The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our Correct Beliefs
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There Goes Jesus Being Jesus Again
Thomas Merton’s well-known prayer . . . An honest prayer loved by many for having its finger on the pulse of the struggles with faith. See Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude.
But, But . . . What About . . . ?
The Bible is a book of diverse voices that speaks into diverse situations . . . This issue is one of the main themes in The Bible Tells Me So. The writings that eventually made up the Bible (both testaments) were written over a wide span of time—about 1,000 years—by people in diverse and challenging historical and personal situations. They do not all speak with one voice, nor should we expect them to. Plus, neither scribes who edited Israel’s scripture after the Babylonian Exile nor the Christians who compiled the New Testament between the second and fourth centuries CE seemed to be particularly concerned about cleaning up the diversity.
Chapter 6: Uh-Oh: When Certainty Is Caught Off Guard (and Why That Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea)
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When Life Happens
These are questions I asked on a survey . . . You can find this survey in the post “5 Main Challenges to Staying Christian, and Moving Forward Anyway” on my blog, The Bible for Normal People, at www.peteenns.com.
God Did What, Now?
High on the list of violent acts was God’s command that the Israelites enter Canaan . . . I look at biblical violence, especially God’s command to exterminate the Canaanites, in more detail in chapter 2 of The Bible Tells Me So. I also talk there about how these stories of violence mirror how ancient tribal cultures saw the gods. The flood, massacre of Canaanites, and other such acts of violence don’t tell us what God is like but how the Israelites, an ancient tribal people, understood and worshiped God. Readers today are not meant to think of God the same way, because the Bible is not a handy information packet on God from A-Z but a record of Israel’s understanding of God, often penetrating and consoling, but also incomplete and disturbing.
Our Pale Blue Dot
. . . the immeasurably vast size of the universe. See notes in chapter 2 regarding Wikipedia’s “Speed of Light” and “Observable Universe.” Rob Bell has a great section in What We Talk About When We Talk about God (chapter 2, “Open”). He looks at the role science has played in showing us how mysterious and unknown our universe becomes the more we learn about it; for example, subatomic particles disappear and show up instantly elsewhere, and space-time isn’t constant, but warps. Science pushes us to accept mystery rather than dismiss it.
Seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal . . . Blaise Pascal, “Of the Necessity of the Wager” sec. 3, no. 206 in Pascal’s Pensées. Thought (Pensée) number 205 is also worth looking at: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?” Blaise Pascal, meet Qohelet!
Our home planet, as Carl Sagan put it, is a “pale blue dot” . . . The “Pale Blue Dot” is a moving soliloquy by Carl Sagan in his 1980 television series Cosmos. The remake of this series, which aired in 2014 and was hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, replayed Sagan’s soliloquy toward the end of the final episode (episode 13, “Unafraid of the Dark”) with stunning graphics to illustrate that the Earth is a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Humans have been around for a long time, doing humanlike things . . . The examples in this and the next paragraph are taken from Andrew Curry’s November 2008 Smithsonian Magazine article “Göbekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?” and Wikipedia’s “History of Wrestling,” “History of Beer,” and “Stonehenge.”
Are we, then, as “neurotheologians” put it, simply a mass of chemicals and neurons . . . Wikipedia describes “Neurotheology” as “a neologism that describes the scientific study of the neural correlates of religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. Other researchers have rejected the term, preferring to use terms like ‘spiritual neuroscience’ or ‘neuroscience of religion.’ Researchers in the field attempt to explain the neurological basis for religious experiences, such as: the perception that time, fear or self-consciousness have dissolved; spiritual awe; oneness with the universe; ecstatic trance; sudden enlightenment; altered states of consciousness.”
Falling Branches
While jogging along a wooded trail in an area park . . . My two illustrations were reported by ABC Philadelphia (“Woman Killed by Tree Branch Identified”) in 2009 and NBC Philadelphia (“5-Year-Old Boy Dies After Tree Falls on Him in Montgomery Country”) in 2012.
God Is Not My Father
. . . like the parts where God actually does love the world and has nurturing patience like a mother . . . On God’s love, see John 3:16 and 1 John 4:8. On God like a nurturing mother, see Isaiah 49:15 and Psalm 131:2.
When “Uh-Oh” Becomes “Ah-Ha”
Adjusting our expectations about what the Bible can deliver . . . This is a major, if not the major, theme in The Bible Tells Me So. Having false expectations about the Bible is the biggest “crisis” over the Bible that we face.
Chapter 7: God Wants You Dead
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The Lie: “It’s All Your Fault”
Doubt—not fashionable skepticism, but really doubting what you were always so certain of . . . It seems to me that in recent years, more and more authors are writing about the role of doubt in the Christian Life—and they are clearly hitting a raw nerve. To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.
Down the Mine Shaft
. . . two sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, St. John of the Cross and his mentor Teresa of Ávila. Gerald G. May’s The Dark Night of the Soul was my great introduction to John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila.
In 1975 the Jesuit philosopher John Kavanaugh . . . For the dialogue between Kavanaugh and Mother Teresa, see Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust. An account of Mother Teresa’s journey in a collection of her letters is Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk). The name of the home has since been changed to “Home of the Pure Heart” as has the name of the city to Kolkata.
Darkness takes away control, what Thomas Keating and others call the “ego,” . . . Thomas Keating is a Trappist monk and priest whose work in the 1970’s revived the contemplative tradition in Roman Catholicism. Invitation to Love is a good introduction to this moment.
Chapter 8: Cultivating a Habit of Trust
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Ever Have One of Those Decades?
To tell my story, I need to mention briefly the story of another . . . As I said, Lizz’s story is hers to tell—and she is. She blogs regularly (under Elizabeth Petters) out of her deep experience on faith, living in the moment, and trusting God.
Live Strong
I hear Aslan’s words to Shasta . . . The scene is Shasta asking Aslan why he had earlier wounded Aravis in C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. I can’t tell you how much the Chronicles of Narnia series meant to me when I first read them after college!! And they still mean a lot to me.
August 1, 2008
I was also facing a simultaneous and very serious stressor at work . . . In this section I recall briefly my departure from Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008. The focus of the “controversy” was the publication of Inspiration and Incarnation. The matter became quite public, landing me on the cover of the Philadelphia Inquirer (“Embattled Professor to Leave Seminary”) and attracting the attention of the local NPR station (resulting in a WHYY’s Radio Times interview with Marty Moss-Coane). Good times.
Honoring Your Head Without Living in It
. . . they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam’s Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts in Solitude; also James Martin’s introduction to Merton and others, Becoming Who You Are), Henri Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love), Gregory Mayers (Listen to the Desert), Rowan Williams (Tokens of Trust), J. Keith Miller (Compelled to Control) and David Benner (Spirituality and the Awakening Self). Let me also include here Frederica Matthews-Green (The Jesus Prayer and At the Corner of East and Now) for gentle and compelling introductions to Eastern Orthodoxy, a direction to which I never once nodded throughout my entire seminary career, and James Fowler’s classic Stages of Faith. Others I want to mention are M. Holmes Hartshorne (The Faith to Doubt) and Daniel Taylor (The Myth of Certainty and The Skeptical Believer). I could go on, but each of these were one ah-ha moment after another, encouraging in me a different perspective on what the life of faith can look like, which I found both unsettling and also healing and freeing. These books have become old friends.
I was drawn to authors and others who were explicitly outside of the Christian tradition . . . Such as Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Robert Bly (Iron John), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements), and Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly). I also re-read Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning (which my daughter Lizz and my wife Sue also read while Lizz was away).
I was entering middle age, the “second half of life” . . . I need to mention here again Richard Rohr (first through podcasts and then Falling Upward), along with James Hollis (Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life).
The Long Haul
. . . after two thousand years, the “end” hasn’t come yet . . . For an alternate and provocative understanding of Jesus’s second coming, see the many posts by Andrew Perriman at “P.OST” (postnost.net). He argues that the second coming is best understood within the conceptual framework of the Bible. That means that these events were fulfilled politically: the destruction of Jerusalem, the dispersion and formation of Christ communities throughout the Roman Empire, and ultimately the overthrow of pagan Rome and the confession of Christ as king by that empire. This brings about an end to persecution of faithful Israel and the worship of Israel’s God among disparate nations. Whether or not you find this convincing, the church is still in the long haul, nevertheless, as was ancient Israel and its successor, Judaism.
Chapter 9: Beyond Trust
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Go and Sin No More
The story of God and God’s people is never static . . . A wonderful book that got me started in thinking about this is Paul Hanson’s Dynamic Transcendence: The Correlation of Confessional Heritage and Contemporary Experience in a Biblical Model of Divine Activity. He speaks of a “form-reform” dynamic in the Bible. The law is a classic example in the Old Testament. Law was given in conjunction with Israel’s liberation from slavery—it was not a burden, but a mark of freedom and a covenant bond with God. Yet, that form became institutionalized over time to mere ritual. The prophets spoke to this (“I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice . . .”; Hosea 6:6). Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount had a similar vibe (“You have heard that it was said [in the Law of Moses] . . . but I say to you . . .”; several times in Matthew 5 beginning at 5:21). And with the prophets as with Jesus, it was the gatekeepers that resisted reform—those with much invested in maintaining older forms at all costs. This “form-reform” pattern, Hanson argues, has also been played out throughout the history of Christianity—it seems unavoidable. The pattern of reforming earlier views that become encrusted with rote tradition is not a regrettable situation to be avoided, but a means of insuring a continued deep fidelity to the heart—not the letter—of any faith tradition.
Earlier, in the late seventh century, the prophet Nahum could write a scathing denunciation . . . The dates I give here for Nahum and Jonah are uncontroversial among biblical scholars. Jonah was written sometime during the Persian period—which ruled from modern day India all the way to Egypt and Asia Minor after dismantling the Babylon Empire in 539 BCE and until the rise of the Greeks in 332 BCE. Nahum is dated to some time in the middle to late seventh century BCE, near the time of the fall of Assyria’s capital Ninevah in 612 BCE.
Scripture Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.
OLD TESTAMENT
Genesis, 36, 38, 40, 41, 52, 95
1, 125
2-3, 137–139
3, 104
6-9, 121–122
6:5, 139
9:25, 44
15:6, 95
Exodus, 40, 41
21:2, 44
21:20-21, 43
Leviticus, 40, 41
19:18, 24
Numbers, 40, 41
31, 122
Deuteronomy, 40, 41
6:5, 24
20:10-18, 122
23:15, 44
28, 84–85
28:12, 22, 125–126
28:35, 85
Joshua
10:26, 122
1 Samuel
7:12, 187
2 Samuel
7:1-17, 63, 65
2 Kings
25, 64
Job, 81–89, 94, 166
1, 81
2, 82
2:7, 85
3, 82
6:4, 86
7:20, 86
8:4, 83
10:3-7, 86
38-42, 87
42:1-6, 88, 221
42:7, 88
Psalms, 57–58, 86–87, 94, 166, 220
1:3-4, 67–68
6:6, 110
19, 126
22:1, 60
40, 100
73, 66–71
73-89, 65
73:1-2, 66–67
73:3-5, 67
73:9, 67
73:14, 67
73:15-16, 68–69
73:17, 69
82, 81
88, 58–61
88:18, 60–61
89, 62–65, 100
89:1-2, 62
89:33-34, 63
89:38, 64
89:46, 65
89:52, 65
121, 132–133
131:2, 225
Proverbs
3:5-6, 103, 172
3:33-35, 83–84
Ecclesiastes, 74–80, 86–87, 94, 166, 220–221
1:5-10, 75
1:11, 76
1:13-15, 74
3:19-21, 77
7:10, 208
7:13, 74–75
12:9-14, 78
12:11, 78
12:12-13, 78–79
Isaiah
49:15, 225
Jeremiah
10:13, 125–126
Hosea
6:6, 228
Jonah, 209, 228
NEW TESTAMENT
Matthew
5:21, 228
5:43-48, 70, 148
6:25-34, 107
7:1-5, 149
10:37-39, 160–162
24:33-34, 196
27:46, 60, 166–167, 198
Mark
9:14-29, 96
15:34, 60
Luke
8:40-53, 96
10:27, 24
John
3:8, 211
3:16, 225
8:11, 210
17:20-25, 191
Romans
6:1-14, 163–164
8:3, 100
8:17, 199
8:29, 164
1 Corinthians
7:29, 31, 196
12:12, 27, 209
Galatians
2:16, 100–101, 221–222
2:19-20, 162
3:28, 44
&nbs
p; 5:6, 99
Ephesians
6:5-6, 44
6:9, 44
Philippians
2:3, 100
3:10-11, 199
Colossians
1:24, 198–199
3:3, 162–163
3:22, 44
4:1, 44
1 Thessalonians
1:9-10, 196
Titus
2:9, 44
James
1:6-8, 113–114
2:14-18, 102
2:19, 96–97
1 Peter
3:15, 114–115
1 John
4:8, 225
4:12, 102
Revelation
14:14-20, 122–123
22:20, 196
About the Author
PETER ENNS is the Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University, St. Davids, Pennsylvania. Enns speaks at schools, churches, and seminars across the country and is a frequent contributor to journals and encyclopedias. He is the author of several books, including The Bible Tells Me So, Inspiration and Incarnation, and The Evolution of Adam.
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Also by Peter Enns
The Bible Tells Me So
Credits
Front cover design: Studio Gearbox. Cover art by leeser | Veer and Thinkstock
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