Certainty is a Closed Door?? Part 2

I want to point out that I'm not attacking JP Shanley but rather a world view that is prevalent in our day. The world view says that mystery, doubt, and unanswered questions are always virtuous. To be ignorant is beautiful but to be certain about anything is a mortal sin. To be certain is to be full of hubris and the truly humble person is the one who is certain that nothing can be truly known.

Second of all I want to point out one fatal flaw of most post modern worldviews. Shanley says that it is wrong to embrace certainty. In other words, most post moderns are absolutely certainly convinced that certainty is wrong. I hope you see the flaw in this thinking. We are all embracing some sort of certainty (thoughts on the war, politics, education, doubt, art, economics etc...) The offense to others does not come when we embrace certainty but offense comes when it is revealed what we are certain about.

It would be important to point out that for the Christians who are reading, they can be assured that doubt is not completely incompatible with faith. Jesus says to Peter in Matthew 14 " O you of little faith, why did you doubt?" In one sentence He points out that doubts can run alongside faith. At some point or multiple points, in their lives, every thinking Christian will struggle with doubt. For the Christian, doubts come when we measure God's revelation against our experience. We struggle with doubt when we read in God's Word that "our paths will be made straight" but our paths seem out of balance. We struggle with doubt when we read in God's Word that "my God shall supply all thy needs" and then we can't pay our credit card bill. We immediately doubt God's promises rather than carefully examining our lives to see if we've been faithful to the conditions of the promises. Just like our existential forefathers, we believe Truth lies in our experience. It doesn't, our experiences and our sin nature betray us and cast us into doubt. Jesus never celebrates doubt, in fact He tells Thomas in John 20 "do not disbelieve but believe." The clear command of Jesus is to believe and to believe in depth. In John 10 He states that He knows His sheep and His sheep know Him (v14-15) just as I know the Father. He says that His people are enabled to know Him in a manner that is patterned around His knowledge of His Father. Jesus is not focusing His ministry on the mystery, He focused His ministry on the revealed. His desire for believers was for them to focus on what had clearly been revealed about God in Christ.

There is a sort of Christian agnosticism that is prevalent in the Church today. This pseudo spiritual agnosticism says that Jesus was focused on mystery and that true spirituality rests in the mysterious. It celebrates doubt and people who are certain are arrogant and evil. Well, some people who are certain are arrogant and evil and certainty does have a tendency to drive us towards arrogance but I want to point out the fact that the thinking that celebrates uncertainty does not come out of the Scriptures but comes out of the culture. Deuteronomy 29:29 says that "the secret things belong to the Lord (we can't be certain about all things) but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever that we may do all the words of the Law." That was written 3000 years before the Enlightenment.

Have you been thinking like JP Shanley? Have you been loving mystery at the expense of what God has clearly revealed in Christ? Are you asking a lot of questions (rapid fire) but don't have time to listen to the answers from wise, trustworthy people who know God's Word? Have you had a laissez faire attitude towards doctrine because you've been more influenced by a culture than by Moses or the Apostle Paul? Do you think that Truth is really two sides of a coin? Have you convinced yourself that two opposing truths can both be right?

Obviously, certainty can be misused but it isn't a closed door. Jesus says that He is a door and a gate and that if men do not enter through Him, with certainty (a faith based on evidence), then they are lost forever to hell. What Jesus seems to say is that it is only through acknowledging that He is the ultimate certainty that true life begins. The certainty found in Christ is not only a certainty about His death on the Cross and His resurrection but it is a growing certainty about His character, His purposes, His plan, His will for our lives, His Church, and how He calls His church to Himself. In other words, maturity in Christ is a growing certainty. This is not a certainty that bludgeons people over the head and leaves them bloody. It is not an abusive certainty but a certainty that cares enough to engage others, on their turf, in the arena of ideas.

Part 3 coming next week.