You Are What You Think

Every society has a rulebook, but living in one’s birth culture creates a blind embrace of its practices, norms, and expectations. We believe certain things about speech, social cues, and even driving habits with little awareness of what we prize or why we prize it. Behavior witnessed out­side the cultural rulebook tilts us off center, lead­ing us to a myriad of responses including inexpli­cable indignation. Identifying underlying cultural assumptions often requires an international friend or a sociologist to hold up a mirror before our eyes. Even then we may resist its telling reflections.

The theological world is no different. There is much to celebrate in recent studies of ancient languages, Ancient Near East culture, Second Temple Judaism, and biblical theology. Volumes of publication have informed the Church usefully. But for all the good, theology possesses its own contemporary rulebook, which has adopted a number of fallacies. I hold up a mirror here for us to reflect on three of the most common ones.

Fallacy 1: All theology is tentative

Like a riptide sweeping away even the Michael Phelpses of theology, a societal vortex has snatched every confident voice from theological discourse. Theological statements, it is contended, never can be certain.

Such claims of theological uncertainty range from the mildly humorous—“Put 10 theologians in a room and get 17 opinions on a doctrine or a Scrip­ture text”—to the sophisticated—as represented by the former Protestant turned Roman Catholic, sociologist Christian Smith, who sees in Protes­tant theology a “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” Smith’s fancy shorthand expresses a desperate de­termination: the incompatibility of theologies, such as Arminianism and Calvinism, mandate theologi­cal uncertainty.

Evidently, we cannot trust our Bible, but not be­cause, as classic liberalism argued, the Bible itself is untrustworthy. Rather because we are. The ar­guments go like this: “Bible reading requires Bible interpretation. Humans do Bible interpretation. Hu­mans produce disparate interpretations.” The con­clusion? “All theological conclusions are inherent­ly provisional.” The logic is formulaic: Same Bible + Different Conclusions = Uncertainty.

Battle weary, yet longing for a foothold, most con­servative Bible students stumble through the fog, hoping to land somewhere close to the truth. But in the journey, the demands for “epistemological modesty”—that allegedly essential framework for contemporary theological discourse—swallow all confidence whole. Inconclusiveness offers the only socially acceptable posture toward biblical doc­trine. Some have even argued that the very desire for certainty exposes psychological dysfunction. Certainty is impossible; longing for it is person­al weakness. So if you seek theological certainty, you may elicit an additional diagnosis for the next DSM: the PTCD—Professing Theology as Certain Disorder.

For Smith, the apparently irreconcilable difference between Protestant theologies issued him divorce papers, so he left his Presbyterian heritage and wed himself to Rome. Our goal here is to critique nei­ther Rome on authority and certainty, nor Smith on his new theological marriage. But note well. He has grossly (and confidently) overstated the disparate character of various evangelical theologies.

Yet we must ask whether his representative theo­logical skepticism is necessary. Is all theology really tentative, inconclusive, and provisional? Should we operate at all times with a hermeneutic of doubt? Am I warped if I want certainty?

Epistemological modesty sounds so compelling, so humble, so godly. After all, which of us wants to claim we have the corner on truth? How can we really know we are right and someone else is wrong? Though such “humility” seems so right on the surface, a quicksand foundation lies beneath it.

Consider the words of Deuteronomy 6:4–7, as an example:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your chil­dren, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

The Almighty expects us to keep his commands on our hearts and teach them to our children. How can we treasure them or teach them if we cannot really know them? Are we prepared to say that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may be the one true God, who may want us to teach our children about the God who may be?

Would we dare infer that God is unable or unwill­ing to speak to us in words we understand? In ei­ther claim, we deny what God himself insists and defy him personally. The First Speaker in the uni­verse intends that we understand his words, and even builds human accountability into what he says. Evidently, the Almighty does not deem his speech ambiguous.

In John 14:6, Jesus plainly affirms he is the only access to the God of heaven. Should we entertain his exclusivist assertions with skepticism? Are we prepared to say that Jesus may be the Way, the Truth, and the Life? When Paul insists on the core components of the gospel in 1 Corinthians 15:1–3, does the key purpose and power of Jesus’s gospel work lack sufficient clarity for us to grip it with outright certainty? Would we contend that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection may provide the for­giveness of our sins?

These questions do not deny interpretation of even the plainest of texts. Scripture does not make brute statements that circumvent our interpretive lenses. But human interpretation does not blockade cer­tainty, because what God intends to communicate lucidly, he communicates lucidly. Our createdness and fallenness present no barrier to our kind and gracious Creator.

To be sure, Scripture does not reveal everything with equal clarity. But “. . . those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient un­ derstanding of them” (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7). We dare not read pointed truth in Scrip­ture and then object, “Did God actually say…?”

Sound familiar? It should. We have heard that question before! Using the tools of hermeneutical suspicion, the wily serpent (Gen. 3) inserted doubt in our first parents’ minds about God’s Word. Satan created confusion over the clear command of God; he blew smoke into clear blue sky. Note well: the hermeneutic of skepticism was the product of the enemy, not of God. Unbelief clouds the clear truths of Scripture. Faith lasers through the fog and un­derstands.

To read the remainder of this article, “You Are What You Think,” go to Credo Magazine HERE