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

by Peter Enns

  Chapter Two

  How We Got into This Mess

  Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods.

  —Psalm 40:4

  Know What You Believe (or Else)

  Few if any truly come to faith in God by the sheer force of an argument. We come to faith for all sorts of reasons that aren’t really “reasons” at all in the conventional sense. Our “reasons” are intuitive more than rational, emotional more than logical, mysterious more than known. I would say that coming to faith involves sensing God’s presence, which may transcend or even defy our ability to rationally process the encounter.

  This does not make faith less real or less stable. It simply acknowledges that faith is enmeshed in the fullness of our humanity and can never be reduced to an essentially intellectual process.

  We do not come to faith lining up our thoughts and then venturing forth, and so why would it ever cross our minds that preoccupation with correct thinking is able—or necessary—to keep us there? Or why should anyone feel the need to depart from the path of faith—or be told they have to—because their experiences lead them to think differently than when they first came to faith?

  The stumbling block here is our modern Western rational mind-set, which has put on a golden throne the human capacity for rational thinking, our ability to know and explain our reality through our thoughts.

  Don’t misunderstand me. I value these God-given abilities and gifts we have. Humans are thinking creatures like no other. Also, I happen to like the modern world, what with its technology and all. Water and lights on demand, air travel, dental care, vaccines, anything battery powered. I’m not taking a cheap swipe at modernity, nor am I suggesting we turn the clock back to some bygone blissful era. We are who we are when we are. And it’s all good.

  But we also have to remember that we are more than walking brains, and truth isn’t limited to what our minds can conquer. Christians, of all people, should know this, but too often they too seem to have bought into the modern project more than they might realize or want to admit.

  Like a lot of Christians, I was taught—from a young age all the way through seminary, and in most every church I’ve ever been to, book I’ve read, or sermon I’ve heard—that having strong faith depends on “knowing what you believe.” And people of true faith will be able to articulate what they know to a lost and blind world that just doesn’t get it. It was all very logical and clear. Having that kind of sure knowledge of the mysteries of life is promoted as one of the major perks of being an insider to God.

  Conversely, if you don’t know what you believe, something is clearly wrong with you that needs to be addressed with a sense of some urgency. At least that is the message I picked up over the years—which really stinks if you happen to have questions and you don’t always feel like you know what you believe.

  I’m not trying to speak for all Christian traditions here. My tradition is Protestant, and I’ve experienced several versions of Protestantism on the broad evangelical spectrum. And there, “knowing what you believe” is a major, almost universal, preoccupation and cottage industry with defend-the-faith books, websites, seminars, and conferences.

  For most of my life, going to church felt like another day of school, and that vibe seems to have been intentional. To get Sunday morning off on the right start, we were expected to attend an hour-plus, age-appropriate lesson called—in case it was unclear what was happening to you—Sunday school. And reading the right kinds of books on your own time was encouraged to learn more about what to believe and what not to believe.

  Sermons were essentially the transmission of information and typically occupied center stage. They could easily last for half the service, often forty-five minutes or more, and consisted of “Bible expositions”—going from one verse to the next to explain what is there so you can know what is right and what is wrong to believe.

  Other sermons might be on topics like marriage, evangelism, raising your teens, the upcoming election, or the Christian approach to watching the Super Bowl, but the vibe remained the same: the sermon is fundamentally a lesson that explained what the Bible (and therefore God) “says” about the matter at hand. And the sooner you know what the Bible/God says, the more confident you can be about your faith.

  To help you retain that knowledge, taking notes on the sermon was encouraged or even expected. Church bulletins provided sermon outlines and empty space for that very purpose. Sermons were often taped and placed in a video/audio library for future reference, or in case you missed a Sunday and had to catch up.

  Other parts of the service, like singing, praying, tithing, and communion (aka the Lord’s Supper, or the Eucharist), were present and taken seriously, but they seemed like add-ons, intrusions to the main action, ramps to launch us up into the sermon and then down to the other side to provide closure. Information transmission was the hub around which the morning service turned. Sunday (and/or Wednesday) evening services would feature more talking and teaching. Missions work was supported, of course, but the expectation was that the church’s distinctive knowledge set would be faithfully reproduced.

  For most of my evangelical Christian life, the faith modeled for me was largely faith as an intellectual exercise, a series of information sessions, diagrams, handouts, and overheads so you could be certain about what you know you believe and go through life with unwavering confidence, ready and able to withstand attacks on your faith from your atheist college professors, Roman Catholics, CNN, or Oprah.

  An upside is that personal Bible reading was expected. That can become another ball and chain, but I am also very thankful for this experience, for I got to know my Bible pretty well. Especially during trying times, passages I’ve absorbed through reading or hearing come to mind that help me remember that God and I have a past, and that past is still real in the present.

  So I hope you don’t hear me knocking the Bible or undermining learning about what you believe, in church or elsewhere. Not at all. Like I’ve been saying, knowing and learning about your faith is good and sacred. And neither am I throwing my former church tradition under the bus. God is there, too, and the people of God wind up in all sorts of traditions.

  What I’m after here is how faith was taught and modeled—as a preoccupation with correct thinking, which feeds on the mentality that knowing (especially the Bible) is central to faith. That message was clear as a bell. Knowing what you believe places faith on solid, unshifting ground. At least that was the plan.

  That idea began to crumble for me rather quickly, in my thirties and especially my forties—a bit of which I talked about last chapter. Life got messy. By “life” I mean a wife, three children, a career, and financial responsibilities; illness, stress, crisis, pain, death. You know, life. My experience kept being out of sync with what I “knew” about God, the world, and what it means to live in it. Familiar ways of thinking yielded less and less certainty. My life of spiritual training, where needing to know was dominant, had set me up perfectly for trouble.

  I’m guessing I’m not alone here. If you can’t relate at all, you might be a toddler (and major props just for reading this far), or you started your journey of faith sometime in the last six hours.

  As life got messier and more complicated, I came to see—here and there, now and then, or at times with sudden, crashing clarity—how much my entire existence was actually out of my control, and in fact always had been. But I never paid enough attention to dig deeper. I had always been too busy assuming my thought world was up for the task. But life won, as it always does, which rocks us off our knowledge perch. Yet “know what you believe” was the center of my spiritual training and support for most of my life. My faith was no help. It was actually part of the problem.

  Looking back, I am simply astounded that no one was aware enough to tell any of us that sooner or later “know what you believe” wouldn’t cut it. Sooner or later, that tank runs empty.

 
; I don’t judge myself too harshly, at least in my better moments, for not grasping this rather obvious point sooner. I was young and caught up in it all. But still, surely someone older and wiser had to have known all this, right? Or perhaps in a knowledge-based faith no one felt safe saying it—like a corporate CEO saying, “You know folks, money isn’t central to what we do here.”

  Neither do I hold anyone else responsible for my experience. For one thing, at the end of the day, we are all responsible for what we do. No one blackmailed me or held me hostage. And playing the blame game only keeps us looking in the rearview mirror, which is a sure recipe for misery.

  But another reason I don’t blame any church is that conservative Western churches as a whole are simply caught up in something bigger and older than themselves. Knowledge-based faith, and hence a preoccupation with correct thinking in order to have faith, is a deep, systemic, and largely unquestioned condition of much of Western Christian culture—like construction detours, bank holidays, and free birthday breakfasts at Denny’s. It is what it is.

  I was caught in a conflict that had been festering for centuries.

  Oh Great, We Came from Monkeys

  Depending on where you live, you might see churches dotting the landscape, with names like Crossroads Bible Church, Main Street Bible Church, Bible Baptist Church, and so on. In my neck of the woods, hardly the Bible Belt but still with a long Christian heritage, a Google search shows me about a dozen “Bible” churches within a half-hour ride.

  These churches, along with Bible seminaries and Bible colleges, are monuments to a rocky time in the not too distant past that has left its stamp all over contemporary conservative Christian America—the so-called Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Think Scopes Monkey Trial.

  Hey!!! Wake up! Pay attention! This isn’t a boring history lesson. It’s why our churches do what they do.

  Here’s what happened. Intellectually speaking, the Protestant Christian faith in America had been doing pretty well for itself for a long time. Christianity was considered “reasonable,” even commonsensical, and Christian leaders and laypeople generally assumed that the Bible was a book of accurate history and science, and defending it was as easy as pointing to a verse to prove your point. And there was no reason to think otherwise. That is, until the nineteenth century got in the way.

  The idea of the Bible providing a sure intellectual foundation for what we believe took a knockout blow from four rapid punches to the chin within about thirty years. The first punch is also the best known: Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution.

  The idea didn’t actually start with Chuck, but he gets the credit for putting the big picture together and getting the word out (in his famous book On the Origin of Species).* As the story goes, sometime after he was bird watching on the Galapagos Islands, Darwin came to see that all the diverse life-forms on Earth are connected through “common descent” and evolved through a process of “natural selection.” But what most people heard was, “We came from monkeys.”

  The problem for biblically centered Christians is that the Bible, right in the very beginning, tells us clearly that God created all life-forms with a simple “Let there be . . .” No common descent, natural selection, or billions of years required. So if Darwin was right, the Bible was wrong—and most of the scientific and academic world thought Darwin, scientifically speaking, nailed it. Darwin’s theory was bound to get some push back, and the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 was the public cage match between modernity (science) and fundamentalism (the Bible is right no matter what science says).

  The controversy over evolution never quite went away, and in fact has gone through a revival of sorts in recent years. “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) practically trip over themselves for the joy of sticking evolution in the face of Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals in books, TV, and social media.

  And it doesn’t help that scientists have recently mapped the human genome. Don’t ask me to explain that, but based on books I’ve read and conversations I’ve had, the genomes of humans and primates are so strikingly similar that they have to be related to each other. That means, genetically speaking, we can’t speak of a “first couple”—Adam and Eve—as the Bible says. The study of genetics seems to be a slam-dunk-over-the-defense-break-the-backboard proof for evolution—a first couple is genetically impossible. And the fact that an evangelical Christian, Francis Collins, led an international team responsible for mapping the human genome has made it an even harder pill for some to swallow.

  Throw into the mix what geologists have known since at least the eighteenth century from the fossil record and rock sedimentation: the earth isn’t a few thousand years old, as the writers of the Bible likely assumed, but several billion years old—4.5 billion, to be exact.

  And since we’re getting all this science stuff out of our system, astrophysicists in recent generations have described for us a universe that is so large and so old I don’t even want to talk about it—other than to say the “known universe” is about 13.8 billion years old, and it would take something like 93 billion years to get from one end to the other traveling at the speed of light. Let me go on record and say this is beyond our comprehension, and Genesis looks like a children’s story by comparison.

  Science in general and evolution in particular made knowledge-based Christians in the nineteenth century with Bibles in hand very nervous, and for good reason. And things haven’t gotten much better.

  Seriously Weird Stories from Long Ago

  Around the same time that Darwin published his research, Christians got a second punch in the jaw.

  For most of Christian history, our source of information about the ancient Israelites and their neighbors was the Bible alone. Other ancient peoples hardly had an independent voice.

  That began to change in the nineteenth century when some curious archaeologists began digging in the Middle East to uncover the ancient past. (I have a rather hefty but scintillating note on this at the end of the book.) Beforehand, digging was largely up to amateurs and grave robbers selling ancient artifacts on the black market. Professional archaeologists introduced some respect for the ancient world. They used careful methods for digging and recording what was found—like bones, houses, temples, weapons, monuments, and tablets with writing on them.

  These efforts have helped us put the biblical story of the Israelites in a wider context. Now we have a chance to let some of these other nations speak for themselves, to see what they thought, what they believed. And some of what archaeologists discovered has led to major turning points in how we see the Bible and the ancient Israelites. And in the early years of archaeology, the victim, once again, was the book of Genesis.

  It turns out that other ancient nations had their own stories of beginnings, and they were similar to the stories in Genesis—creation, the first humans, and a great flood that drowned everyone. These other stories were not only similar but also much older than the versions we find in the Bible. So, logically speaking, if the biblical versions of these stories are similar and younger, the biblical writers likely weren’t working from scratch. They had a formula for writing their stories.

  The idea that the stories in Genesis were later versions of older ones made a lot of Christians uncomfortable. The Bible didn’t look unique any longer, a book with classified information from God delivered only to the ancient Israelites. It looked more like another story told by a tribal people from three thousand or so years ago, with a talking serpent and two trees with “magical” properties to give life and knowledge. These stories were myths—stories of deep religious value written by and for ancient people with no (or precious little) historical, let alone scientific, value for us today.

  So now Christians in the nineteenth century had to deal with evolution and archaeology. Many would find it difficult to go on as if nothing had happened. It looked more and more like the book of Genesis was wrong about science a
nd history.

  All this contributed a very serious period of freaking out and set Bible-believing Christians on a long course of being preoccupied with correct thinking, namely “defending the faith” by defending the Bible as scientifically and historically accurate—if not in every detail, then at least “basically” accurate. Certainly not myths adopted from pagan neighbors. After all—as the logic goes—if the Bible couldn’t be relied upon to provide certainty about how the world began and where people come from, it couldn’t really be trusted for much else. Therefore the viability of the Christian faith—based on the Bible—was in peril.

  And there’s more. (Are we having fun yet? No? Neither were nineteenth-century Christians.)

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

  As if landing two hard punches against the ropes wasn’t enough, a third blow came from Germany—specifically from German biblical scholars who had been doing their scholarship thing for over two hundred years already. And once again, the victim was poor old battered Genesis, though now the next four books of the Bible were also affected. (The first five books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—together make up the Pentateuch, “five scrolls,” aka the Law of Moses, or the Torah.)

  Here’s what happened. Since forever it was thought that Moses, after leading the Israelites out of Egypt, wrote down in his old age all or most of the first five books of the Bible in the fifteenth century BCE. But careful readers of the Pentateuch—long before the nineteenth century—had seen problems with this scenario. The Pentateuch has some obvious logical inconsistencies, contradictions, stories told from different perspectives, and bears the marks of different writing styles and, in some cases, of a much later time. (I unpack this a bit in the note at the end of the book.)