Faith and Certainty

     I believe that faith and certainty are opposites.  When we become certain, we don’t need any faith.  We have all of the answers.  Sometimes this spirit of certainty invades the church and we believe that we have the answers and that the people outside have nothing at all.  In our recent past, the Charismatic movement was an example of this.  There were many wonderful people connected with this movement, they brought joy and a powerful religion to a great number of people; but there was a subtext to all of it that tried to make the movement the whole.  I see this reflected sometimes in the songs that the charismatics loved such as the hymn I am the bread of life.  There is a verse in that hymn that speaks of the certainty of  everlasting life.  It goes:

Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man
      And drink of his blood,
You cannot live forever,
You cannot live forever.

The certainty of that verse and the arrogance of its contention infuriates me every time that I hear it.  I simply cannot sing it, and as a result, I don’t like the hymn at all.  Also , when it is sung, it is frequently accompanied by people standing up and raising their arms in the air to emphasize the lyrics that go:  And I will raise them up, and I will raise them up on the last day!

Our faith teaches us that by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are all forgiven of our sins and assured of eternal life.  There is no physical, scientific proof of that, it is a matter of our faith.  We can never prove it with certainty.  The only proof that we have is contained in our scriptures, such as the words in Second Corinthians:

                                 Just as we have the same spirit of faith that is
                             in accordance with scripture-- "I believed, and
                             so I spoke" -- we also believe, and so we speak,
                             because we know that the one who raised the 
                             Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will
                             bring us with you into his presence. 
                                                                   --2 Corinthians 4: 13-14

That is what I rely on for my faith.  The only certainty included in that passage is the certainty of the effect of Jesus’ resurrection on my salvation and my eternal life.  That the God in whom I trust will raise me from the dead, just as he raised Jesus in his resurrection.   Beyond that, I need not worry at all.  The evangelical work of that text will be seen in the life that I live, not in the hymns that I sing.

Certainty has infected the church often.  The crusades were an example of this when we sent armies to “liberate” Jerusalem from the Muslims and the Inquisition when we burned Jews and supposedly heretic Christians at the stake because their religious beliefs were different from the powerful church.  It continues today with the persecution of Muslims in the wake of the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

As Christians, we need to understand that God has spoken eloquently and differently to many human beings and that God’s work can be seen throughout the world in different and powerful ways.   Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus and followers of the Tao all live lives that echo the desires of God.  We are foolish when we believe that only Christianity is the preferred religion of God.  God is larger than that.  I know it from what I have seen in the lives of people such as the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, Confucius, Martin Buber and others who represent divergent faiths.  Thank God for all of them and for their work.  Let’s join with them in their celebration of the goodness of humankind and their obvious love of God.