Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
This I Believe–and that’s not a good thing

This I Believe–and that’s not a good thing

Last updated on: January 9, 2024 at 7:00 am by Vance Morgan

0 Comments

This I Believe–and that’s not a good thing 2024-01-07T15:03:16-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

A number of years ago, at the end of a presentation to fellow resident scholars at an ecumenical institute where I was spending a sabbatical semester, someone exasperatedly asked “Vance, don’t you have to believe something with certainty in order to be Christian?” I responded (as philosophers) with a question of my own: “I don’t know. Do I?” Snarkiness aside, the question of belief and certainty continues to obsess me well over a decade since that exchange.

One of the consistent messages that I seek to convey to my students every semester in every class has to do with the impermanence of belief and the fragility of certainty. Christian Wiman describes a talk he gave recently that sounds a lot like what I want my students to become comfortable with:

The lecture was on the line between belief and unbelief, how there is no line, really, how to be devout means to be at risk, to live with the understanding that all one’s assumptions might be overturned in the blink of an eye.

If we pay attention to multifarious uncertainies of our lives, our experiences, and of the world around us, it should not surprise us that our certainties and our beliefs are as ephemeral as mist. And yet this does surprise us.

I have found over the years that my classroom attempts to establish the importance of embracing uncertainty, doubt, and the provisional nature of just about everything runs immediately into a firewall that human beings come naturally equipped with—the need to make everything cohere and fit together in categories with well-defined and recognizable boundaries. In a recent interview in The New Yorker, British comedian Leo Reich describes his stand-up routines with this in mind.

Part of the feeling I am trying to express in the show is an inability to line up all my atomized beliefs in a row on specific issues and to say, “This coalesces into one coherent perspective.” . . . But a hundred things are often true at the same time—a hundred deeply contradictory things.

Why is it so important that a person show how her or his beliefs “coalesce into one coherent perspective”? Why are we so quick to criticize others for apparent inconsistencies when we know at our core that consistency is an impossible demand on both others and ourselves?

As in many areas of growth, it may be that our commitment to certainty and coherence in the face of a world that provides neither is a necessary stage in the process of intellectual and psychological growth, a stage that, although crucial important in its time and place, we should mature beyond. At least Christian Wiman thinks this is the case.

One of the most difficult things to outgrow is the need for, the belief in, permanent things . . . One of the ways that humans developed, it turns out, has been an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the limitations of human development. The need for certainties, for “belief,” is a symptom of intellectual adolescence, and it can afflict a culture as well as an individual consciousness.

Wiman notes that an overreliance on reason, what he calls “the idolatry of logic,” has led to some remarkable discoveries as well as some “pretty strange noodlings.” Isaac Newton, for instance, both was at the epicenter of spectacular discoveries and, using the same rational tools of logic, thousands of pages of speculation seeking to determine from the Book of Revelation the precise timing of the rapture. We would do best to follow the example of Aristotle, who argued that one can expect only the amount of certainty that is appropriate to the subject matter. As John Polkinghorne, both a physicist and an Anglican priest, suggests: “No greater clarity should be sought than reality permits..”

For people of faith, the tension between wanting to and being unable to believe with certainty arises most sharply when we turn our attention toward what is greater than ourselves. We both pay lip service to the ineffable and unknowable nature of God and seek to use our limited resources and tools to reduce the divine to categories we are comfortable with. As Christian Wiman says, “Grace is absolutely beyond all human capacity, one thinker after another will say, and then they begin furiously reasoning their way toward it.” Which brings me back to where I started this essay—my colleague’s wondering whether a Christian doesn’t have to believe something with certainty in order to be a Christian.

It’s an important question and deserves to be answered more seriously than I did the first time those many years ago. Take, for instance, what most would agree is one of the central tenets of the Christian faith, something anyone claiming to be a Christian should be willing to affirm with conviction: Jesus of Nazareth was both fully human and fully divine. I believe that to be true—and as soon as I say that, I run out of words. Despite the millions of words that have been written and the thousands (perhaps millions) of lives that have been sacrificed in the effort to establish the infallible truth of this claim, it doesn’t lend itself to logical analysis or categorization. Simply saying it requires making a claim that involves incompatible categories, a “category error” as philosophers like to say.

And yet, as I’ve said and written many times, the incarnation is the central truth of my faith—it is what keeps me in the camp of faith. When I say that I believe it is true, I am not primarily making a rational or logical claim. I am instead expressing my willingness to embrace a story, a mystery so profound that it transcends human language. One of the reasons I love Marilynne Robinson’s beautiful novel Gilead, a novel that I will have the privilege to engage students with this semester for the first time in several years, is because Reverand Ames expresses these matters profoundly.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things . . . So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp.

Amen to that. And amen, also, to this from Christian Wiman:

This I believe: that we—priests and penitents, geneticists and journalists, physicists and philosophers—all need to outgrow our need to say, “This I believe.”

Previous Post

January 7, 2024

When Things Got Real Between John the Baptist and Jesus

Next Post

January 11, 2024 A Theology of the Compost Pile

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Mary did have a choice. And she was able to make it before the Holy ..."

madalyn baumstark

Mary Got To Choose

"i cannot read beyond your recommendations for the books since i like to have a ..."

madalyn baumstark

A Doubting Faith

"AI will never be able to utter with honesty, feeling, or humility, the greeting: "Namaste".It ..."

madalyn baumstark

AI and Human Dignity

"They do. I'm sure you could find discussions of the same topic from any of ..."

Vance Morgan

AI and the Life of Faith

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz