Certainty in evangelical culture is the tendency to think and act as if a viewpoint on big questions like why we exist, what happens when you die, what God thinks about any given thing, is clear and settled and lines up with what the church presents on these matters.
Have you ever encountered religious leaders who seem to think that God’s position, on any given matter, is entirely clear? Have you noticed that what they see as God’s view and the views that they hold are closely aligned? In other words, somehow God seems to support almost all of their political and cultural views. Can I suggest that you should find this hilarious? Imagine saying to someone like that, “It is truly amazing that what God, the infinite, transcendent, perfect, all-knowing sustainer of the universe thinks, and what you think is pretty much the same.”
Have you seen, from the other side, a religious expression that is unwilling to say anything at all about God? I find this way of seeing things just as helpless as the way of certainty, but much less hilarious. People who are constantly critical are rarely funny. Taken to its extreme, this way of things can lead to a faith without any transcendence or divinity at all.
When thinking about God we are best to know that there are things to say, but that we say them as people who are at least as wrong as we are right. At this time in the history of the church a theological awakening is called for that realizes the value of tension. We discover and learn and are enlightened not from a place of constant certainty or constant criticism, but from a place of hopeful, yet humble, inquiry.
Jen and I listened to a great book during some of the driving legs of a recent vacation.
The book, by Canadian author Miriam Toews, is called Fight Night. Toews, in telling the story of a grandmother, a mother and a daughter, makes some fantastic points about religious rigidity and condemnation. Toews’ writing is funny and unsparing. One memory recounted in the book describes a religious leader from the women’s Mennonite community visiting the family and telling them that two family members who had taken their own lives are condemned to the flames of hell. This kind of of judgmentalism, comes from a certainty born of religious dogma. Toews draws it in its extreme form, but many of us have experienced this dark certainty in less extreme forms. It does not lead to God. It leads away from God, to fear.
When religious leaders are willing to declare “What God thinks” they are operating within, what Karl Barth called, “the path of dogmatism”. That is, they are ready and eager to speak about God and God’s supposed thoughts on virtually every matter.
The other path, according to Barth, is the “critical path”. This path is marked by the tendency to declare that we can say and know nothing at all about God. The critical path negates everything and leaves us with nothing. As my friend Richard Topping (Principal at Vancouver School of Theology) says, our culture often teaches people how to be critical of almost everything, but leaves them unable to articulate what they like, unable to articulate what has worth and meaning.
Both dogmatism and criticism, on their own, take away God and leave only the person and their opinion. We need better than this.
Religious leaders who act as if it is their job to know everything and to tell people what God thinks and what people need to hear, can wind up being spiritual abusers. They actually work against true spiritual awakening because they close the door on thought and tension and enlightenment.
Conversely, it is not true spiritual leadership to present only criticism. The path of criticism, on its own, has very little to offer. I have seen people choose to follow dogmatic leaders because, unlike constant critics, dogmatic leaders at least have something to say. This can lead in all kinds of dangerous directions.
Barth, along with some other theologians, presented another path. It has come to be known as the “dialectical path” in which there is a constant realization that “As theologians we must speak of God, and as human beings we are unable to do so.”
(Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict, Christiane Tietz, p. 136)
I think that this awareness could do any preacher well before they go to preach a sermon. I have seen how it can lead to a deeper spiritual awakening and to connection with other people. Just yesterday, in my role as volunteer hospital chaplain, I was asked to visit a man who is dying of bone cancer. At one point in his life he was a volunteer minister at a church. He helped lead trips to Mexico where he and others built houses for people in poverty. Between that time and now he has faced great difficulty and suffering. Much of the trouble in his life, in his telling, was by his own doing. He found himself living in “squalor” (his word) and then without a home at all. Now he has a terminal illness that can not be treated. The only hope is to try to manage the intense pain of bone cancer. The man blessed me. He had moved from a place of religious certainty in his life to a place of hopeful, humble inquiry. He expressed gratitude for the hospital staff and for his days remaining. He spoke of his faith. He spoke about how he was not certain of a lot, but that he knew God could still allow him to be a blessing in the world. I told him that he was a blessing to me.
I think that in that visit we both sought to talk about God while still being aware of our frailty and humanity. This brought us together. There was a posture in that visit that opened us up to God and to one another. I did not leave that meeting with certainty or with criticism. I left with hope.
Only dogmatism or only criticism can appear helpful, but by themselves they lead to death. Realizing that we can think about and speak about God, but that we always do so as flawed and real people, leads to life.