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

  Dedication

  As always, and with love and thanks, to my family,

  and to those who are weary and heavy-laden, seeking rest.

  Epigraph

  Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the voice

  of his servant, who walks in darkness and has no light, yet trusts

  in the name of the LORD and relies upon his God?

  —Isaiah 50:10

  Trust in the LORD with all of your heart,

  and do not rely on your own insight.

  —Proverbs 3:5

  As for knowledge, it will come to an end.

  For we know only in part.

  —1 Corinthians 13:8–9

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1 — I Don’t Know What I Believe Anymore Thanks for Nothing, Walt Disney

  Can We Just Be Honest for a Second, Please?

  Okay, I’ll Go First

  What’s So Sinful About Certainty?

  Thinking Is Good

  Chapter 2 — How We Got into This Mess Know What You Believe (or Else)

  Oh Great, We Came from Monkeys

  Seriously Weird Stories from Long Ago

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

  Slavery: Whose Side Is God On?

  Again with the Germans

  Why “Defenders of the Faith” Are Raising White Flags

  Chapter 3 — “You Abandoned Me, God; You Lied” (and Other Bible Lessons) Parts of the Bible We Don’t Read in Church (but Should)

  God Is a Liar

  The World Makes Perfect Sense Without God

  Chapter 4 — Two Miserable People Worth Listening To Trust God Anyway

  Don’t Even Try to Understand What God Is Up To

  Chapter 5 — Believing in God: So Easy Even a Demon Can Do It Who, Not What

  Amen

  Faith Isn’t Something in Your Head (or Heart)

  “All to Jesus I Surrender”

  There Goes Jesus Being Jesus Again

  But, But . . . What About . . . ?

  Chapter 6 — Uh-Oh: When Certainty Is Caught Off Guard (and Why That Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea) When Life Happens

  God Did What, Now?

  Our Pale Blue Dot

  Falling Branches

  Meeting New People

  When Christians Eat Their Own

  God Is Not My Father

  When “Uh-Oh” Becomes “Ah-Ha”

  Chapter 7 — God Wants You Dead The Lie: “It’s All Your Fault”

  The Truth: “God Wants You Dead”

  Down the Mine Shaft

  Let’s Bring This Aboveground

  Chapter 8 — Cultivating a Habit of Trust Ever Have One of Those Decades?

  Live Strong

  August 1, 2008

  Honoring Your Head Without Living in It

  The Long Haul

  Being Like Jesus

  Chapter 9 — Beyond Trust No Fear

  Go and Sin No More

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Scripture Index

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Enns

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  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 ut
tered 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 it is what this book is about.

  Another dynamic at work here is how friends, family, and church members would handle it if they knew what you were thinking. Feeling judged and banished is a common story among those who take a risk to let people in on their well-guarded secret.

  Since I have outed myself as someone who is okay with questions about the faith, I can’t tell you the number of private conversations I have had with people—often virtual strangers telling me about their secret questions and thoughts. They seem haggard and worried. Even frightened.

  Taking a risk like this could mean being branded for life, that person who “used to have such strong faith” but is now just another doubter who “doesn’t know what she believes anymore.”

  Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest. What a shame. And when pastors and other Christian leaders are going through this, well, don’t get me started. Those poor people. While they’re working things through in private agony, they still have to keep up appearances or risk public shame, not to mention their paycheck.

  So you hold it in and muddle through your life, keeping it all quiet, trying not to think about the lost faith you now mourn, and hoping nobody brings it up. Or, after you have tried to hold it in for a while, it may reach a point where the pressure is too much and explodes into a full-on crisis.

  We need to talk about this.

  Sooner or later we all find ourselves faced with some serious challenge to how we think about God. Don’t we all eventually come to a crossroads where familiar beliefs don’t work very well and we just don’t really know what we believe anymore? Even if we have never verbalized it to ourselves (let alone to others), don’t we all at some point have a nagging background noise of doubt, a deep undercurrent of cognitive dissonance, where what we were once so certain about evaporates like a dream?

  Okay, I’ll Go First

  I’ve certainly had some of those moments—and not just on airplanes. They’re always uncomfortable and disorienting, and I just want them to go away. But I have come to trust—or at least I try to trust—that God is not calling me to resist these moments. I believe God patiently leads me through them.

  I won’t say my faith is “stronger”—that implies that the uh-ohs have been fixed or conquered, which is the opposite of what I am saying. I mean my faith is more real, more textured, three dimensional, and without the constant fear of being wrong playing in my head or that God is disappointed in me for not acing a multiple-choice theology exam.

  One of my uh-oh moments happened when I left a spiritual community I had been a part of for twenty years. Leaving was challenging enough, but the really difficult moment ambushed me quietly and without warning several months later.

  In my mid-twenties, I attended for four years a small conservative but sane seminary and then returned to teach there after earning my Ph.D. I would wind up spending another fourteen years there as a Bible professor, from my early thirties to
mid-forties—about half my life at that point. That community deeply and powerfully shaped my thinking about the Bible, God, and life. That school was my spiritual home, more so than any church. It defined my faith. I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else for the rest of my life.

  I had some good years with fond memories. But toward the end of my time there, things began turning sour. We had a lot of quick turnover on the faculty, administration, and board—and that often leads to shifts in ideology. It was thought that things had become too relaxed, and now the school’s conservative identity had to be protected. And with that, the atmosphere changed from collegial and generous to tense and adversarial. Our teaching and writing began to be closely monitored. It seemed like the slightest perceived deviations in thinking led to very serious meetings about the “future of the school” and “maintaining our heritage.”

  That was my experience.

  The long and short of it is that I resigned after several stressful years. I will come back to that part of the story at the end of the book, because it is part of a larger story of how I began to trust God differently through all this. But for now, let me just say that I was ready to leave. Despite how much the school had meant to me spiritually, I was ready to leave. Very ready. So I did.

  I recall those first few months of sweet freedom. I hadn’t felt that light and joyful in probably a decade. Pick your cliché: I felt alive, born again, as if I had been liberated from a prison camp, released from a dungeon, and had seen the sunshine and felt the cool breeze for the first time in ages. And I had boundless energy. I was bursting at the seams with fresh and exciting ideas I felt free to put out there without threat of scolding. I wound up having seven books published within the next four years, which, frankly, is insane, but a lot of cramped thinking needed to stretch its legs. I even started eating well (fewer Oreos) and exercising for the first time in forever. I was taking care of myself emotionally and physically.