New post for new dads here at the Christian parenting blog.
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Certainty gives people comfort, and that’s what they like most about it. When you are certain of something, then you no longer have to mess around with it. It’s a done deal, a slam dunk, a great big been-there-done-that. It takes people out of the unresolved and places them safely in the resolved category. People crave closure.
The problem is that in faith, there is no closure, there is no resolve, and there is no certainty. (OK, there is a lot less of it than we usually want to believe - I was being a bit dramatic there). 9/11 should have taught us that. Enron should have taught us that. Priest sex scandals should have taught us that. The hideous intergenerational effects of toxic faith should have taught us that. Job should have taught us that. Solomon should have taught us that.
Isn’t certainty what Solomon looked for so desperately and never ever found? Yet the result was disillusionment.
Ah, the great literary theme - disillusionment. It is what happens when what you thought was there, but really wasn’t, is now gone. The illusion you believed in is gone. What you put your faith in never really existed in the first place. Oh the pain – the confusion.
For some of my clients (I'm a marriage counseor) it’s the feeling they have when they realize that their spouse has been cheating on them, for three years, and they ahd no idea. It’s the feeling Saul had when Jesus blinded him on the road to Damascus and realized he was working against the God he claimed to be working for. He must have felt like Sydney Bristow from Alias when she realized that SD-6 was not part of the CIA. It is the feeling Solomon had every time he tried something and just got more and more depressed.
The more things we are certain of the greater the risk of wide spread and grand disillusionment.
Hence the problem with my religious upbringing. The measure of spiritual development was the depth and breadth of certainty as it relates to the already known positions of the church. The more certain a person was about the right things the more spiritual and privileged that person was.
However, when I learned that instrumental music is OK, that celebrating Christmas on Christmas is OK, that if I miss church I’m not going to Hell, sex is not dirty, people who speak in tongues are not necessarily fakers, that communion on Thursday would be just fine and on and on and on – when I learned this and reflect back on the level of certainty I was encouraged to have, it created for me a faith crisis – a completely unnecessary faith crisis.
What's worse is that we do this to our children. When we get so insecure about their faith, we try to get them to know all the answers fo we, as parents, can feel better. So, we do whatever we need to do with our kids in order to ensure our certainty about theri faith.
We should be more careful about how certain we are and about how many things. If we are wrong, then we are set up for a crisis in disillusionment.
13 comments:
A lot of this mirrors my own journey, Chris. I feel like I live in an age where things unravel, and I am sometimes tempted to think of all of the unraveling as evil. But its really not, when you think about it. At least not all of it.
Brian McLaren talks about how culture and faith tend to get all wrapped up and intermingled. Then, when a major cultural change comes along, there is naturally a sense that things are becoming disconnected and uncertain.
But that can be God's way of re-revealing (can't think of a better word right now) to us what is really important, winnowing away all of the unnecessary stuff that got attached with culture, so that we can understand who He is all over again.
But you also ask the other question that is plaging me these days - what about my kids? Its so tempting to give easy answers to hard questions, but I think that does them a disservice.
Does God keep us safe when we are doing things in His name? The kids at Highland learned that such isn't necessarily the case last January. And a lot of us (myself included) will be putting our kids in more vans and busses to go do mission work over the course of the summer.
I've got to tell you. Its hard. But the alternative - to huddle up and keep our kids and their gifts confined to our homes and our city - it seems even worse. And wrong. So off they go, even if some of us are a little (or a lot!) nervous about it.
Anyway. Enough rambling. Keep on preachin', friend! I really love this stuff.
Rubel Shelley (and others) have written about what happens when we take our answers about the questions of our faith, and confuse them with our faith. When we finally figure out that a particular answer was wrong...we see it as damaging to our faith as a whole, because our faith was built on a foundation of "right" answers.
I wish we could have more faith in our faith...
I bit off a tiny corner of this in a post called The Gospel According to Star Trek some time back. I had found a nugget of truth deeply buried in one of the movies: Not understanding something is often our excuse for not believing it. I think it's tangentially related to your point in this post, Fajita.
We believe what we want to. We believe what we're taught. We stretch and contort the truth (or let others do it for us) to make it fit what we believe, and sometimes we sadly discover the real truth bears no resemblance to it.
Since I'm preparing a series on the second coming, the example that comes to mind is a Jewish culture for whom the concept of Messiah did not fit a traveling faith-healer from Nazareth. They had such hopes for him, but instead of militarily routing out foreign oppressors, he verbally routed out their religious leaders. What a disappointment. What an about-face from his entry into Jerusalem to his departure on a cross outside the city. They had been sure he was the promised one.
They were so certain.
Thanks for speaking the truth to us in this post, Chris. I can't imagine it being said any better than the way you communicated it.
KEEP POSTING, brother!
Nailed it, on this one.
Sometimes it scares me how the things you say reflect what I think. You say it all so very well! Keep it coming.
Would there be faith without uncertainty?
Faith is being sure of WHAT WE HOPE FOR and certain of WHAT WE DO NOT SEE. (Hebrews 11:1)
What is so troubling is that we are too easily tempted to take a short cut and use certainty for what we do see and bypass what we do not see. Certainty is so repulsive to postmoderns partially because it is almost always so badly placed by moderns.
Interestingly, the Apostle Paul did not think that the opposite of faith was doubt. He seemed to believe that the opposite of faith was sight.
This is very informative. I hope to see more in the near future
Interestingly, the Apostle Paul did not think that the opposite of faith was doubt. He seemed to believe that the opposite of faith was sight.
Rubel Shelley (and others) have written about what happens when we take our answers about the questions of our faith, and confuse them with our faith. When we finally figure out that a particular answer was wrong...we see it as damaging to our faith as a whole, because our faith was built on a foundation of "right" answers.
I wish we could have more faith in our faith...
Thanks for speaking the truth to us in this post, Chris. I can't imagine it being said any better than the way you communicated it.
KEEP POSTING, brother!
Nailed it, on this one.
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