What is faith?

Certainty. Someone said, “I’m always certain. I’m just not always right.” My personality is not given to quite so much such certainty; I often doubt myself. But I know people like this very well, especially men. I think testosterone gives men an edge in that department. I mean, maybe. At least I think so. J

Janey took me to Prime Time (yes, she is finally eligible. I still have a few months), and we were handed a Christmas quiz to see what we really knew about the details of the Christmas story. It asked what myrrh is, and whether frankincense is a perfume. It asked what the innkeeper said to Mary and Joseph, and how many angels spoke to the shepherds. Most of us were pretty sure about our answers, and most of us got quite a few wrong. Here’s the one I shouldn’t have got wrong: “How did Mary and Joseph travel.” Answer: we don’t know. The Bible doesn’t mention the faithful donkey Nestor (named after a Greek king and advisor to Menelaus in the Trojan War, no less. Not very likely name for a Hebrew donkey carting a poor, pregnant woman), any more that it mentions innkeepers, snow, or three wisemen. Where do we get the donkey from? Since very early days, 145AD, when people were still around who had been taught by the apostles, one of the apocryphal gospels, supposedly written by James, mentions Joseph saddling a donkey for his journey to Bethlehem. Since then, Nestor has been there in all the pictures, steadily plodding along toward a star-lit stable.

What was interesting to me was my own certainty that there was a donkey, when there wasn’t, and the surprise of people as they realized that the answers they had ticked off so quickly were not right, after all, despite their certainty.

I’m so glad that certainty doesn’t determine truth. Because with the person I’m married to, I’d always be wrong. And many women would be wrong all the time, because we tend to be more tentative in our declarations, more attune to the other person’s take. And some preachers speak as if certainty itself were the path to truth. We recently disagreed with a friend on a matter, and after a discussion about it, he said he would think about it and get back to us. Later, he said that he had prayed about the matter and now was even more certain than before. As if the certainty itself were proof of something. A biblical teacher I respect says this is an evangelical form of idolatry: to trust that your own certainty is assurance of anything.

A preacher we know said that he took a class from a very wise Biblical scholar named N T Wright, who is one of the foremost evangelical teachers of our day. He’s written books like Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense and  Paul and the Faithfulness of God and many more. To introduce his class, he challenged his students to question and challenge everything and anything he taught. “Because a third of the time, I’ll be wrong,” he said, “and your questions will be clues about where I need to keep researching.” I think women would have felt comfortable in his class. Maybe.

One thing that modernity does to us all is take away our certainty and force us to choose Jesus by faith. It no longer lets us take for granted that we (or our country or our children) will walk in our parents’ faith. We now have to choose for ourselves whom we will trust. We can no longer go on someone else’s certainty. This new freedom is frightening. What if we choose wrong?

And to those who are certain, everyone else looks stupid. I mean, “Come on! A blind person could see this is true.” But this kind of language disrespects the intelligence of the person choosing differently. It is not obvious to them, and our certainty alone is not convincing. And neither our certainty nor their doubt changes what is actually true in the end. There is one Truth. It is not a list. It is not a set of propositions. It is a Person from whom all truth emanates, for “all truth is God’s truth.” We choose Him. We have our doubts. Our grave questions. Faith means, not certainty, but hanging on in the midst of uncertainty.