Impossible Uncertain Certainty
It takes negative capacity to live with a question. Here’s what I mean by that: it takes an amount of discomfort to process uncertainty. “Discomfort”, here, being understated. It’s more like “we hate it”.
In fact, I would suggest that our desire for an answer is sometimes so great that it can supercede the process of developing an honest answer. Beyond even that, I would suggest that we sometimes crave certainty so much that we will let ourselves be convinced that we can have more of it than may be possible.
And now we come to the issue of certainty with Christ. Perhaps, we have at times, projected a kind of candied, dressed up super-certainty that isn’t sustainable in the real world. Who wouldn’t want an irrepressible, undefeatable, low-maintenance, complete certainty that requires no thought or care or attention? Who wouldn’t want to be blazingly certain for free? It’s compelling. And also, likely, dysfunctional.
We’ve trained entire batches of young people to believe that Christ was “simple” and “undeniable” and “proveable” and “obvious”; and then those young people went to University and found that Christ was anything but. We trained them to live in the expectation of a certainty that was not sustainable in our half life of limited perspectives and fallen human nature. Force to process this sudden conflict, many of them took it as evidence that they’d been scammed and left Christ for those in high school.
Maybe we just should have told them that uncertainty is a part of life… What about a faith that can survive the honest uncertainties of our limited perspectives? Have we raised generations of certainty junkies? What about teaching them about the pendulum-like movements of certainty swinging back and forth from clear to muddied and back again? How true does a true thing need to seem? What about increasing their negative capacity to live with their questions? Maybe more of them could have carried their passion for Christ into University and beyond.
Faith implies challenge when you read about it in scripture. It implies stretching, it implies choice, it implies endeavor and development. True, a time is coming when a conclusion about Christ cannot be avoided; a time is coming when revelation will be complete and irresistible. But by then, it will be too late to choose. Christ will be face to face. As for now, the choice is the point. And we will never get to the place where we can be so certain we won’t need to get up tomorrow and CHOOSE to believe it all over, again.
In fact, I would suggest that our desire for an answer is sometimes so great that it can supercede the process of developing an honest answer. Beyond even that, I would suggest that we sometimes crave certainty so much that we will let ourselves be convinced that we can have more of it than may be possible.
And now we come to the issue of certainty with Christ. Perhaps, we have at times, projected a kind of candied, dressed up super-certainty that isn’t sustainable in the real world. Who wouldn’t want an irrepressible, undefeatable, low-maintenance, complete certainty that requires no thought or care or attention? Who wouldn’t want to be blazingly certain for free? It’s compelling. And also, likely, dysfunctional.
We’ve trained entire batches of young people to believe that Christ was “simple” and “undeniable” and “proveable” and “obvious”; and then those young people went to University and found that Christ was anything but. We trained them to live in the expectation of a certainty that was not sustainable in our half life of limited perspectives and fallen human nature. Force to process this sudden conflict, many of them took it as evidence that they’d been scammed and left Christ for those in high school.
Maybe we just should have told them that uncertainty is a part of life… What about a faith that can survive the honest uncertainties of our limited perspectives? Have we raised generations of certainty junkies? What about teaching them about the pendulum-like movements of certainty swinging back and forth from clear to muddied and back again? How true does a true thing need to seem? What about increasing their negative capacity to live with their questions? Maybe more of them could have carried their passion for Christ into University and beyond.
Faith implies challenge when you read about it in scripture. It implies stretching, it implies choice, it implies endeavor and development. True, a time is coming when a conclusion about Christ cannot be avoided; a time is coming when revelation will be complete and irresistible. But by then, it will be too late to choose. Christ will be face to face. As for now, the choice is the point. And we will never get to the place where we can be so certain we won’t need to get up tomorrow and CHOOSE to believe it all over, again.
posted by CSW at
12:19 PM
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