Uncertainty

In contemporary culture, walk into a bar and say you're a "Christian" and people are likely to suspect that you reject science, hate gay folk and Muslims, and think God wrote the Bible.

If you didn't know it, you would think Christians have always been this way.  But the truth is, we're in a strange new world.  In the history of Christianity, literal thinking is a new phenomenon.  It has its origins in 18th-century Scotland in the movement called "Common Sense Realism."  A few Scots, troubled by the uncertainties of Enlightenment philosophy, sought to reduce uncertainty by declaring select principles to be categorically true.  The Bible was declared one of the unquestioned foundations of knowledge.  Now, the beauty of Common Sense Realism is that functionally, it's an awesome way to think about the world.  If you can swallow the premise (and keep it down)--that some parts of reality can be true without any justification--you can build your worldview around those premises and plow through the rest of life never pausing over the nettlesome moments where your idea of reality doesn't comport with someone else's.  Passed down and modified through generations of conservative Christians, Common Sense Realism became what we know today as "fundamentalism."

I admire fundamentalism for its courage in trying to protect folks from epistemological doubts, which can lead to frustration (and even humility).  But there are two problems with fundamentalism:  1) it's lazy and 2) it's not really Christian.

By lazy, I mean to say that the idea of foundational knowledge has been discredited.  Folks who think about these things agree that knowledge is always rooted in the particular perspective of the the person claiming it.  Knowledge emerges out of culture and language, nature and nurture.  What we know and how we know it is connected to the particular details of our lives.  To claim to know something, we actually have to know ourselves, too.  That takes time and energy.  It asks a lot more from a person than just saying "the Bible says...."

Fundamentalism is not Christian, either, in the sense of comporting with the life of Jesus, the witness of the Bible, and the history of Christian theological writing.  Jesus wasn't a fundamentalist--he spoke in elliptical riddles and paid little heed to doctrine--what mattered most to him was ethics:  so long as you could turn from your sins and love God and your neighbor, you were good.  The Bible, as a collection of disparate writings that long preceded Common Sense Realism, knows nothing of a fundamentalist worldview.  The Bible is a text that creatively reads and interprets itself--the New Testament writers consistently read and reference the Old Testament, but never in search of literal meanings.  The writers of the Bible engaged their sacred texts much like today's liberals do--generously, creatively, from their particular location.  In the history of Christian theology, few, if any theologians treated the texts as "literally" true--they understood them as discrete literary forms with disparate functions:  history, poetry, metaphor, myth, dream.

The Christian life is a life based less on certainty than uncertainty.  Believing in God by its nature is an uncertain endeavor.  The Creator is never visible as an object to behold with one's eyes; the Son's divine identity leans on the unlikely prospect that a man lived after he was dead; the Holy Spirit is wind and can't be pinned down.  It's all uncertainty, really.  But the great goodness of welcoming this uncertainty into my life is that in the Christian tradition, uncertainty does not enter in alone.  She has a dance partner in the mind--the strange type of knowledge called faith.  Faith and uncertainly appear together and evolve together; they work together; they feed each other.  They dance.  Faith is not certainty; rather, it is knowledge that opens itself to uncertainty, to mystery, to the possibility that there are truly important aspects to reality that can't be empirically proven.  Faith is a good dance partner--faith gives guidance to uncertainty.  Faith imputes motives to a world that does not offer them up.  Faith sees directionality when the world feels adrift.  Faith locates comfort when the world delivers hard surfaces.  Faith reads the Bible for what it says, what it doesn't say, and what it says between the lines and finds truth in all three places.  Faith opens up the possibility of knowing oneself, but only through a God who knows me better than I know myself, one who is always teaching me about myself.  To know anything in this world, you have to work to know yourself--for me, faith is coming to know myself in relationship with a God who loves me and loves the world.

There are no foundations, no fundamentals, thank God.  In the Christian life, there we come to know by uncertainty and by faith; they dance together, they serve each other, and they fill life with spirit and delight.