Why Can’t We Have Certainty?

I had to buy a furnace this week. As I went through the process of getting estimates, I was reminded how much I don’t like doing this. It’s a big expense and it’s hard to know, for sure, if I have made the right decision. I would be much happier if someone would just tell me which furnace would be best. I would like certainty about this decision.

Have you watched little kids when they are playing try to work out their disagreements? Often they try making a new rule for everyone to abide by. Clear rules give us certainty about how to behave. Many of us would like a little more certainty in our lives. Teenagers may be the exception. For the rest of us answers to life’s hard questions is alluring. What job should I take? Should I marry this person? Should we have kids? What furnace should I buy? Certainty is often appealing, comforting even.

There is a sense of certainty when we agree on the rules, the boundaries, the guardrails. The world can be a dangerous place. An instruction manual for living would be helpful.

I suspect, in part, that’s why so many Christians treat the Bible as if it’s the rule book, the guide to faithful and successful living. We think it would be good to know for certain how to act and what to do. We would have clarity about how to please God.

The difficulty with this approach is that the Bible is more story than rule book. Narrative, stories make up large parts of the Bible. Torah is presented as part of a larger story. Jesus’ teachings are presented as in story form. Even when Jesus is quoted, he isn’t particularly good about giving us clear rules. He tells parables and offers statements that are often confusing and unclear. The more we think about Jesus’s sayings, the more enigmatic they become. What does it mean that the first will be last and the last first? How would that actually work? What does it mean to love my enemies? Who, exactly, are my enemies? And love? What does it mean to love someone as God loves in my daily life?

In spite of what many of us have been told, when we try to read the Bible as a book of rules we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment. And if it’s not the book of rules, then what is it? Why spend time reading this perplexing book? Does it have any meaning for us today?

If the Bible was nothing more than a book of rules it would have been ignored and forgotten pretty quickly. What is it that keeps people reading this very old book?

I think it’s because the text requires us to engage it. If we take it seriously, we can’t just read it and then put it back on the shelf. The Bible invites us, encourages us, and pleads with us to wrestle with it. Eugene Peterson wrote a very good book about the Bible titled, Eat This Book. In it he suggests that we are to gnaw on the Bible like a dog gnaws on a bone. Chew on it. Growl at it. Gnaw it. I agree. Don’t worry, the Bible can take it.

But still the question remains, why? Why isn’t the Bible more straightforward? Why make us wrestle it?

Biblical interpretation turns out to be a team sport. It takes a community to read the Bible well. Yes, we read individually, but soon we realize we need the insights and the scholarship of others. The Bible reading community is a place where hard questions are asked of the text, and various ideas and possibilities are offered. Reading in community exposes us to different insights that come out of different experiences. What seems insignificant to me, may be very important to you. If we don’t read together, my understanding of that part of the text will be lacking your insights.

This community of Bible readers is composed of people you know, people you don’t know (like Biblical scholars) and people you can’t know (like historical thinkers and writers). It’s a conversation across time and location.

The point of this is to make us wise.¹ The world changes too much for one set of rules to work in all times and in all places and in all situations. Our lives are too complex to neatly followW a set of Biblical principles. When we let the Bible help us grow in wisdom, we are better able to faithfully navigate this very complicated world we live in. We learn to recognize how God has been present in the past. We see and learn from the mistakes people made. We read the stories of how God and the people of God struggled to understand each other. We discover what faithful living looks like for us in our lives.

Certainty, in the way that we often want it- knowing we are doing the right thing, knowing we are making good choices- is illusive. If we’re honest it’s impossible. What is certain, is that if we read the Bible with curiosity and wonder, with humility and persistence, together, we will become more wise and more faithful in our lives.

1. This is the thesis of Peter Enns’ book How the Bible Actually Works. This book and Peterson’s book are reliable guides for thinking about how we faithfully engage the Bible. ↩︎