You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.
― Toni Morrison
This weekend’s preview of Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence explores what happens when one’s sense of certainty erodes. Although it draws from a particular lecture I heard in graduate school — when Professor Elizabeth Clark upended my historical understanding of how Christian creeds developed — the issue goes far beyond that episode. In many ways, moving past certainty is something we need right now in politics as well as religion.
We often do anything to avoid having our world made more complicated. But, as I learned when studying history in graduate school, complexity can be a gift.
IT’S COMPLICATED
From Freeing Jesus (HarperOne) pp. 198-200.
c. Diana Butler Bass, 2021
Nearly all of my Christian friends remember a lecture, book, or conversation that made them reexamine what they thought about the Bible, doctrine, the church, or even God. For me, it was Elizabeth Clark’s lecture. It was not really the topic — the creeds and orthodoxy — that was revelatory; it could have been about evolution, white supremacy, the authorship of Paul’s letters, or any other topic in church history. The point was that she complicated my view of faith and history.
Complications challenge certainty. You do not have to go to graduate school to know that. We live in a complex world, one where, at any given moment, a sound bite or tweet from the other side of the planet can make you stop in your tracks and reconsider what you believe. An unexpected question or upsetting event can throw a life into turmoil in a flash. If you are alive and paying any attention at all in the early twenty-first century, your world is thousands of times more complex than that of your grandparents.
This is why people move to gated communities, associate with only those who think as they do, block critics on Twitter, believe in conspiracy theories, and find safety in watching Fox News. Huddling in our own corner is a respite from complexity, where we might hold on to at least a shred of our certainty. “Sometimes the biggest challenge to our sense of certainty about God,” writes Peter Enns, “is just getting out of the house once in a while and seeing that we are just people like everyone else with a limited perspective and not the center of the universe.”
Faith often needs to become more complex before it can become clear again. That sounds paradoxical, perhaps, since we typically define faith as surety. Although it took a couple of years and much wrestling, I came to admit that Christianity itself, as a human story, is profoundly flawed, shot through with all the sins Jesus condemned; much of its tradition is an exercise of power, and its institutions are far from perfect.
Knowing this, I learned that faith must be cloaked in humility and open to honest criticism about where the church had gone wrong. And, as a historian, I experienced a kind of graciousness that arises from knowing that, in a century or two, we too will probably be shown to have contributed to some great injustice or really stupid idea that is invisible to us now. I let go of the need to be so darn certain about things.
This sort of modesty is, as an old prayer says, meet and right. Faith, after all, is a sister of hope and love, an aspect of trust, and a way of life. Certainty is a poor imitation of that, like one of the last copies from an old-fashioned mimeograph. Alan Jones, former dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, would often say, “The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. It is certainty.” An unpretentious faith — paradoxical, really.
Questions for Reflection:
Do you remember a time when you had to let go of certainty?
What do you think of the claim “complications challenge certainty”? Have you experienced this in your own life?
Are you being called to let go of something now?
“The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. It is certainty.” Have you ever thought about it this way?
Over the next several weekends, I’ll share sneak peeks of my forthcoming book here at The Cottage. Of course, there will continue to be the regular essays on faith and what’s going on in the world and in the news more generally (usually on Monday or Tuesday). But I’m pleased to invite you into an early look at Freeing Jesus — a book I hope will inspire new questions about what it might mean to follow Jesus in these fraught days.
INSPIRATION
I have no answer for you.
Here on this barren slope,
Mistily there on that mound
Set out your fragile hope—
Doubt will water the ground;
Doubt, the authentic cry
Rainbow the earth to the sky.
— Marion Strobel
For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do.
— Anne Lamott
A lot of people hear me attacking their certainty. I don't have any interest in doing that. I'm interested in penetrating the meaning of certainty.
— John Shelby Spong
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost….I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
— Portia Nelson
Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty. It is not knowing all the answers.
— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
NEWS AND EVENTS
Please join us on April 26!
BREATHE: Making sense of the past year, finding hope for the future
This one-day virtual gathering is for women in spiritual leadership (trans women and non-binary persons who are comfortable in women-focussed events are - of course - welcome) – clergy, spiritual directors, lay leaders, authors and poets, and teachers – to catch our breath after this difficult and challenging year.
Breathe is an opportunity for you to be encouraged, affirmed, and to connect with others from across the country. Together, we'll find new grounding for the final stretch of the pandemic. The gathering will allow time to reflect on what's happened to us in the last year, and open our hearts toward a new phase in our lives and ministries.
For booking events, including events based on Freeing Jesus, please contact Chaffee Management. We’re booking virtual events through spring 2021, and blended and in-real-life events for later 2021 and into 2022.
For podcast, media, review, and interview inquires and availability regarding the book launch, please email Dan Rovzar at HarperCollins publicity: Dan.Rovzar@harpercollins.com.
For me, the lecture was one given by Marcus Borg in a Summer Session class at Pacific School of Religion at least two decades ago. It became the chapter on faith in his book, "The Heart of Christianity," so I suppose I could zero in on the date that way. It caused a major shift in my approach to teaching confirmation class.
The lecture didn't make me give up some certainty. Rather, it invited me to see faith as something that is first and foremost relational, and as something that is changing -- at that the early church saw "faith" in this way. It made so much sense to me and I was/am grateful for his scholarship on the subject.
The gem from this essay for me is, "in a century or two, we too will probably be shown to have contributed to some great injustice or really stupid idea that is invisible to us now."
The only certainty that I have come to rely on is absolute confidence in faith, hope and love.
In the midst of all the varied circumstances of life, these three remain.