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

by Peter Enns

  Israel’s faith was flexible, not set in stone.

  Movement, change, and surprise are woven into the very fabric of the Christian faith. A crucified and risen Savior was the surprising act of God’s faithfulness. It challenged conventional notions of what it meant for the God of Israel’s story to show up—messiahs were supposed to rule from the throne in Jerusalem, not die. And this gospel continues to challenge our conceptions of God today.

  A faith that remains open to God complicating our certainties will not only affect our own lives and the lives of those closest to us. It will also make us better world citizens.

  Followers of Jesus throughout history have been of great service to the world in alleviating pain, suffering, and injustice. They have built countless schools, hospitals, and orphanages; have fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and housed the homeless; have worked tirelessly to protect the rights of the innocent and to abolish slavery. These acts are worthy of those who are called “the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 27), and the Bible speaks eloquently and repeatedly of justice and righteousness for the human family, of care for the widowed, orphaned, and strangers—the “others”—in our midst, of love that usurps self-glorification and power.

  Yet, at least in my corner of the planet, Christians are often portrayed as syndicate thugs, known more for imposing eccentric certainties about science and morality on others. And so the gospel has become yet another calculating movement seeking power to impose on others its own version of divinely mandated order—another ideology claiming the divine stamp of approval added to the long list of such movements past and present that end in coercion, oppression, and violence.

  The reputation Christianity has in the public arena has varied causes, to be sure, including our post-Christian culture, which has little use for religions of any sort. But ultimately some blame must fall squarely on the shoulders of Christian subcultures that are armed with an unwavering sense of certainty in what God wants here and now, which is not up for debate and must be imposed (to the glory of God).

  Adopting and intentionally cultivating in Christians a culture of trust in God, rather than raising up soldiers for holy wars, would neutralize such public perceptions and reveal a bit more of the true Christian faith—and of God. Such a culture of openness to God’s future is not a compromise to faith but a demonstration of it.

  All this is to say that a faith in a living God that is preoccupied with certainty is sin, for it compromises the gospel—personally, locally, and globally. But it need not remain so. As Jesus said to the adulterous woman, “Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (John 8:11).

  Developing that culture of trust rather than preoccupation with certainty means discerning, articulating, and embodying the heart and soul of the Christian tradition, while also—and just as passionately—remaining open to the movement of God’s Spirit, which “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8).

  Faith like this does not come easily for many of us, and often it can only emerge at the tail end of difficult and trying experiences. For it is in those moments that we come to realize how little we actually know, that we have traded God for our own tired images of God, and that the frenzied pursuit of and clinging to correct thinking will sooner or later leave us empty and exhausted.

  But if we venture further, we will then begin to see that trust in God, not correct thinking about God, is the beginning and end of faith, the only true and abiding path. Coming to this realization—for me as for others over the centuries—has made all the difference.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is about faith, doubt, the wisdom of not needing to know, and learning that trusting God is the beginning, middle, and end of the Christian path. This book expresses that faith, and the faith to which I aspire.

  I’ve been writing this book in my mind for about ten years, during which life transitions and just life in general were happening to my family and me with little time to come up for air. Actually, judging by an old journal I stumbled on from my early twenties, these themes have been my home base for over thirty years. I think I’ve always been writing this book.

  Which explains why it took me a few tries to get this book looking like, well, a book, and not some random gushing of thoughts and stories with little focus. It took some time, but I eventually saw some themes and coherence amid the chaos, and voila! Here you go.

  Many thanks to Mickey Maudlin, my editor, for his wisdom and insight into the Christian faith and what it means to write about it, and the rest of the team at HarperOne, who seem to have quite a knack at seeing a book from draft to completion and beyond. It’s great working with you.

  Kathy Helmers, my agent, still believes in me, understands what I am trying to do, and seems to know where I am going before I get there. And I am likely the only person in human history who can say, “I played catch with my agent in November at an academic conference.”

  Spring Ridge Academy walked with us during a trying time and helped me see myself and my family more clearly. My friend Ted Olson picked up the slack and helped me to keep on seeing things more clearly. St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church continues to refuse being wordy, trendy, flashy, loud, or caught up in culture wars.

  Doug Green and Mike Kelly, friends and former colleagues, share a long and difficult journey with me. You are valued by many, including me, for who you are. Do not listen to those who only value you if you do as they say.

  Gary and Maureen, you have lived the last few years with vulnerability amid pain—and you have introduced me and many others to the deeper catacombs of faith that I would not have seen otherwise.

  Jackson Curreri, my student who read the proof pages, made sure I didn’t do something truly stupid like confuse a citation from 1 Samuel with Galatians and other blunders I am prone to. David Vinson is a true friend, a brave and honest soul, and perhaps the fastest proofreader on the planet. Jared Byas, friend, coauthor, and collaborator, knows what I’m trying to do, sees implications long before I do, and doesn’t hesitate to let me know when I’m veering off the path.

  I would be remiss if I did not mention our house full of blissfully ill-trained animals. Marmalade, who is either purring on my lap or dutifully guarding (sprawled over) my keyboard, is singularly responsible for reducing my work efficiency by as much as one-third. Snowy, however, remains a very large and contagiously happy cat, whose only vice is needing to be fed hourly. Gizmo and Miley keep it real by lying around all day and barking at nothing. Newcomer and non-respecter-of-anyone’s-personal space Stassi, the Italian Greyhound, draws the others out of their shells. And steady, contemplative Thumper more or less maintains his quiet routine of munching carrots and just sitting there.

  And of course, my family:

  Sue—teacher, masters student, writer, mother of our children, and dear wife of now thirty-one years—for your own courageous journey and for our journey together. Elizabeth Petters gave me permission to tell a small bit of her story in chapter 8. You and mom are the actual writers in the family. I just type a lot and hope for the best. Erich, an authentic and genuine spirit, with an uncluttered life and a no-nonsense pursuit for meaning. Sophie, a warrior dragon queen, honest, courage like steel, and compassionate.

  Thanksgiving, 2015

  Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

  Chapter 1: I Don’t Know What I Believe Anymore

  * * *

  Thanks for Nothing, Walt Disney

  Nothing looked remotely interesting except for Disney’s film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia . . . The movie was released in 2007 and based on the book by Katherine Paterson published in 1977, which is now published by HarperCollins.

  Chapter 2: How We Got into This Mess

  * * *

  Oh Great, We Came from Monke
ys

  . . . in his famous . . . book On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s classic was published in 1859. The first edition sold out in a day. My copy is a facsimile of the first edition and published by Harvard University Press in 1964.

  . . . an evangelical Christian, Francis S. Collins, led an international team responsible for mapping the human genome . . . Collins’s first book on the subject is The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Another helpful book of his, co-written with Karl W. Giberson, is The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions.

  . . . the earth isn’t a few thousand years old, as the writers of the Bible likely assumed . . . The age of the earth is commonly given to be about 4.5 billion year. According to Wikipedia’s “Age of the Earth,” the earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old.

  . . . the “known universe” is about 13.8 billion years old . . . The numbers in this paragraph are based on Wikipedia’s “Speed of Light” and “Observable Universe.”

  Seriously Weird Stories from Long Ago

  . . . when some curious archaeologists began digging in the Middle East . . . Nineteenth-century British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie is considered the “father of modern archaeology.” His systematic methods of excavating and dating artifacts quickly became the industry standard and led to greater understanding of the ancient Near East (aka, modern Middle East). Among the earliest finds to impact our understanding of the Bible was the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish (perhaps as early as the eighteenth century BCE). This story is similar to Genesis 1 at various points, which led scholars to begin looking at other parallels between the Bible and the older literature of ancient Israel’s neighbors. I talk a bit more about Enuma Elish in chapter 3 of The Bible Tells Me So. Since the days of Petrie and the early stages of what would come to be known as “Biblical Archaeology,” a lot of texts and artifacts have been discovered that help us place ancient Israel in its historical and cultural contexts. Scholars certainly debate particulars, sometimes with some intensity, but all agree that the “world of the Bible” has shed a lot of light on our understanding of the Bible.

  The Germans Are Coming (Like We Need This Right Now)

  . . . The Pentateuch . . . bears the marks of different writing styles . . . Based on the work of other European scholars going back several generations, German Old Testament scholar Julius Wellhausen published his influential and controversial masterpiece Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel in 1882. Wellhausen argued that the Pentateuch is made up of four originally independent documents that were written between the tenth and sixth centuries BCE and then edited together in the fifth century, after the Babylonian Exile. Today most scholars question the details of Wellhausen’s theory, but no scholar seriously questions the notion that the Pentateuch came to be over a long period of development—some might even say “evolution.”

  Slavery: Whose Side Is God On?

  . . . the Bible itself gives conflicting information about slavery . . . A great explanation of the crisis of biblical authority in the wake of the slavery issue is by Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.

  Again with the Germans

  The only authority was “the natural light of reason” . . . The phrase is that of radical philosopher, and no friend of organized religion, Baruch Spinoza (1632–77). He uses it throughout his famous work Theological-Political Treatise published in 1670. A contemporary version is Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise, edited by Jonathan Israel.

  Luther’s Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, is also where modern biblical scholarship would take root within two hundred years . . . Luther’s call to reform the Church had unintended consequences. The whole matter is involved and hard to capture in a few sentences. An excellent (though expensive and academic, yet readable) source is Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible by Travis L. Frampton (T&T Clark, 2006). The key chapter is chapter 2, “Protestantism and the Historical Sense of Scripture.” For example, in his debates with the Catholic hierarchy, Luther appealed to Scripture and “plain reason” to defend his views—which is precisely the rhetoric used by later more radical figures like Spinoza.

  Why “Defenders of the Faith” Are Raising White Flags

  . . . they share the same starting point . . . Recent decades of biblical scholars and theologians have called into question the entire modern intellectual project, with its confidence in being able to give certain, objective, knowledge about the nature of reality, past and present. Two great critiques of modernity by biblical scholars are Walter Brueggemann’s Texts Under Negotiation and Walter Wink’s The Bible in Human Transformation.

  Chapter 3: “You Abandoned Me, God; You Lied” (and Other Bible Lessons)

  * * *

  Parts of the Bible We Don’t Read in Church (but Should)

  The 150 Psalms we have in our Bible are basically of three types . . . In terms of their mood, the Psalms can be divided as I have it here. But biblical scholars spill a lot of ink laying out in great detail the various types of psalms you encounter in the book of Psalms. Scholars don’t agree entirely on what those categories are and they don’t always use the same vocabulary, but, if you look at any book introducing the Psalms (like Bernard Anderson’s Out of the Depths), or just a decent study Bible (like The New Interpreter’s Study Bible, The HarperCollins Study Bible, or The Jewish Study Bible), you read about a wide variety of psalms. Some psalms are sung by individuals and others by the whole community. We see psalms of thanksgiving, praise, complaint, lament, and petition, along with wisdom psalms, royal psalms, and processional liturgies. The book of Psalms is a beautifully diverse collection of ancient Israel’s songs of worship and faith.

  Walter Brueggemann calls these parts of the Bible Israel’s “countertestimony” . . . This spot-on term to name the dark side of the Bible, and which calls into question Israel’s main storyline, comes from Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy.

  The World Makes Perfect Sense Without God

  . . . “Grace grows best in winter” . . . The quote is from Samuel Rutherford’s “Letter 74 to Lady Culross Aberdeen 1837” in The Letters of Samuel Rutherford.

  Chapter 4: Two Miserable People Worth Listening To

  * * *

  Trust God Anyway

  . . . the main speaker of the book, the otherwise unknown Qohelet . . . The name Qohelet comes from the Hebrew verb qahal—to “assemble”—which suggests Qohelet is a “leader of an assembly,” a far better option than interpreting the name as “Teacher” or “Preacher.” Still, leaving the name as is seems best. Qohelet is a fictitious figure, a literary persona, styled as a king, and as such bears the theological message of the book’s author. I discuss all this in my commentary, cleverly titled Ecclesiastes.

  Don’t Even Try to Understand What God Is Up To

  He stands firm in his effort to get an answer from Yahweh. The last words of Job (42:1–6) are routinely understood as Job humbling himself before God and acquiescing to God’s power, especially v. 6. The meaning of this verses is debated (what isn’t among biblical scholars!), but commentaries and study Bibles lay out the problems with this conventional interpretation. To some interpreters, Job is anything but turning over and playing dead. Long story short, Job is mimicking God in the first few verses, and v. 6 is not a moment of repentance but Job holding his ground: “I reject and regret dust and ashes” (The New Interpreter’s Study Bible) or “I am disgusted and take pity on wretched humanity” (The Jewish Study Bible). Job is not humbling himself before God and crying “uncle.” He is resigning himself to the fact that God is never going to give him a straight answer.

  Chapter 5: Believing in God: So Easy Even a Demon Can Do it

  * * *

  Faith Isn’t Something in Your Head (or Heart)

  . . . the Greek word behind it is the same one translated as “faith” elsewhere in the Bible: pistis (PIS-tis). That is not quite right. Pistis is the noun
, and can mean belief or faith. There is also a verbal form of the word, pisteuo (pis-TYOO-o). Since faith is not a verb in English (we don’t “faith” something), translators use a different word (“believe”) or add the helping verb “have faith,” both of which can confuse things and fall short of getting at what these words convey, as we see in this chapter.

  A better reading is “faithfulness of Jesus Christ” . . . This way of understanding Paul in Galatians 2:16 has gained a lot of support in recent decades, due to a better understanding of Paul’s letters as a whole. Paul’s letters focus not so much on communicating a set of beliefs that will lead you to heaven when you die. Instead, Paul’s focus is on how God has made Jews and Gentiles one people of God through the death and resurrection of Christ. This may seem like a bit of a letdown for some of us, but Paul’s message (Paul’s “gospel” as he calls it)—that Jesus is the messiah of Israel, who was crucified and raised from the dead, and that Jesus was messiah equally for both Jews and Gentiles—was a huge crowd control problem for Paul. As Gentiles began following this Jewish messiah, Jewish followers of Jesus rightly assumed that these newcomers would need to adopt certain longstanding Jewish practices commanded in the Bible, namely circumcision and dietary laws. These practices, which Paul refers to as “works of the law” in Galatians 2:16 and elsewhere, were “identity markers” to mark one off as Jewish in Roman society, and it was assumed Gentiles would join right in. But Paul argued that these practices, however ancient and biblical they may be, no longer mark one off as the people of God—no longer “works of the law” but rather what Jesus has done (Jesus’s faithfulness), in whom we now place our trust (our faith). Disagreement over whether these Jewish practices remained valid and binding threatened to tear apart this fledgling community of Jesus followers, and if it did, it would be seen as proof that the gospel doesn’t work and therefore isn’t true. Holding together this disparate group of believers was a prime focus of Paul. The debate whether we should read “faith in Jesus Christ” or “faithfulness of Jesus Christ” is in full swing today, with scholars arguing for one, the other, or some point in between. Books and articles could fill a small library, and any decent commentary written in the past thirty years is sure to mention it. One of the more readable books is N. T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision or What Paul Really Said.