The Sin of Certainty

Why God desires our trust more than our 'correct' beliefs

Peter Enns

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781529343243
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Bible scholar and author of The Bible Tells Me So Peter Enns explains how Christians mistake 'certainty' and 'correct belief' for faith when what God really desires is trust and intimacy.With compelling and often humorous stories from his own life, Bible scholar Peter Enns offers a fresh look at how Christian life truly works, answering questions that cannot be addressed by the idealized traditional doctrine of "once for all delivered to the saints."Enns offers a model of vibrant faith that views skepticism not as a loss of belief, but as an opportunity to deepen religious conviction with courage and confidence. This is not just an intellectual conviction, he contends, but a more profound kind of knowing that only true faith can provide.Combining Enns' reflections of his own spiritual journey with an examination of Scripture, The Sin of Certainty models an acceptance of mystery and paradox that all believers can follow and why God prefers this path because it is only this way by which we can become mature disciples who truly trust God. It gives Christians who have known only the demand for certainty permission to view faith on their own flawed, uncertain, yet heartfelt, terms.

1 I Don’t Know What I Believe Anymore

My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol.

—Psalm 88:3

Thanks for Nothing, Walt Disney

A few years ago, I was on my way home from a (boring, Lord-help-me-get-out-of-here) academic conference on the West Coast and thought it would be nice to chill with an onboard movie, which airlines used to offer before they gave up trying. Nothing looked remotely interesting except for Disney’s film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia, so . . . sure . . . why not, let’s give it a shot. I can’t recall my exact thought process, but I guess Disney’s marketing assumption that your inner ten-year-old never really goes away is right on the money.

The movie tells the story of a friendship between two fifth graders in rural Virginia, Jess and his new neighbor, Leslie. Jess is a shy and self-conscious boy from a poor and fundamentalist Christian family. Leslie couldn’t be more opposite—an a-religious free spirit with a contagious imagination, and who looks at life as one adventure after another. They become close friends, but Jess isn’t always sure how to think about Leslie’s nonconformist ideas.

In one scene, Jess and Leslie, along with Jess’s spunky little sister May Belle, are in the back of the family pickup truck on the way home from church. Jess had invited Leslie, who seems to have spent her entire life insulated from the kind of world Jess takes for granted.

For Leslie going to church is another opportunity for an adventure into the unknown. She is glad she came along, despite the hellfire-and-brimstone preaching, and declares, “That whole Jesus thing. It’s really interesting.”

May Belle is absolutely shocked and corrects Leslie: “It’s not interesting. It’s scary. It’s nailing holes through your hand. It’s because we’re all vile sinners that God made Jesus die.”

Leslie looks at May Belle like she had just told her she believed babies were delivered by storks. “Do you really think that’s true?”

Not only do they believe it, but Jess tells her they have to because “it’s in the Bible.” May Belle dutifully adds that if you don’t believe in the Bible, “God will damn you to hell when you die.”

Leslie will have none of it. “I seriously do not think God goes around damning people to hell. He’s too busy running all this,” she says, pointing to the sky and trees overhead.

And with that, I was nostril deep in a faith crisis—which, I don’t mind saying, is embarrassing to admit.

It wasn’t fair. I wasn’t ready.

How was I to know that the company that gave us Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Son of Flubber would venture deep into a religious debate? I was just minding my own business at thirty thousand feet over the Midwest and was caught off guard. Me—a professional Christian, a seminary professor paid to think right thoughts about God and to tell others about them. But after a long trip, my orthodoxy shield was resting at my side. I was unarmed, and Leslie’s words hit their mark. In a flash and without words, I thought quietly to myself, I think Leslie’s right.

The idea that the Creator of heaven and Earth, with all their beauty, wonder, and mystery, was at the same time a supersized Bible-thumping preacher, obsessed with whether our thoughts were all in place and ready to condemn us for eternity to hell if they weren’t, made no sense—even though that was my operating (though unexamined) assumption as long as I could remember.

A fifty-two-second exchange in a movie—a Disney movie, for crying out loud (this is so embarrassing)—uttered by a fifth-grader and total outsider to the Christian faith. She doesn’t even have a Ph.D. or fly across the country to academic conferences. And the next thing I know, my view of God flies away as if sucked out the window due to loss of cabin pressure.

Leslie’s comment confronted me with a simple yet profound and uncomfortable question: When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why? I thought I had that all worked out. Yet, amazingly, with decades of church, Christian college, seminary, and graduate school behind me, and now a seminary professor, I had never actually asked myself that question to see what I thought. (And have I mentioned how embarrassing this is?)

But now I felt threatened, cornered into a moment of uncomfortably honest reflection. Leslie’s comment was uttered with such effortless childlike commonsensical innocence, and it brought to the surface thoughts that had been safely tucked away for many years behind a thick wall of “proper Christian thinking.” I had never openly explored my thinking about God because I was taught that questioning too much was not safe Christian conduct—it would make God very disappointed in me indeed, and quite angry.

So dangerous thoughts lay dormant, never entering my conscious mind. My theological antivirus software had been doing its job, working in the background to keep me from errors in thinking—until this stupid Disney movie snuck past and forced me to deal with it.

Jess’s God was my default God, but Leslie’s God was the one I, deep down, wanted to believe in. My inner May Belle reacted quickly—an aggressive panicked voice scolded me for slipping off the rails. After all, I wasn’t calling into question some side issue of faith, like whether God wants me to give up chocolate or coffee for Lent, but a central question—perhaps the central question: What is God like?

Once you start down this path, there’s no telling where the dominoes are going to fall—and then what? So I just sat there, trying not to think about it. But the train had pulled out of the station with me on it, and it was too late to jump off.

I didn’t plan this little moment, and before I knew it my view of God passed from “Yeah, I got this” to “Uh-oh.” Not triggered by an impressive book or lecture, the way it’s supposed to for scholars. Not inspired while fasting or on a weekend prayer retreat, the way it’s supposed to for the spiritually mature.

But a common and ordinary moment worked unexpectedly to snatch me from my safe, familiar, and unexamined spiritual neighborhood and plop me down somewhere I never thought I’d land. A forced spiritual relocation.

This episode and others like it resulted in a lot of spiritual wrestling matches, a change in employment, a change in churches, and even some breaks in relationships with other Christians. But while there has been much angst and some pain, there has also been a deepening, a maturation, a growth in my spirit that has led to closer intimacy with God.

I’ve come to accept these uh-oh moments rather than run from them. Precisely because they are unexpected, out of my control, and unsettling, they bear with them a lesson I need to hear: I need to be willing to let go of what I think I know, and trust God regardless. And I have come to trust that God uses these moments.

Can We Just Be Honest for a Second, Please?

Most Christians—I’d be willing to bet, sooner or later, all Christians—have unexpected uh-oh moments that threaten familiar ways of believing and thinking about God, moments that show up without being invited, without a chance to prepare for what’s coming and run for cover.

Maybe we’ve read a book, listened to a podcast, watched Secrets of the Bible Revealed on cable TV or a Disney movie on a plane that introduced instability to our once stable faith. Maybe we’ve met new people who don’t share our ideas about the Bible or God at all, but who are just plain nice and what they say makes sense. Maybe we’ve experienced a deep loss or an unspeakable tragedy that leaves us questioning everything we ever thought we believed about God, the world, and our place in it.

I believe these uh-oh moments get our attention like nothing else can. In fact, I believe they are God moments. I don’t claim to know how it all works, and I’ve learned the hard way over the years not to think I can speak for God, but I believe uh-oh moments serve a holy purpose—at least they have for me. They help break down the religious systems we create for ourselves that sooner or later block us from questioning, wondering, and, therefore, from growing.

For many of us, faith is our rock-solid source of security and hope. It provides the map and values for how we navigate the world. But life has all sorts of everyday and ordinary ways of upsetting our thinking about our faith. I believe that, in these moments, God invites us to deepen and grow in our relationship with and our understanding of God.

These are key moments of growth because we tend to create mental fortresses that keep us in the same safe religious space. It is upsetting to redraw our maps and change what we see as the anchor of our security—and if left to ourselves, we would never go there. So we build walls to prevent that from happening, walls within which we preserve what makes us feel secure, where we are in control and our God makes perfect sense to us.

Watching certainty slide into uncertainty is frightening. Our beliefs provide a familiar structure to our messy lives. They give answers to our big questions of existence: Does God exist? Is there a right religion? Why are we here? How do I handle suffering and tragedy? What happens to us when we die? What am I here for? Answering these questions provides our lives with meaning and coherence by reining in the chaos.

When familiar answers to those questions are suddenly carried away, like stray balloons at a county fair, we understandably want to chase after them to get them back. When once settled questions suddenly become unsettled, our life narratives are upset—and no one likes that.

Reflecting on that tension and working through...