“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
Anne Lamott
Most of us grew up believing that doubt and faith were opposites, we either had faith or we had doubt. But that is only a superficial way of understanding faith, for certainty is not normally seen as a characteristic of the faith journey. As St. Augustine put it, “If you understand God, what you understand is not God.” As God is beyond all concepts, words and images, the path to God is a path of shedding them rather than adding to them, a path of unknowing rather than knowing. This of course puts us in conflict with a world that increasingly desires clear answers and explanations.
The digital world gives us the clear answers and explanations that we want. It may be difficult to notice, but the more time we spend in the digital world, the more we expect the world to be clear and certain, for issues to be black and white, for a world of good guys and bad guys. This way of thinking can produce certainty but not understanding. We can easily identify the bad guys and see ourselves as separate and distinct from them. But such a polarizing world view is inconsistent with the reality of the world we have been given and is unlikely to enable us to bring any type of healing to the conflicts and situations in which we find ourselves.
A world of certainty and polarization is a world full of people that think they know what is wrong and how to fix it. Once a faction with such a mentality obtains significant state power, it can impose its will on the others, work to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth, the workers’ paradise, or whatever else their goal may be. That has been history since the enlightenment, a history of mass death, propaganda and authoritarian governments. Few see the 21st century as having any hope of being different.
The Bible cautions against that approach because it is anything but certain, it is full of contradictions and ambiguity. It gives us a story of humanity that starts with God’s creation, our sin, God’s response, and God’s eventual salvation at the end of time. The notion that we are going to figure it all out and create the Kingdom of God on earth (or the updated Tower of Babel) is simply not part of the story. What is part of the story is God’s guidance. But that guidance is not in terms of straight forward, easy to understand precepts, but in stories, poetry, legend, and myth. We trust that God’s spirit will guide us, but how we experience that spirit is clouded by unknowing. We will not be able to know for certain what God’s will may be in any given situation, we can only trust our faith, as we step forward each day in the ‘fear and trembling’ described by Paul.
Anne Lamott
Most of us grew up believing that doubt and faith were opposites, we either had faith or we had doubt. But that is only a superficial way of understanding faith, for certainty is not normally seen as a characteristic of the faith journey. As St. Augustine put it, “If you understand God, what you understand is not God.” As God is beyond all concepts, words and images, the path to God is a path of shedding them rather than adding to them, a path of unknowing rather than knowing. This of course puts us in conflict with a world that increasingly desires clear answers and explanations.
The digital world gives us the clear answers and explanations that we want. It may be difficult to notice, but the more time we spend in the digital world, the more we expect the world to be clear and certain, for issues to be black and white, for a world of good guys and bad guys. This way of thinking can produce certainty but not understanding. We can easily identify the bad guys and see ourselves as separate and distinct from them. But such a polarizing world view is inconsistent with the reality of the world we have been given and is unlikely to enable us to bring any type of healing to the conflicts and situations in which we find ourselves.
A world of certainty and polarization is a world full of people that think they know what is wrong and how to fix it. Once a faction with such a mentality obtains significant state power, it can impose its will on the others, work to usher in the Kingdom of God on earth, the workers’ paradise, or whatever else their goal may be. That has been history since the enlightenment, a history of mass death, propaganda and authoritarian governments. Few see the 21st century as having any hope of being different.
The Bible cautions against that approach because it is anything but certain, it is full of contradictions and ambiguity. It gives us a story of humanity that starts with God’s creation, our sin, God’s response, and God’s eventual salvation at the end of time. The notion that we are going to figure it all out and create the Kingdom of God on earth (or the updated Tower of Babel) is simply not part of the story. What is part of the story is God’s guidance. But that guidance is not in terms of straight forward, easy to understand precepts, but in stories, poetry, legend, and myth. We trust that God’s spirit will guide us, but how we experience that spirit is clouded by unknowing. We will not be able to know for certain what God’s will may be in any given situation, we can only trust our faith, as we step forward each day in the ‘fear and trembling’ described by Paul.
