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

by Peter Enns

  Biblical scholars across the board came to the same conclusion. It seemed to them that several people, living centuries apart and long after Moses, wrote various portions of these books, which were then edited together about one thousand years after Moses lived. Similar to Darwin’s theory of evolution, this theory of the “evolution” of the Pentateuch was almost universally convincing to scholars at the time. And that caused a crisis.

  If God’s appointed messenger Moses wrote the Pentateuch, then you would have a God-appointed eyewitness to at least four of the five books. Moses arrives on the scene in the second book (Exodus) and dies in the fifth book (Deuteronomy). Four out of five books with Moses around ain’t bad. So, as the logic goes, if the bulk of Pentateuch was written by the eyewitness Moses, we can be reasonably sure that the Pentateuch is historically accurate. But if biblical scholars were correct and the Pentateuch had several authors and then one editor one thousand years after Moses’s time, you’ve got a major blow to the Bible being an accurate account of history—which is the same problem introduced by evolution and archaeology.

  So we have Darwin, archaeology, and now the Germans—three hard punches landing square on the jaw of the Bible all within about a thirty-year period of the nineteenth century, and the Bible was down for the count. The first five books of the Bible don’t give us accurate science or history recorded by an eyewitness. Rather, the Pentateuch that we have in our Bibles is as far removed from the time of Moses as we today are removed from the Norman conquest of England (1066 CE, so you don’t have to look it up like I did).

  And this theory wasn’t staying put in the secluded halls of academia. It was spreading to churches of Europe and America. Conservatives were deeply worried—panicked is the right word—that this would cause average churchgoers to lose their faith because it challenged their thinking about the Bible. I feel their pain. Their panic was justified—but only because faith and correct thinking were seen as two sides of the same coin.

  Conservative Protestant churches have never fully recovered from these blows. In American evangelical and fundamentalist Christian colleges and seminaries today, the “battle for the Bible” begun in the nineteenth century continues to rage against these three “attacks” on the Bible. Indeed, the battle must be waged. The Christian faith itself is at stake.

  But a fourth blow was yet to come—in some respects more devastating than the other three.

  Slavery: Whose Side Is God On?

  Christians in the nineteenth century debated whether kidnapping, buying and selling, and enslaving Africans was all part of God’s plan. Both sides looked to the Bible for sure moral guidance for solving this conflict. And both sides found what they needed, not so much because they were biased readers (although they were), but because the Bible itself gives conflicting information about slavery.

  On the one hand, slavery in the Bible was a given, and slaves were the property of the owner, just as in every other ancient society. The Bible even contains laws about how to treat slaves that should make us squirm.

  When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property. (Exodus 21:20–21)

  I wonder whether African slaves ever felt like God had painted a number on their backs.

  A favorite go-to Bible verse for slave owners was the story of the flood where Noah curses one of his grandsons, Canaan, to be the “lowest of slaves” (Genesis 9:25). It just so happened that, according to the flood story, the descendants of Canaan were among those who migrated to the African continent. I imagine slaveholders were quite happy to read right in the Bible that their slaves were descendants of the accursed first slave Canaan. And passages like this from the New Testament certainly helped their case:

  Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ; not only while being watched, and in order to please them, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. (Ephesians 6:5–6; see also Colossians 3:22 and Titus 2:9)

  Slaveholders were like Jesus, demanding and deserving obedience from their subjects.

  On the other hand, some saw the exodus story as proof that God is in the business of liberating slaves. The Bible also has a rather wonderful provision for releasing slaves after six years and for harboring escaped slaves who wind up on your doorstep (Exodus 21:2 and Deuteronomy 23:15). We also read that masters must treat their slaves “justly and fairly,” which is at least a start in the direction of humanizing slaves (Colossians 4:1 and Ephesians 6:9). And at one point, Paul just comes out and says this:

  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

  We could go on, but the point is that the Bible gives conflicting moral guidance, which caused for everyday people a different kind of crisis of faith than the one caused by Darwin, archaeology, and some Germans. It’s one thing for the Bible to be wrong about the long-ago past (as difficult as that was to process), but it is far worse for the Bible to be of no use to us here and now when we actually need it to tell us what to do.

  If you can’t trust the Bible to tell you what to do on such a pressing moral issue of the day, than what is it good for? In what sense is the Bible God’s word when it looks like we can’t count on it to steer us through the real and urgent complexities of life? And so the Bible didn’t seem trustworthy—either for telling us about the past or for navigating the present.

  With all of this, the dominoes were unwinding down the slippery slope (that’s a clever mixed metaphor—think about it), and the only way to hold it all together, the only way to hold tight to “what we know,” was to hunker down and defend the Bible. As the Bible goes, so does Christianity.

  This is why we see such a preoccupation with the transmission and preservation of knowledge among evangelical and fundamentalist churches in America today —the reason they “do church” the way they do. They have been living in intellectual reactive mode for generations to defend the intellectual certainty that they believe the Bible needs to provide. That is why Bible churches and colleges began popping up around the turn of the twentieth century and continue to thrive. That is why such a premium is placed on Sunday school, long lecture-like sermons, and reading the right books and keeping away from bad ones.

  Of course, not every contemporary pastor or leader is aware of this history, but it’s still in their DNA, passed on from one generation to the next. Patrolling their borders is part of the job description. The faith is at stake, and the skirmishes have been known to get pretty nasty. If having faith means holding on to certainty, when certainty is under “attack,” your only option as a good Christian is to go to war—even if that means killing your own.

  Again with the Germans

  So are you bored yet? I hope not. I can’t really help you with that anyway, plus you’re just going to have to be bored for another couple of pages, because we’re going to talk about Martin Luther in order to get the bigger picture of how we got into this mess.

  Martin Luther (died 1546) was a German monk. He also reportedly drank a lot of beer. Whether that’s relevant or not, Luther had issues with the Roman Catholic Church. The long and short of it was that the Church was obscuring what he felt the gospel was all about—God’s forgiveness of our sins by God’s absolutely free mercy and love. One does not earn God’s forgiveness.

  One thing that set Luther off was that the Church had gotten into the indulgences market, which was very much about earning forgiveness. An indulgence, to put it a bit crassly, was a way of donating money for a new church building in return for having your sins forgiven, along with the sins of those who have already died and are presently stuck in purgatory (a place of purification after death to make you ready to enter heaven eventually). Perhaps not medieval Catholicism’s finest hour.

>   Luther wasn’t the first to say “Uh . . . excuse me, but NO” to indulgences, but he parlayed his protests to the point where he called for sweeping reforms of the Church—which is why it’s called the Protestant Reformation. And here is why this is important for us: Luther’s rallying cry was that the Bible alone (sola scriptura, to use the Latin phrase) was to be the basis of these reforms, because the Bible alone—not decrees handed down by a fallible Church hierarchy—has the imprint of God’s authority on it.

  Luther did not succeed in reforming the Catholic Church, so he started another one, eventually called the Lutheran church, which claimed to follow the teachings of the Bible more carefully. But in doing so, one problem was solved and many others were created—and with that, we are getting even closer to my point.

  If the Bible alone is seen as the final court of appeal for right thinking about God and how one lives a life of faith, it becomes vitally important that you get the Bible right and that everyone is on the same page about what “right” means. And to help ensure that everyone had access to the Bible to do just that, Luther translated the whole Bible from the original Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament) into German, thus putting the Bible into the hands of every “Joe Meatball and Sally Housecoat.”*

  And once you translate the Bible into a language people actually speak and understand, they are bound to start forming opinions about what the Bible “says.”

  Anyone who has ever been to a church Bible study or—heaven help us—led one, knows what’s coming next. When people read the Bible for themselves, they often disagree about what it means. The Bible does not have a good track record of promoting unity among those who read it. Take us back to the carefree days of the papacy and the few who interpreted the Bible for the many. At least you had some order. Now you have chaos.

  In time, Protestant denominations were popping up like dandelions—Baptists, Anabaptists (Mennonites), Calvinists, Methodists, and on and on. They all agreed that getting the Bible right was the first priority, because getting the Bible right was the key to getting the Christian faith right. The problem, though, was that they each thought they carried that key in their pocket and kept it safe for the rest. And this is why Protestant church softball games even to this day sometimes end in a brawl. (I was actually in one once.)

  And here’s something else about Luther and the Protestant Reformation: Luther’s Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, is also where modern biblical scholarship would take root within two hundred years.

  Feel free to draw a line from one to the other. Luther championed independence from Church tradition so he could follow where the Bible led. It wasn’t long before some—who read and thought a lot, too, but were also largely fed up with the whole church thing in general—said, “How about independence from any church tradition and seeing where that takes us?”

  Soon you had university professors reading the Bible without feeling they needed to line up with any church doctrine. They took the Protestant you’re-not-the-boss-of-me spirit to the next level. Sola scriptura for the Reformers never meant ignoring church tradition. But now sola scriptura went into hyperdrive: the Bible alone without any outside church authority to tell us what is says. The only authority was “the natural light of reason.”

  The end result of all this upheaval in Germany beginning in the seventeenth century, and soon elsewhere in Europe, was that the Bible wasn’t a perfect holy book from God, but a book from long ago and far away, and had to be studied by scholars like any other ancient text. The gates were flung open to read the Bible apart from and even against church tradition, Catholic or Protestant.

  And with that, the modern period of biblical studies was born, which continued to grow and mature until it hit its major growth spurt into full adulthood, as we’ve seen, in the nineteenth century.

  Why “Defenders of the Faith” Are Raising White Flags

  If you’ve made it this far, relax. It’s over. No more history. And at least you can say you accomplished something today.

  For the record, I don’t think grappling with what the Bible says is a bad move. But when we take a step back from how church happens today for many of us, we can see that we are part of a legacy where getting the Bible “right” is important, even central. So on one level, we can’t rightly hold any church or movement today fully responsible for being preoccupied with correct thinking and making sure their beliefs are rock solid and certain. It goes with the territory.

  But this long history has begun taking a surprising turn in recent decades—and that brings us to why I wanted to write this book in the first place. After a few hundred years of various groups claiming to have a firm handle on getting the Bible right, a critical mass of Protestants is starting to wonder whether this quest for certainty is running on fumes.

  If we are supposed to know what we believe and be sure of it, and if that knowledge comes to us from the Bible, how come there are thousands (literally) of Protestant churches out there, each claiming to be biblical? What’s wrong with this picture? Are we to think that one of them is basically right and the others basically wrong? Or that perhaps this mess is an indication that we may have been walking down the wrong road?

  And that’s the great irony here. The long Protestant quest to get the Bible right has not led to greater and greater certainty about what the Bible means. Quite the contrary. It has led to a staggering number of different denominations and subdenominations that disagree sharply about how significant portions of the Bible should be understood. I mean, if the Bible is our source of sure knowledge about God, how do we explain all this diversity? Isn’t the Bible supposed to unify us rather than divide us?

  In a sense, the fact that churches continue being preoccupied with correct thinking is perfectly understandable: holding to what you know is part of the Protestant DNA, passed down to contemporary evangelicalism and fundamentalism via the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy. But that preoccupation is also inexcusable, because we only need to google “churches in my area” to see that this road of getting the Bible right has led, if not to a complete dead end, then at least to an endless traffic circle.

  This struggle between fundamentalists and modernists over the Bible has also revealed an odd fact lying just below the surface. Even though these two groups see the Bible in polar opposite ways, they share the same starting point: any book worthy of being called God’s word would need to talk about the past accurately. The modernists, looking at things like the problems with Genesis, concluded that the Bible wasn’t, after all, a supernatural book that told us reliable facts about the past.

  Fundamentalists fought back. They said the modernists showed lack of faith in God by doubting that the Bible gives an accurate record of history. The Bible, because it is God’s word, must get the past right. Otherwise the whole Christian faith collapses. This attitude spawned a long history of fundamentalist crusades to defend the Bible against modernist “attacks” by amassing their own arguments for why the Bible can be fully trusted as a historical document despite what mainstream academics say.

  These crusades are still very much part of Christian culture, at least in America. But the question many are asking today, as I am in this book, is whether the Bible is really set up in the first place to give the kind of certainty that both of these groups expected. Is the Bible’s role really to give us certainty about what happened in the past (and to be judged thumbs up or down)? Perhaps the endless back-and-forth debates were rooted in the wrong question.

  I believe that the Bible does not model a faith that depends on certainty for the simple fact that the Bible does not provide that kind of certainty. Rather, in all its messy diversity, the Bible models trust in God that does not rest on whether we are able to be clear and certain about what to believe.

  In fact, the words “belief” and “faith” in the Bible are just different ways of saying “trust.” And trust works, regardless of where our knowing happens to be.

  Chapter Three

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

  Listen to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for I cry to you.

  —Psalm 5:2

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

  This may be hard to hear, and you might want to be sitting down, but as my children got into their teens, especially my daughters, they did not worship the ground I walked on. They actually found flaws in me, their father.

  During one particularly rough patch, I asked my youngest daughter, Sophie, who was around sixteen at the time, why she seemed to be avoiding me, had hardly acknowledged me for weeks, and (can you believe this?) refused my friend request on Facebook. She looked me square in the eye and said in a matter-of-fact, logical tone of voice, “Because I don’t like you.” Well, that did it. I’m a failure. I fell into self-pity mode with a healthy dash of passive-aggressive behavior toward Sophie.

  Somewhere in my brooding, I mentioned this to a more seasoned parent, who had a good chuckle over it.

  “Good for you!” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “For Sophie to say this—free of screaming and drama—means that she trusts you enough to be honest with you. You’ve got a healthy dynamic going on here. Trust is deep, unquestioned, sort of a reflex. Good parenting job!”

  From failure to Father of the Year. Not bad.

  Which brings me to the book of Psalms in the Old Testament—those 150 poems of faith that ancient Israelites sung or read in worship to God.