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

by Peter Enns

  I was being led to a much bigger God—and a much more interesting and caring one.

  I’m leaving out a lot of steps here; I’m not writing an autobiography. But I had a lot of periods of ups and downs, and still do. My point, though, is that these experiences have drawn me out of my safe haven of certainty and onto a path of trusting God—not trusting God that my thinking is correct or soon would be, but trusting God regardless of how certain I might feel.

  My way of thinking was being tamed more severely than during those first moments at the Arizona barbeque. I was experiencing for myself what is really the point of this entire book: that trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.

  I also understood that the responsibility for where I had been and where I could go was all mine—a freeing and also unnerving thought. I was entering middle age, the “second half of life” as some call it, and was presented with the choice to remain where I had been or to press forward.

  And somehow in the midst of all that, in a way I can’t rightly quantify (and would cheapen it if I tried), I found myself becoming more conscious of God and the centrality of simple, uncluttered trust. I wish I could bottle that and write a bestselling “5 Steps” or “50 Days” book, but I can’t. At least for me, it doesn’t work that way. Better, I don’t think God works that way.

  This is my process, not necessarily anyone else’s. I’m not giving advice, another to-do list to give the impression of being in control of things.

  I have also come to accept myself for what I am: I am wired as an explorer. I value challenging older orthodoxies and gaining new insights. That’s neither good nor bad in and of itself. It just is what it is. I believe that I needed to learn to accept who I am, without apology, but also without falling into the trap of thinking that my particular type of faith, filled with books, languages, teaching, and writing, is the be-all and end-all of who God is. I was learning, and still am, to honor my head without living in it.

  And a crucial part of all this was finding a flesh-and-blood community of faith that already modeled this expression of faith—and for me that wound up being a welcoming, Christ-centered Episcopal community.

  I need to be in a place where the pulpit was off to the side and the table was central, symbols for me of letting go of old patterns, where lengthy sermons were the center of worship.

  I need. Others may not.

  I need Sunday morning centered on what is transrational, the fundamental Christian mysteries of incarnation and resurrection, the very heartbeat of Christian faith. Not irrational or unworthy of discussion and debate, but that which, when the intellectual dust has cleared, is ultimately beyond what our minds can grasp.

  I need a God bigger than my arguments.

  I like a prayer book and liturgy to guide me in my faith rather than falling back into my comfort zone of controlling reality with my learned and carefully chosen words, and without leaving it up to me to come up with what to say here and now when I just may not feel like it.

  I teach, I write, I speak. All those words. I need to leave my words at home at least once a week.

  I like reciting common words together with those sitting near me, with those far away, and with centuries of fellow pilgrims long gone. I need to be a part of something bigger than myself to believe with me—and when needed to believe for me.

  I need a place to let go and fall back from my familiar patterns and trust God to catch me.

  The Long Haul

  We’ve spent some time looking at the Old Testament—Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and Job—as we’ve been talking about struggling with faith, doubt, and the need to trust God whether or not our brains are keeping pace. The reason we’ve camped out in the Old Testament is because that is the part of the Bible that has the most to say about these things.

  The Old Testament is a collection of writings written over a span of several hundred years. It comes to us from scribes, priests, royalty, and shepherds, writing in diverse times and places, under times of triumph and defeat. The Israelites had plenty of opportunity to have ups and downs, as a nation and as individuals.

  One of the great comforts of Israel’s epic is that it contains raw expressions of fierce doubt and lack of trust in God embraced by the ancient Israelites as part of their faith. I am thankful to God for this Bible rather than a sanitized one where spiritual struggles of the darkest kind are brushed aside as a problem to be fixed rather than accepted as part of the journey of faith.

  The New Testament is different, though. It was written over a much shorter period of time—probably about sixty years. Even though suffering is a key topic in the New Testament, the long haul of the Old Testament is not. In fact, the “end”—the return of Jesus—was thought to be right around the corner.

  When you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. (Matthew 24:33–34)

  You turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven. (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10)

  Brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short. . . . The present form of this world is passing away. (1 Corinthians 7:29, 31)

  “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (Revelation 22:20)

  Amid persecutions and other struggles that Christians endured, the tone of the New Testament writers was urgency to keep the faith because ultimate triumph is near at hand: “Hold on. It won’t be long. Soon Jesus will return and God will set all things in order and your present sufferings will be over and justice will be served.”

  The problem we face today, of course, is that after two thousand years, the “end” hasn’t come yet. And frankly, I don’t know of many Christians who are gearing up for it. Most of us go about our lives without ever seriously thinking of stage two. I suppose we could go on living “as if” it were imminent, but it’s hard shutting out the rest of life waiting by the door with your bags packed.

  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.

  In that respect, Christians today have more in common with the Israelites wandering through a lonely and threatening desert or exiled to a hostile land than with Paul and most other New Testament writers. The Old Testament doesn’t speak in the booming voice of imminent triumph. It speaks of generation after generation of the faithful and not so faithful, of successes and failures, of God’s presence and God’s absence.

  Being Like Jesus

  What then does the New Testament have to say about any of this? Plenty, but from a different angle altogether—an angle I’m going to go right ahead and call a mystical angle.

  Paul doesn’t call followers of Jesus “Christians.” He calls them “in Christ.” That isn’t the easiest thing to understand, let alone explain, but it suggests an intimacy with Jesus that defies words.

  That intimacy also includes—somehow—suffering.

  When we cry out, “God, why have you forsaken me?” we are experiencing something of what Jesus experienced on the cross when he cries those same words (Matthew 27:46). The New Testament gets at this idea of suffering with Christ in different ways. For example,

  I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. (Colossians 1:24)

  What exactly is “lacking” in Christ’s afflictions and is “completed” by our suffering? I don’t know, but it looks like our suffering intimately—mystically—connects us to Jesus’s suffering in a powerful way and that benefits others.

  Paul says that those led by the spirit of God are children of God.

  And if children, then h
eirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:17)

  When reading Paul’s letters, it’s easy to get lost in the details, so let’s not: suffering with (not for!) Christ is what children of God do. Suffering is not a sign that something is wrong with us and has to be corrected. Suffering is a key component of what identifies us as children of God.

  And here is one of my favorite thoughts in all of Paul’s letters:

  I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:10–11)

  Paul wants to “know” Christ, and (obviously) not in a “Hi, let’s do lunch” sort of way.

  Knowing Christ, for Paul, means not only experiencing “the power of his resurrection”—the triumphs and spiritual highs of the life of faith, the parts we can all quickly get on board with. It also means necessarily experiencing the dark times of the life of faith, the “sharing” of Christ’s sufferings, participating in them, so to speak.

  The two go together. Sharing Christ’s suffering and death goes hand in hand with experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection. In fact, suffering and death necessarily precede resurrection.

  What is my point? The mystical language of “completing” Christ’s sufferings, suffering “with” him, of “sharing” his sufferings, signals that suffering has some positive role to play in the life of faith, even if we can’t grasp it well enough to understand it.

  Of course, most of Western suffering doesn’t involve prisons and tortures by violent regimes. But sufferings that are emotional and intellectual—like those laments of the psalmists, Job, and Qohelet—are no less true sufferings.

  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.

  Our psychological anguish over faith—sadness, despair, hopelessness, fear, worry—is suffering. The New Testament may not lay it out quite that way, but the Old Testament does.

  So let me say it in a way that the ancient Israelites couldn’t: when we are in despair or fear and God is as far away from us as the most distant star in the universe, we are at that moment “with” Christ more than we know—and perhaps more than we ever have been—because when we suffer, we share in and complete Christ’s sufferings. And we don’t have to understand that to know we should like it.

  I am not glorifying suffering or papering over the pain. But when weariness and hopelessness settle in, at that very moment, our suffering is Christ’s suffering and his is ours. We are more like Christ in these moments than we might realize.

  Those times of despair, of not knowing how to put one foot in front of the other, of plummeting down a dark mine shaft of fear and despair, put us in a place where “correct” thinking is out of place. Only by laying down the need to understand and by accepting the mystery of faith can any of this truly make any “sense.”

  Chapter Nine

  Beyond Trust

  Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

  —Psalm 139:23

  No Fear

  Letting go of the need for certainty is more than just a decision about how we think; it’s a decision about how we want to live.

  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

  A faith like that is in constant battle mode, like a cornered honey badger. Or like a watchman on the battlements scanning the horizon from sun up to sun down for any threat. And soon you forget what faith looks like when you’re not fighting about it.

  That kind of faith is not marked by trust in the Creator. It is stressful and anxiety laden, and it doesn’t make for healthy relationships with others, including those closest to us.

  On the surface, we might see here pride, arrogance, or belligerence, but those are simply symptoms of something deeper—a fear of being wrong and what might happen as a result.

  But trust in God casts out fear and cultivates a life of trust that flourishes regardless of how certain we feel.

  Trust is not marked by unflappable dogmatic certainty, but by embracing as a normal part of faith the steady line of mysteries and uncertainties that parade before our lives and seeing them as opportunities to trust more deeply.

  Instead of relying on absolute either-or thinking, a trusting faith understands that trusting God is a process that takes times and practice. That pilgrimage doesn’t necessarily follow a linear progression but accepts the unpredictable and disquieting nature of life as an encounter with God—and a move ultimately toward God, trusting that God is involved in that very process.

  Rather than focusing on the badges that define our tribal identity (our church, denomination, subdenomination, doctrinal convictions, side of the aisle, whatever), a trust-centered faith will see the world with humble, open, and vulnerable eyes—and ourselves as members and participants rather than masters and conquerors. We will see our unfathomable cosmos and the people in our cosmic neighborhood as God’s creation, not as objects for our own manipulation or unholy mischief.

  Rather than being quick to settle on final answers to puzzling questions, a trust-centered faith will find time to formulate wise questions that respect the mystery of God and call upon God for the courage to sit in those questions for as long as necessary before seeking a way forward.

  Rather than counting on the acquisition of knowledge to support and defend the faith, a trust-centered faith values and honors the wise—those who through experience and mature spiritual habits have earned the right to lead and are given a central role in nurturing faith in others.

  Rather than defining faithfulness as absolute conformity to authority and tribal identity, a trust-centered faith will value in others the search for true human authenticity that may take them away from the familiar borders of their faith, while trusting God to be part of that process in ourselves and others, even those closest to us.

  The choice of how we want to live is entirely ours.

  Go and Sin No More

  Trusting God even when we can’t or don’t want to because nothing makes sense—especially then—is freedom, freedom from the pressure of needing to be certain when certainty has left us.

  Choosing to trust the Creator then and there isn’t irrational, but a humble admission that our rational faculties are limited for grasping the eternal and infinite. To call such trust irrational has already put on a pedestal the rationalistic pattern of faith that deeper faith calls us to transcend.

  Trust acknowledges faith as transrational, submission to the mystery of the Spirit. For Christians, this is summed up in the mystery of a Creator who participates in the human drama. And all of this defies our analysis and the carefully sorted cubbies of our minds. Trusting this incarnating Creator gives us freedom to know or not know, to accept certainty when it comes or the absence of certainty, clarity or doubt, rest or restlessness.

  Trust does not cancel our mind but circumscribes it and tames it—and so we do not succumb to fretting or anxious thoughts of being unsure.

  I understand that the Christian faith is a long tradition deep in content. But pressing forward does not mean reproducing specific moments of that tradition from the good old days as if it were the best and permanent work of the Spirit. “Do n
ot say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10).

  I am a father and professor, and I get discouraged sometimes about the kind of faith we are passing on to future generations, where “protecting the past” is often goal number one. On one level I get it. But there is a difference, I believe, between a constructive respect for tradition and holding tightly to our image of God like an addiction—a Creator made in the worried image of created beings and to which we cling with a frenzied fury.

  Rather than simply protecting the past, our faith communities have a sacred responsibility to protect the future by actively and intentionally creating a culture of trust in God, in order to deliver to our children and children’s children a viable faith—

  •a faith that remains open to the ever-moving Spirit and new possibilities, rather than chaining the Spirit to our past

  •a faith that welcomes opportunities to think critically and reflectively on how we think about God, the world, and our place in it, rather than resting at all costs on maintaining familiar certainties

  History has shown us that such a course adjustment wouldn’t be the first time, or likely the last. In fact, we would simply be following the very template of scripture itself. The story of God and God’s people is never static, never simply about repeating the past and maintaining it at all costs.

  Israel’s thinking about God was affected by its fifty years of captivity in Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Earlier, in the late seventh century, the prophet Nahum could write a scathing denunciation of the dreaded and super-mighty Assyrians and gloat over their deserved destruction by God’s own hand (the capitol Nineveh fell in 612 BCE). But the book of Jonah, written sometime after the Israelites experienced the Babylonian exile (586–539 BCE), shows God commanding the prophet Jonah to preach repentance to the wicked Ninevites—to save them—much to Jonah’s dismay.