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

by Peter Enns

  What kind of God is this? Where is this God? Is “where” even a legitimate question? Is God a being, or is it better to say, as some theologians do, “God is being”? That strikes me as a promising train of thought, but what then do we do with the biblical God, who is definitely presented as a person-like deity, who sits enthroned in the heavens?

  Who or what is this God, exactly? What does the God of the inexplicably infinitely large and infinitesimally small have to do with the God of the Bible, who seems preoccupied with tribal skirmishes, making sure his people don’t eat shellfish or pork, and who demands his people maintain a rigorous schedule of sacrifices to him?

  The disconnect between our world and the ancient one is indeed vast when we begin talking about God.

  But for many of my survey takers, the even more challenging areas of science were branches of anthropology and psychology—fields that speak more to what makes us human. Now, it’s getting personal.

  Humans have been around for a long time, doing humanlike things—far longer, more widespread, and more complex than the simple stories of Genesis. We have ancient art in the form of cave drawings forty thousand years old. In Göbelki Tepe, Turkey, archaeologists uncovered the oldest known temple. Whoever these people were, they were worshiping some deity or deities about eleven thousand years ago, predating creation in the Bible by five thousand years.

  We know of cave paintings in Mongolia that depict wrestling matches from seven thousand years ago, when, according to the first chapter of the Bible, the cosmos was still trapped in a cosmic, primordial, chaotic “deep” (ocean). The Sumerians (in modern-day Iraq) were brewing beer six thousand years ago, around the time when the Bible says God created light. Stonehenge was built five thousand years ago, one thousand years before Abraham, Israel’s first ancestor, came on the scene.

  How does the God of the biblical story fit into all this? That question challenges modern-day Christians as no generation before.

  Neurobiologists are currently mapping the brain and are able to reproduce human emotions in laboratories—including those associated with worshiping God. Are we, then, as “neurotheologians” put it, simply a mass of chemicals and neurons that have evolved over millions upon millions of years of adaptation? Are humans simply an evolved species with particular adaptive functions, like art and abstract reasoning, that Christians have mistakenly been calling “the image of God?”

  Medications have been hugely successful in addressing chemical imbalances in our brains, either innate or learned, that have wired us to act and think in certain ways that might have been called “sinful” in times past. I personally know many perfectly down-the-middle-noncontroversial Christians, including pastors and professors, who have been helped by therapists and Lexapro more than prayer, Bible reading, or some forms of Christian, Bible-based counseling (that emphasize sin and the need for repentance).

  If healing wounds and helping people live fulfilling and meaningful lives can be addressed through skilled counselors, group support, and medication, what are we to make of the biblical language of sin to explain why we do what we do?

  The question many of faith are confronted with today is whether ancient biblical ways of understanding humanity really have all that much to add to the modern discussion. Does Jesus really make a difference, or are we better off with a health plan that covers therapy and prescription medications? These sorts of questions come up in a modern world awash in genuine, documented, therapeutic successes and pharmacological advances.

  We have every reason today to think differently about the universe and our place in it. This doesn’t disprove God, but it does challenge our thinking. For people of faith, bringing the ancient Bible and our lives together can be stressful and unnerving—which is a problem if faith and correct thinking are deemed inseparable. “What does it mean to be human?” does not have as clear a biblical answer as it once had.

  Falling Branches

  Where is God when where we’re facing the worst life has to offer—when life explodes in front of us? Some in my survey told stories of senseless, random, heinous, unjust, and cruel suffering and death that would tax to the breaking point anyone’s faith in a just, attentive, and loving God we had always believed in—or whether there’s a God out there at all.

  Twice in the last several years or so that I’ve lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the evening news reported something so bizarre, so flat-out implausible, and so very tragic, that I was left thinking that either God doesn’t exist or spends a lot of time napping or is simply distracted.

  While jogging along a wooded trail in an area park, a huge branch high above cracked off its massive trunk and landed on the head of a jogger below. She was listening to music on her iPod and was killed instantly. Those jogging further ahead or behind were fine.

  This might not make you jump as it did me, but as a writer and professor, supposedly getting paid to have a good handle on God, I was taken by surprise. I felt my intellectual armor disintegrate, like a blowtorch cutting through whipped cream.

  Had she just left the house a few moments sooner or later. Had she just kept up a slightly slower or quicker pace. Had traffic to the park been a bit heavier or lighter. But no.

  How can anyone recover from this news? I mean, the timing—like it was all carefully orchestrated. “Branch, drop on top of unsuspecting mortal minding her own business on three . . . two . . . one . . . release.”

  A few years later, in what seemed to me like a twice-told cruel cosmic nightmare, a young mother was taking a walk in a park, not far from where I live, with her two young sons. This time a branch fell and killed one of the boys at the very moment they passed underneath. The mother and the brother, a few steps away, were not touched.

  I don’t remember more details. I was too busy shutting down my brain so I wouldn’t have to process the implications. For an instant, any talk of God coming from my lips seemed absurd, ridiculous, and foolish. A quick Google search of “child killed by falling branch” brings up a disconcerting number of incidents.

  What kind of universe is God running, anyway?

  No wonder ancient peoples sacrificed to appease their gods. Pantheons made up of gods with humanlike qualities have their downsides (like being distracted all the time by having sex with humans), but they also have a built-in mechanism for handling “acts of God,” as our insurance policies put it. If a high wind dropped a tree branch on a loved one, you could always pin it on the kinds of chess games the gods were known to play with human lives. Solution? Offer a sacrifice, make a vow, or appeal to your patron god to protect you. Belief in the gods themselves, however, didn’t seem less plausible.

  But once you are left with one God who is also all knowing and all loving, “Why do senseless and horrible things happen?” is a lot harder to answer. That’s the monotheist’s dilemma: a schizophrenic God who is all loving and caring one moment and then distant and uncaring the next.

  I don’t understand how all this works. Does God cause these things or just let them happen? Is God too busy or disinterested? Keeping branches from falling at just the perfect time—neither a second sooner or later—clearly wasn’t a priority.

  The Bible doesn’t help much here because it contains psalms like this one:

  I lift up my eyes to the hills—

  from where will my help come?

  My help comes from the LORD,

  who made heaven and earth.

  He will not let your foot be moved;

  he who keeps you will not slumber.

  He who keeps Israel

  will neither slumber nor sleep.

  The LORD is your keeper;

  the LORD is your shade at your right hand.

  The sun shall not strike you by day,

  nor the moon by night.

  The LORD will keep you from all evil;

  he will keep your life.

  The LORD will keep

  your going out and your coming in

  from this time on and for
evermore.

  (Psalm 121)

  No need to worry, because God doesn’t slumber. He will watch out for you, and neither the sun nor moon will strike you. Good to hear, but how about adding a clause for falling branches? Imagine reading this psalm to the families. I can’t. The Bible—our source of knowing what God is up to—has lost its credibility for some.

  I cannot speak to how the surviving family members processed this pain. And I have no right to try. But for me, these episodes pushed me to think differently about God. What I thought I knew about how God works—even if there’s a Bible passage to back it up—seemed like a naïve wish, a hypothesis with no support. If there is a God, this God doesn’t behave the way I expected.

  The faith of some is untouched by all this. But for those who find themselves in a place where the absurdity of God’s absence is more real than the touch of their own skin, these uh-oh moments make it hard to force a holy smile and keep on keeping on as before.

  The falling branches in our lives force open the doors of our minds to dark and out-of-our-control places with questions that challenge the very core of what we thought we knew about God—and we ask deep down in our guts how knowing what we believe and our absurd reality come together. Once that door is opened, it can’t easily be forced closed again. The life of faith is never the same.

  We sometimes refer to these perplexities as “mysteries” of God. Yes indeed, mystery—but these mysteries are painful for us to experience, even terrifying and unsettling.

  “Mystery” is not a loophole in our defense case for God, certain that the answer is secure and waiting for us behind the curtain. I’m working this out like everyone else, but it seems to me that the way forward is not to “find the answer” that will allow familiar ways of thinking of God and our world to somehow stay as they were. The way forward is to let go of that need to find the answers we crave and decide to continue along a path of faith anyway (as Qohelet would say). That kind of faith is not a crutch, but radical trust.

  Beyond that, I don’t have much to add, except perhaps to point humbly to one of the key pillars (and mysteries!) of the Christian faith, that God enters into human suffering and dies. I’ll just leave it at that. If I say more, I’m afraid it will look like I’m trying to explain it.

  I am amazed and encouraged by those who have lived through these moments of hell on earth and have continued on in the life of faith anyway. They have something to teach people like me: no matter what we think we know, no matter how sure we happen to think we are, suffering is the place where our sense of certainty about God’s ways fades like a dream and forces us to consider that what we know may not be as central to our faith as we might think.

  Meeting New People

  Sometimes the biggest challenge to our sense of certainty about God is just getting out of the house once in a while and seeing that we are just people like everyone else with a limited perspective and not the center of the universe. And when we leave our village and interact with real live flesh-and-blood people who see the divine and the world differently, we cannot help but be affected somehow—and perhaps threatened.

  Is what we believe the only way? Are we right and is everyone else wrong?

  Do I believe as I do simply because of where and when I happened to be born? Would I be a committed Hindu or Buddhist, just as certain about the truth of what I believe, if I were born elsewhere?

  Can we really say with credibility and a straight face that Christianity—let alone my version of it—has a monopoly on truth?

  Our world has grown very small though technology. We “travel” daily via the Internet, and our familiar world is relativized. Us-versus-them thinking seems absurd. Holding on to correct thinking about God and the world becomes stressful.

  When I left my conservative seminary for doctoral work in Old Testament at Harvard University, one of my professors (who had made a similar journey) said, “The non-Christians there will be some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.” Boy, was he right. My most spiritually challenging experience at Harvard wasn’t professors who were geared up to strong-arm me into atheism or some Ivy League cult (as some warned). It was, unexpectedly, the simple act of living and working with people outside of my familiar tribe.

  My classmates and professors came from such different walks of life, from different countries, and they believed such different things than I—about Jesus, God, the Bible, and the world around us. Many of these good people had no idea, no mental architecture, for how I processed reality through my version of the Christian faith, which I took for granted, assumed to be correct, and never really had to seriously examine before. As I rode the subway, navigated Harvard Square, and walked across Harvard Yard, that sense was multiplied many times over. So many people. So different from me.

  And yet, as it turned out, so much the same.

  There were no enemies waiting to trip me up, no muggers lurking in the shadows, no snipers on the rooftop. They were the same mixed bag of personalities I’ve always known, in and out of church, with hopes, fears, histories, and wounds. I shared meals with them and they babysat our children. They were fellow humans, not the “other”—at least no more the “other” than I was to them.

  It could have been me. Like them, I could have grown up somewhere else. And if I had, I wouldn’t be the person I am now—with my particular set of beliefs ordered and arranged as they are. I could have been a “them.”

  I wasn’t exactly sheltered as a child, but at Harvard, in my late twenties, the time was apparently right for me to begin coming face-to-face with what one might call the randomness of my existence and the inadequacy of my faith structure to account for it. And these people, these “outsiders” whom I was taught would on God’s judgment day be consigned to endless punishment, were basically good and kind people—more pleasant, unfortunately, than some Christians I’ve come across.

  So how am I, with my random existence, suddenly the standard by which to evaluate others on earth? Does God look on them as outsiders? Are they destined for eternal separation from God because of when and where they were born and raised, while I, being on God’s party list, can make it past the bouncer because of when and where I was born and raised?

  “Know what you believe” needs a “them” as a contrast. But travel broadens. When the bigger world is tossed in our lap, that sort of confidence wanes and the “them” category shrinks. We begin to wonder whether there even is a “them.” And we hope that God really does love the world enough to let nothing get in the way—especially where and when someone was born.

  More than anything, studying the Bible with Jews dislodged my parochial thinking about God, and it’s had a lasting impact. Over time, I came to appreciate firsthand the richness and depth of that tradition. I also felt some shame for never really being exposed to it before, even in seminary.

  Early in my first year I had lunch with a Jewish classmate who grew up in Israel. For some reason I can’t recall, the topic turned to the story of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2–3). Maybe I was munching on an apple.

  The Christian version of this story—the only version I had ever heard—goes like this. Adam and Eve take a bite of the forbidden fruit after being tempted by Satan (here portrayed as a serpent). As a result, God becomes angry with them and throws them out of paradise. Not only so, but this “original sin” caused all humanity to “fall” into this same state of being objects of God’s complete displeasure. Not a single neuron or hair follicle can escape this state of sin we are all born into, which is the ultimate cause of every conceivable ill on Earth, from tyranny to taxes to charging $2,500 for box seats at Yankee Stadium.

  So over lunch, I mentioned casually this fall of humanity.

  “The what?”

  “The fall of humanity. [Duh.] You know, Adam and Eve’s disobedience plunged all subsequent humanity into a state of sinfulness and complete alienation from God.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Really? That’s odd, since it’s so
obvious.”

  “No, it’s not. The story nowhere says anything about sinfulness passed down from parent to child. Death and hardship are introduced to humanity, but nowhere do we read that sinfulness is ‘passed down.’”

  “Well . . . then what do you make of Satan tempting Eve with the forbidden fruit?”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean ‘who?’”

  “Satan isn’t in the story. We see a serpent, and he is clearly identified as the craftiest creature made by God—not a supernatural foe of some sort.”

  “But the serpent is talking.”

  “Because it’s a story.”

  “Okay, well . . . then tell me why we do bad things?”

  “Good question—but one the story of Adam and Eve doesn’t answer. Jews believe that humans struggle with an ‘evil inclination,’ meaning humans are disposed toward sin, which is an idea we do find elsewhere in Genesis, in the Flood story: ‘The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually’ (Genesis 6:5; emphasis added). Adam and Eve had that same evil inclination, which explains why they disobeyed.”

  “Oh. Okay, then.”

  What I “knew” the story of Adam and Eve to be about wasn’t what the story actually said, but something I had brought to the story from my own Christian tradition. How could I have missed it? It was so obvious. I don’t mind saying that I felt somewhat duped. And that’s a lot to work through over lunch.

  My faith and the Bible it was supposedly based on looked awfully fragile. I didn’t feel like my faith was being attacked, but relativized—which felt worse.

  And that got me thinking: I wonder how much else I was certain about might turn out to be less certain? How naïve and sheltered had I been to think that how I saw things was how they are? And why was I never told any of this? What were they protecting?