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

by Peter Enns

  I’ve thought a lot about that early evening in Arizona, but even as I write this, my inner skeptic tells me it was a coincidence, just one of those things that happens once in a while in a universe of infinite possibilities, and that my psycho-physical experience of a Presence was due to chemicals passing across neurons in my brain interpreted as a God moment. I also have a good idea what confirmation bias is—a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions. My academic mind-set is tuned in to not accepting things at first glance—or at least knowing enough to feel guilty when I do.

  And I’ve thought a lot about the selfishness of thinking that God showed up here for me at a cookout, yet religious extremists go from village to village killing, raping, and kidnapping, and God does nothing. I think of all those who responded to my survey, and how they might react if I dared interpret this as a God moment when they had been praying without ceasing for years with no relief.

  But still.

  I hear Aslan’s words to Shasta: “‘Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story. . . . I tell no one any story but his own.’”

  I don’t know how it all fits together in the grand scheme of the universe. I can’t explain it or be certain about what happened.

  But, in a way, that’s exactly the point.

  Part of my own journey of faith is letting go of knowing first, of sorting it all out first before I commit. For me, a big part of learning to let go of knowing is to not care how or whether my experiences can fit together in some overarching intellectual structure where my rational mind remains enthroned as the true and final arbiter of what is and isn’t real.

  So I am just trying to tell my own story here, not anyone else’s.

  After nine years, I still can’t shake that experience in Arizona, and recalling it now brings back those emotions, and I feel that feeling again. And I just can’t shake the timing and the absurdity of that random exchange.

  I have chosen to trust God enough to accept that this was a God moment that will always remain outside of my ability to comprehend or analyze. I embrace a different kind of knowing.

  Probably for the first time in my life I was beginning to comprehend that trust was a habit I would need to cultivate. I was a seminary professor with a seminary degree and a Ph.D. in Old Testament. I was in my midforties with a wife and three teenagers. And it was time to learn to trust God. But that is my story. Don’t judge me too harshly. Remember what Aslan said.

  I took five bracelets from John. One for each of us. I kept mine on until long after Lizz came home from Arizona. Just so I would remember. It eventually got brittle and broke in half, but I’ve kept it on a dish next to my desk. Writing this reminds me to tape it together—and maybe to look at it more often. I need to keep my God moments before me.

  August 1, 2008

  Along with a decade of stress at home, I was also facing a simultaneous and very serious stressor at work: my fourteen-year tenure as a seminary professor looked like it was coming to an end—at least some were determined to make it so.

  Sticking with the bare storyline, several colleagues, some of them newly hired, had begun taking steps a year or so earlier to make sweeping changes in the composition of the faculty and administration, and those steps evolved into something of a well-orchestrated movement.

  In the summer of 2005, I had published a book that reproduced more or less the content of what I had been teaching in my classes for twelve years with no sign of problems. But now, those views had become, for some, “controversial,” meaning in violation of the school’s ideological parameters. As a result, for almost three years I was viewed with suspicion, and regular faculty meetings were eventually held to “discuss” my work. With each passing month, the outcome became more and more self-evident: my days were numbered.

  If you’ve ever been in a work environment where you face daily a concerted effort to put your head on a chopping block, but you have to go in day in and day out and sit in meetings with those who wish you weren’t there and are exerting great effort to make it so, then you have a sense of what I was processing.

  The inevitable loss of your livelihood is hard enough. But for me, home and work were coming unhinged at precisely the same time. And that was too much for me to handle—which I eventually came to realize was probably the point.

  To pile it on, in the midst of all this, my father died, leaving my mother in a state that weighed heavily on me. A dear colleague, friend, and former teacher of mine also succumbed to a long illness a few weeks before Lizz left for Georgia.

  Everything was happening in sync, with an unnerving rhythm and the precision of a Swiss watch. Waves of stress at work and at home were cresting and troughing at the very same moment. I recall some mornings having left the house in the middle of a true crisis, only to arrive at an office I didn’t really want to go to in the first place and find waiting for me an e-mail or some rumor signaling the imminence of my professional demise.

  And the crests weren’t really crests. I was constantly under the waterline, just at different depths, never able to rest and catch a breath. I hardly came up for air. There were no even days, let alone good ones. Only variations on bad days. It seemed that stressors at home and work were collaborating, as if both worlds held morning staff meetings to get the timing right.

  It was too much. I was completely drained—emotionally (Lexapro helped for a season), financially (wilderness and boarding school ain’t cheap), and physically (I was stress eating and had put on some weight for the first time in my life). I was in new territory. A friend of mine genuinely wondered why I hadn’t become an alcoholic.

  My mom would tell me on the phone, “Peter, you have to give this to God. I mean really give this to God.” But I wasn’t ready to hear that just yet. I wasn’t necessarily against the idea in theory, but trusting God seemed off topic at the time. I had begun learning to trust God with my daughter and family, but not with my own life. I needed to handle this myself, and right now, I was in survival mode. (Okay, now you may feel free to judge me.)

  I wasn’t yet self-aware enough to realize I was climbing into the car and about to head down the mine shaft.

  After two years, it became clear to me (and many others) that no matter how many meetings we had or whatever other measures were attempted to call off the hounds, the scent of blood was in the air, and things would only get much worse. Rather than subjecting myself to a process with a foregone conclusion, I decided in January 2008—while Lizz was in Arizona—to take charge of the situation. After getting some sage advice, I contacted a lawyer and began moving toward a legal separation from the school I was once so proud of—the school that had educated me years before Lizz was born and had employed me since Lizz was in preschool.

  This decision took a lot of the pressure off, but the next few months proved to be trying for other reasons. Although my intention to resign was known, a special board meeting was called for March where a vote was taken to suspend me. I was not there. My family and I were on a long-scheduled trip to visit Lizz in Arizona.

  My case gained steam in the public eye (having been dubbed the “Enns controversy”), which added an element of shame further compounded by feeling disparaged and misrepresented. Despite the majority of faculty supporting me, a carefully guided process was underway that I was helpless to stop. By May, after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations at my instigation, a severance agreement had been reached in principle.

  Now the only thing that remained was working out the details back and forth and deciding on an official end date for my employment, which turned out to be August 1. It could easily (and more logically) have been earlier, July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year. But the process of ironing out details went slower than expected. Whatever.

  During those months of negotiation, Lizz was also in the process of moving toward the end of her time in Arizona. Her school had no fixed graduation dates, since students enter at different times and go throug
h the process at different paces. When a critical mass is reached, graduates are grouped together for one ceremony. So a lot of moving parts are in play, and it’s hard to schedule graduation day more than a week or so in advance.

  Early July came and went, and then mid-July, with tentative graduation dates scheduled in pencil and then erased. The date that finally worked turned out to be August 1. We marked it on our calendars and made the usual flight arrangements.

  I didn’t see the connection right away. My focus was 99.5 percent on bringing my daughter home after a long journey of healing, not on my job. But eventually, the beauty of it hit me. Lizz’s difficult journey and mine, whose crests and troughs had been so exquisitely intertwined for years, were coming to an end—with a new life beginning on the exact same day.

  Three hundred sixty-five days in a year, and two independent stories played out on opposite ends of the country, both converging in harmony on precisely one of those days. I felt like I did eighteen months earlier with John at his grill.

  The convergence became more real for me as I sat there in Arizona, listening to Lizz give the valedictorian address. I was overcome by God’s thick presence and a thankful heart—the kind of thankfulness that only comes by receiving grace rather than manufacturing it. Two hard journeys coming to an end in such alignment without—amazingly—my micromanaging a single moment of either. Go figure. I actually don’t control the universe.

  My family was being given permission to leave the past behind and move forward, though not as before, enslaved to fear, but by cultivating the seeds of trust that had been planted over the last few months.

  Honoring Your Head Without Living in It

  When the Israelites defeated the Philistines at the town of Mizpah, the prophet Samuel set up a stone “between Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, ‘Thus far the LORD has helped us’” (1 Samuel 7:12). You may know “Ebenezer” as Scrooge’s first name, but in Hebrew, it means “stone of help,” which Samuel placed at the battle site as a monument, a physical reminder of God’s help.

  We all need an Ebenezer or two in our lives. I know I do. Something we can point to.

  As a boy (in middle school, if I remember correctly), I made myself a sandwich, tied together the bread bag, and tossed it back onto the counter a few feet away. My mother, who for much of her childhood in Poland and Germany during World War II had little to eat, looked at me with sad eyes.

  “God cries when you throw food.”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  Maybe our Ebenezers are there and we need to listen better so we can recognize them. They may come softly, quietly, blended into our daily moments. And they may not come very often. But they may get us through long periods when remembering is all we have.

  Our experiences of God matter—those sacred moments that defy the very rational capabilities we are so keen to rely on. And you know what? Throughout that time of struggle for me and my family, never was I preoccupied with lining up my thinking about God. There was no time for that, and it would have been out of place anyway. I was too busy surviving.

  I had to let go—or better, the very idea of holding on was ripped from me. Like the guy in the mine shaft, trust was the only option available.

  “You are of eternal worth.” That’s the message Lizz received in Arizona. Neither she nor I had ever heard that throughout our years of church life. And I began to wonder why. Instead, the starting point hadn’t been our nonnegotiable humanity, but that we are deeply flawed and need to be fixed: pray more, do more, have more faith.

  And I lamented, “Why did we never hear anyone say this in church?” It might have helped many build more healthy self-concepts—not in the superficial self-help sense. Our Arizona experience actually challenged us emotionally and spiritually, and our dysfunctional behavior patterns were laid bare in ways I had never remotely experienced in churches before. Speaking for myself, I felt more human, more whole, more honestly self-aware. And I didn’t particularly like what I saw.

  My theological training and “expertise” stood by silently watching it all happen. They had little to contribute that wasn’t being handled quite well, thank you, by other means—a period of medication, family-systems therapy, individual therapy. Those things worked.

  If we were so dramatically better off after a sixteen-month break from familiar Christian remedies, maybe my thinking about God, the world, and our place in it wasn’t working very well. I found myself having to look at what I believed about God and God’s actions in the world from an alien point of view.

  This wasn’t an academic exercise for me. I felt like pieces of my life were falling into place, and what I had always known about God wasn’t fitting very well into this new scheme. I was at the beginning of a process of relearning how to “be” Christian—and becoming more spiritually self-aware than I had ever been. That process hasn’t come to an end, and I see now that it never will. And I’ve come to see the wisdom of being fine with that—and trusting that God is, too.

  I see my own life of faith as an ongoing rebuilding and renovation project. Though having passed official inspection, the flaws deep in the foundation have been exposed, as have the cracking walls and bursting pipes hidden behind them. Touch-up paint and caulk worked for a while, but they are at best temporary solutions—or worse, quick fixes that mask the cracks. Some walls have needed to be torn down and rebuilt with new framing, which has also given me the option to do some expanding and redesigning; the foundation of trust can handle it. I’ve expanded some rooms and rearranged others.

  I still recognize my house as my own, even though it looks different from the street and has a different feel on the inside. And I know now that I need to make sure I don’t let things go unchecked as I had before. Regular upkeep and vigilant maintenance are hard work and absolutely necessary.

  Working on the lifelong habit of cultivating trust has meant learning to express my faith with words that rarely came to mind before—and that I might have mocked if they had—like journey, pilgrimage, and mystery. I know these ancient words of Christian wisdom can sometimes sound trendy and insincere, but not for me. They are my letting-go-of-control words. I’ve needed to be intentional in using different vocabulary not simply for describing my faith but for reconstructing it. The way we talk is not only a byproduct of how we think; vocabulary actually affects our mental architecture.

  I made some friends who had already undergone a similar process of reconstructing their faith (some because of hard loss and excruciating pain). The quality of their lives of faith encouraged me, and they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had either never heard of before or never took seriously enough to notice when correct thinking controlled my faith.

  I know all this reading may sound a bit self-contradictory—reading books filled with information about needing to let go of holding on to information—but I don’t see it as self-contradictory at all. As I’ve been saying, letting go of the need to be certain isn’t the same thing as letting go of thinking. Reading outside of my comfort zone played a role in helping me understand that the need for certainty is at best a debilitating spiritual distraction, and at worst, simply destructive.

  Discovering a contemplative tradition in Christianity was like opening a window in a dark room and seeing a crack of light that hinted at much more beyond. Here was a tradition for which mystery is not a slogan or reluctant concession but a deep, defining, and fundamental spiritual reality—a tradition, as I came to see, that went back even to the apostle Paul, who, as we saw, talks about being “in Christ,” Christ being “in us,” and our lives being “hidden” in God. And in John’s Gospel, we read that believers are as intimate with the Father and the Son as the Son is with the Father (John 17:20–25).

  I never noticed this contemplative transrational dimension of the Christian faith because it was never taught. I felt a bit cheated, but I’m not sure if hearing about it
years earlier would have helped. Not enough “life” had happened. Regardless, I now felt understood—which came at a pivotal moment in my life. For most of 2009 and 2010, God’s absence was as profoundly tangible as was God’s presence in Arizona two years earlier. Much like the writer of Psalm 73 or the writer of Ecclesiastes, and for the first time in my Christian life, I really wondered deeply whether it was worth it all, whether there actually was a God, and what it even means to speak like this.

  I mourned that I might never be able to sing a Christmas song again, go to church, pray, or even care about any of that. I was between jobs and began looking for a new line of work altogether, but after many months of searching, nothing turned up. As I was bathing in my inner agnosticism, I was drawn to authors and others who were explicitly outside of the Christian tradition or not easily recognized as being in it—at least less easily than I had been accustomed to.

  I felt I had to push myself to the outer edges of my known universe. After all, my old patterns of thinking had been disintegrated. Plus, if all this Jesus business is really real, he can handle it. And if he can’t, well . . . whatever. But I’m not going to play around. That horse has left the stable. By peering out beyond my horizon, I got a different perspective on how inauthentic, carefully guarded, superficial, even fake, my own life of Christian faith had been, with its default mode of gaining knowledge to maintain my false sense of control at the expense of being aware of my own soul.

  So it was huge for me to discover, in the midst of all this, an entire Christian tradition that confirmed my experience, which is when I began reading about the dark night of the soul—a cleansing acid bath to my preoccupation with correct thinking. My familiar pattern of needing to know now felt wholly out of place, even sacrilegious.