ lives “in us” and our lives are “hidden” in God.

  Of course, we all know that dying, rising again, Christ in me, hidden in God, seated in hea
ven 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.

  Doubt signals that this process of dying and rising is underway. Though God feels far away, at that moment God may be closer than we realize—especially if “know what you believe” is how we’re used to thinking of our faith.

  Doubt isn’t cool, hipster, or chic. Doubt isn’t a new source of pride. Don’t go looking for doubt; don’t tempt it to arrive out of time. But neither is doubt the terrifying final word.

  Doubt is sacred. Doubt is God’s instrument, will arrive in God’s time, and will come from unexpected places—places out of your control. And when it does, resist the fight-or-flight impulse. Pass through it—patiently, honestly, and courageously for however long it takes. True transformation takes time.

  Being conscious of this process does not relieve the pain of doubt, but it may help circumnavigate our corrupted instinct, which is to fear doubt as the enemy to be slain. Rather, supported by people we trust not to judge us, we work on welcoming the process as a gift—which is hard to do when our entire life narrative is falling down around us. But we are learning in that season, as Qohelet did, to trust God anyway and not to trust our “correct” thinking about God.

  Doubt is divine tough love. God means to have all of us, not just the surface, going-to-church, volunteering part. Not just the part people see, but the parts so buried no one sees them.

  Not even us.

  Down the Mine Shaft

  The dark places of the Bible—Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job—are valuable to us because they connect with the dark places of our souls. So let me say once again thank you to these parts of the Bible. You give us all permission to not fake it in our uh-oh moments.