I am a Christian and theology has generally been one of my main areas of interest. When I was younger, I found that my involvement with Christianity was mostly reading Scripture through the lens of this very specific framework my church upheld. It felt very inflexible and often left me with lingering questions I was wary of digging for answers into. I had an understanding of a what, but not a why. It very much ran up against this essentially “dynamic” character which drew me to Christianity in the first place. As time went on and I began reading more into the debates through church history, I found that I was able to engage with these ideas in a much more organic fashion.

In my opinion, the value of theological criticism is that it encourages doctrinal integrity on not just an individual, but also institutional level. When I use this phrase “doctrinal integrity” what I’m referring to is something analogous to the standards we place on other fields of inquiry: questions like why is this position held, is the position internally consistent, and what factors could have influenced the adoption of this position? The focus is more on how we came to a conclusion rather than just coming to the quote-un-quote “right” conclusion.

What the Reformation opened the door for was this sort of critical back-and-forth as a means of constructing a framework as opposed to deferring to Dogma. The early Reformers found that everything from the composition of the Biblical canon to theories of atonement could be re-evaluated. They found in that their investigations of the early Church that opinion wasn’t uniform and that there was room to question the dogma put forth by the Catholic Church.

Sola Scriptura marked not just some discovery of a “true authority” but an actual democratization of the process of interpretation. It became not just a right for people to read their Bibles but also a responsibility. Luther went as far as to expect that every member of his church memorize the book of Romans. No longer was it enough to simply take the word of any one priest or Church regarding religious matters, it had to be scrutinized. Christians were to take an active role in their faith, both in service and in Word. By engaging with the Gospel on a personal level, it helped to give weight to the message and broke down the institutional barriers between man and God.

The God that confronted Job in the whirlwind, that fed Elijah when he was all alone is a personal one. Not personal in the sense that he is constrained to our wishes or wills, but personal in the sense that we relate to him unmediated: as an I to a You. The weight of the grand cathedrals, elaborate rituals, and the institutional bureaucracy stripped Christianity of its dynamic character. It became harder and harder to view God as an independent being one enters into a genuine relationship with, but rather instead as an object: something to be contemplated, appropriated, or weaponized. And as the Reformers made themselves enemies of the state, the seriousness of their relationship was put to the test.

Of course this highly personal character led to differing opinion among early Protestants. The debates had between the Reformers, while decried by many as a source of division, would also come to serve a constructive purpose. Both Rome and Constantinople derived authority for their doctrinal positions from church tradition. In both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, one justifies an interpretation or position by finding a line of bishops to trace it back to. For many of those in these denominations, this is a point of pride. The Reformers didn’t have this, but the necessity of the moment provided them to question centuries of doctrine and interrogate the fundamentals of their own faith.

Of course it’d be incredibly disingenuous to act as if this has been the case through the whole history of the larger Protestant church. In the centuries since, Protestantism has become a Leviathan of its own, becoming a core institutional pillar of many modern societies. The descendants of the Reformers were given their weekly Sunday, their place in the political system, and their spot in our cultural ethic. Whatever conflict that is present seems to be merely one between the zeitgeist of today and the zeigeist of yesterday.

The church is finding itself paralyzed once more, having forgotten its radical roots. It’s become static, stubborn, and complacent: leaning onto an uncritical orthodoxy as a crutch. The Bible was meant to democratize interpretation, but now the question of interpretation has been homogenized in the practice of Bible-thumping.

Bible-thumping does not mean just citing or reading Scripture, but doing so in a disingenuous way. In my view, Bible-thumping is best defined as holding a position a priori and then working backwards until you can cherry-pick a passage in support of it. It can be selectively looking at the broader context of the passage in an inconsistent fashion dictated purely by convenience. It often means shying away from alternative interpretations or methods, feeling the need to only interpret through the lens provided by your pastor. Bible-thumping is dangerous because it takes away the Protestant answer to church tradition: dialogue.

In dialogue we continuously challenge and keep each other in check, it puts pressure on us to remember why we believe what we believe. It brings Christians together without demanding conformity, it allows us to maintain doctrinal integrity without falling into dogma. If I have a certain opinion, I will find that good-faith engagement with someone who disagrees with me puts my position to the test. It demands introspection, and ultimately introspection on what Christianity means to me. The actual impact and weight of the Gospel isn’t stifled by the impetus to stay in line.

So, if Bible-thumpers do not derive their doctrine from a central church tradition or from a coherent reading of Scripture, why is it that countless independent Baptist churches can end up sounding exactly the same? It’s because they draw their positions from mainstream political ideologies. It’s impossible to talk about evangelicalism here in the US without bringing up its relationship to the GOP: when you look at what these evangelicals preach, independent of denominational differences, you can see them converging on the positions espoused by this party. I don’t want to get deeper into this than necessary, given how much of a quagmire of arguing about political theater can be, but I do think it is necessary to talk about this in at least some depth. We are seeing churches splinter and tear each other apart, not even over theological positions, but predominantly political ones.¹

The key issues in these conflicts are not doctrinal, Fryling told me, but political. They include the passions stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship. I know of at least one large church in eastern Washington State, where I grew up, that has split over the refusal of some of its members to wear masks.

“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

While this is already a common charge leveled at evangelicals, it’s mirrored in liberal Christianity too²³. Verses are cherrypicked out when it’s convenient to support liberal positions, and when it’s not, generalizations and cultural cliches take their place. They pride themselves on being less dogmatic, but their views are still drawn and policed within the cultural context of their church. It’s the exact same thing, just expressed in different terms. The views of a lot of these churches map just as neatly onto the Democratic Party as the evangelicals do for the GOP.

There’s been an undeniable rot. Not just in some narrow sense of these people abandoning the quote-un-quote “true Christianity”, but in an artistic and intellectual sense. The dynamic energy which had long fueled creative inspiration, philosophizing, and debate has been stifled under the weight of pedantry, posturing, and propagandizing. Being careful not to fall into a reactionary mentality, what’s occurring here isn’t unique: it’s what occurs every time the church as an institution integrates into the larger social hegemony.

A while back, I was recommended to look into Peter Enns, a theologian who concerns himself with challenging this trend in the church. I picked up a book of his titled The Sin of Certainty and got reading. The book wishes to challenge the sort of stubborn inflexibility with which Christians approach many issues in favor of coming to terms with doubt. I went into this book wanting to like it; the premise and what it was responding to looked promising, and even if I ended up disagreeing, I figured could still apply the points made to challenge my own beliefs. Unfortunately I came out underwhelmed, and I exited with a feeling of frustration above all else. I couldn’t quite articulate it well enough then, but I’m hoping that upon revisiting it, I may be able to get a better understanding of why that was the case.

It should be noted that Peter Enns is an evangelical writing to evangelicals here. There’s a certain common framework he operates in, his audience operates in, and I intend to operate in when critiquing the book. Obviously, there is an incredible amount of diversity in Christian thought, but to account for every school of thought would not just make this article unnecessarily long, but also distract from the main points. Whatever claims I make here regarding Christianity are primarily departing from the debates within mainstream Western Protestant thought. If a disagreement arises from grounds separate from Enns is arguing, that’ll have to be resolved in a separate discussion.

Either way, I think we’ve been thorough enough in terms of exposition, let’s actually get into the book itself. The book itself starts well enough, with Enns recalling a personal incident where doubt really began to take seed in his mind. Up until this point, Enns, like many other evangelicals, had gotten used to tying orthodoxy to personal salvation. Whenever he ever had a doubt or a question regarding a position, his mind would compartmentalize or try to suppress it. It was scary to him to think about it too much, because to stop doubling down meant to put his faith, the object of his security, in jeopardy.

Not only does this introduction provide a way for him to relate to and catch the attention of his audience of everyday evangelicals, but it also gives us an idea of what he is criticizing, what he’s looking to solve. And honestly, I have no issue with any of this so far. As I’ve discussed earlier, this is very much a real issue in the modern church, and it’s something I’ve had to grapple with over the years too. For these Christians, having someone there to tell them that they don’t have to police their thoughts so intensively, is something I do think they need to hear. Church needs to be a place where people are actively engaged, and part of that engagement is asking questions, ones which are tough and personal. If we foster an environment where people are too afraid to speak honestly, then how can we expect them to engage with their full heart?

But as Enns let go of his original mindset, he found new problems arising to the forefront. He lost both his sense of spiritual community when he departed the seminary but also his sense of meaning and groundedness when he departed the mentality. He had to begin asking himself what any of this meant to him, what personal relevance or weight it had, without relying on the script provided by his church. He said that he found his way out of it by learning to “trust God” to guide him through the woods of uncertainty.

He contrasts the uncertainty he learned to embraced with this concept of certainty, this idea of conflating with faith in God with faith in a certain set of beliefs regarding God. He refers to these beliefs as “mental idols”, human constraints on the totality of the divine. He qualifies that he doesn’t think it is futile to think about these things, just that getting hung up over them is the issue. Throughout the entirety of this first section, we see that Enns wishes to orient the conversation away from what to believe and towards who we trust.

Towards the end of this chapter, my disagreements quickly began to surface. The most glaring issue I’m seeing is that Enns does not at all define trust clearly. Throughout the end of Chapter 1, where he is supposed to be describing what this trust in God constitutes, he compares it to how trust works in a marriage. How does he define trust in marriage? Using the word trust again.

Christian faith is trusting in God, a personal being, rather than an abstract force. That’s why we often refer to faith in God as having a “relationship” with God—which sounds like a Facebook status update, but it’s true.

Our marriage is not based on accurate knowledge of each other we hold with confident certitude. Our vows are based on our commitment to trust and pursue one another, whether or not we understand each other correctly and regardless of whether the relationship is moving along swimmingly. Even if we don’t like each other, annoy each other, or can’t stand the sight of each other, the commitment to trust is fundamental. In fact trust is actually fundamental to being human. Children, as soon as they are conscious, trust their parents unconditionally and without deliberation. As we mature, trust is at the heart of any healthy relationship. Our relationship with God is no different.

And no, this isn’t just some sort of gotcha or a semantic nitpick. Almost every Christian you talk to will say they trust God, including the ones Enns is targeting here. There is some definition, some essence to trust Enns is arguing that is central to Christian faith. If we could take every single Christian at their word, this book would not have to be written. I have my own understanding of what trust is, but it’s impossible for me to compare it against the standard Enns is upholding here, since I have no idea what standard he is upholding. He’s able to go on about all the things this trust does, or how it compares to other forms of trust, but underlying all of it is this implicit “well, you know what I mean”.

And if we’re deliberately leaving this standard open-ended, then I think that basically undermines whatever distinguishes him from the Bible-thumpers he criticizes. With all the posturing, I think it’s easy to forget how evasive evangelicals can be on how their orthodoxy originated. And that’s because the consensus is essentially stitched together from a myriad of sources. Ask a random evangelical how they know the 27 books of the New Testament belong in the canon, you’re likely to get a circular answer based implicitly on some sort of trust. Or even more famously, the entire issue of the Trinity: the nature of the Trinity has been subject to the most intense of obfuscation, done to cover up a perceived contradiction in doctrine. “It’s a holy mystery, just trust that it is so.” In this context, trust has been weaponized to shut down questioning, and allow for cognitive dissonance.

Instead, Enns suggests we ask “who do we put our trust in”, but I want to emphasize the who here. What does he mean when he says we should trust God? Is it the God that would damn him for a single heresy, the same God he was oppressed by beforehand? Is it a God that exists as a projection of our personal desires, a God that will smite our enemies, or a God that is indifferent to our sins? These Gods may be the same Abrahamic concept on an abstract level, but we relate to each of them in entirely different ways.

That disconnect between what a Christian can recite with words and what they feel deep down isn’t dealt with by papering over the cracks like this. Do I think this is what Enns has done on a personal level? I don’t think so, and I’m not in a position to judge that anyways. It seems more likely to me that he’s just describing a genuine change in himself in terms that doesn’t properly convey what he experienced. But if we want to reach these people, we have to find a way to communicate with them in a fashion where we’re not replacing one set of cliches with another.

On that note, Enns also discusses his disdain for the cliche of “knowing what you believe”, and honestly, I don’t blame him. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly common practice to treat the church as a sort of apologetic training grounds, where talking points and positions are drilled into heads with with little room for questioning or personal engagement. But I don’t think the sentiment is entirely unfounded, the issue has more to do with how churches go about accomplishing this. The reasons are understandable: the church is constantly under cultural pressure, and as a site of instruction and fellowship, it can help members to find grounding in their convictions and encouragement to steadfastness.

What I think gets neglected though, is that the church can inadverdently form its own cultural environment, which in turn can be influenced by other cultural factors. This is the crisis visible in modern evangelicalism. Issues like cliques, complacency, and cognitive dissonance arise out of human nature, so why should we assume an insular church of men is somehow immune to this? Throughout church history, we have given a great deal of emphasis to heresies and violations of orthodoxy, which on its own isn’t something inherently faulty. But where is the emphasis on private sin, on general attitudes and character failures? What good is a Christian who tows the line in doctrine but fails to internalize even an iota of it?

Just as criticism serves as an inoculation against theological complacency in the larger church, this can apply to individual churches or individual members too. Leadership advocating a position or a line isn’t inherently wrong, but it needs to be met with a continuous reminder to the lay to verify it for themselves. We need to stop treating Christianity as a puzzle where once we have all the right pieces, we can rest easy, that the intellectual ground on which we stand is unassailable. Personally, I’d be ecstatic to see more Christians share my views, but it’d be all for naught if I won them over by depriving them of the opportunity to seriously investigate opposing positions, if it didn’t actually enrich their own personal relationship with God. It is justifiable to risk heresy to tear down another barrier, to interrogate the substance of one’s own faith. If our God is truly great, why should we feel the need to protect him from questioning?

For this reason, no considerations of false reverence should prevent us from subjecting the incarnations of creators to the severest tests of examination. It is right that they should be pulled about and subjected to the most searching kind of inquiry. If the structure is truly knit, it will stand any strain, and prove its truth by its toughness. Pious worshippers, whether of mortal or immortal artists, do their deities little honour by treating their incarnations as something too sacred for rough handling; they only succeed in betraying a fear lest the structure should prove flimsy or false. But the writing of autobiography is a dangerous business; it is a mark either of great insensitiveness to danger or of an almost supernatural courage. Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation.

From here, he moves onto the various controversies which have served to sow doubt in the church. The historical context is especially important to highlight here, so I’m glad he did. The 20th century marked the rise of some of the first major challenges to the Protestant consensus from a secular context. At first the church responded with attempts to suppress these findings, but over the course of the century, that approach failed. As we continued to refine our methods, the evidence got increasingly damning, all while the Church lost its political grip. These challenges have been accepted as fact, and there’s a cultural reckoning. And its within this context Enns, like many other Christians, finds himself. Does he continue to double-down on an insecure position or does he search out a new position that can fit the bill?

Those who chose the former often fell into the camp known as fundamentalists, who started with their understanding of Scripture and applied it to the rest of the world from there. The latter were considered modernists, who chose to start from scientific fact and attempt to come to an interpretation of Scripture that could account for the new information. Both positions are derived from something rational in some capacity: the fundamentalists apply rational methods to Scripture and the modernists depart from facts rationally derived from experimental evidence. Occasionally there’s cross-pollination with modernists engaging in hermeneutics and fundamentalists creating the Frankenstein that is creation science, but it’s still rational.

Enns, throughout not just this book, but also his broader writings, undeniably falls into one of these camps. One of the issues he is most outspoken about in this regard is evolution and the historical Adam. I want to give this focus, because I think it gives us a good insight into how Enns’ approach works in practice. I do want to preface this by saying I don’t think his position is inherently indefensible. I’d argue many positions aren’t. If he or some other thinker provides an alternative creation framework, I would be open to consider it based on its merits. Key word being based on its merits, however: what matters in these discussions for me is not the position you hold as much as it is how you got there.

We should generally avoid simply looking to “solve the problem” or “resolve the contradiction”. An apologetic mindset does disservice to the beauty found in Scripture and the dynamic essence of the religion. Other questions often overlooked in these debates are things like: how does this thematically relate to the rest of theology, does this shed light on any sort of new meaning, how does this affect my own relationship with God, and so on. If we can’t think in these sort of terms, then to me it seems as if either the question isn’t all that important or we’re holding back.

For Enns, what matters is who you put your trust in, and I think this is where his argument completely backfires on him. Through the course of this book, he has put this expectation on evangelicals that they should suspend their theological beliefs in these dilemmas, trusting that God will guide them through the uncertainty when they don’t have all the answers. Yet, this could just as easily be turned back on him. Who is to say that we shouldn’t trust God to have created the world as per the Genesis narrative, even when its incomprehensible to us how that could possibly be the case?

The issue with the evolution debate that separates it from other historical debates, like whether or not the Earth revolved around the Sun is that there are significant theological consequences apart from purely a question of biblical inerrancy. This is something Enns himself concedes.⁴

The truth of a historical Adam is not judged by how necessary such an Adam appears to be for theology. The proper response to evolution is to work through the theological challenges it presents (as many theologians and philosophers are doing), not dismiss the challenge itself.

He argues that the conflict is a theological issue, which requires us to correct our theological stances to account for what has been scientifically proven beyond a doubt to be incorrect. The position has already been established a priori. Now we’re working backwards to try and find an interpretation which fits it, and we’ve deliberately closed off our mind to any explanation not in concord. This is the same logic employed by the Bible-thumpers. It may prove to be a more scientifically acceptable position, but is it any less apologetic? Does it not approach Creation with the same contradiction-correcting mindset? Where is the trust, where is the willingness to accept that we may not have the answers in the face of uncertainty?

Taking it a step further, can we not trust that Christ physically resurrected? No biologist in their right mind would attest to this. Of course, there exist theological arguments against the necessity of the resurrection, but that’s besides the point. The point is that Enns, like many Christians, rejects the Genesis narrative on scientific grounds while also upholding the resurrection⁵. Could this just be another example of the mystery of trust? Maybe, but given that public opinion polling leans in favor of both evolution⁶ and the resurrection⁷, something tells me that there are external factors at play.

Some of the other sections he has here include challenges to the Mosaic authorship of the Torah and slavery. I’m going to skip over the former because I don’t have much to interesting to say on the matter, but I think it’s important to dig into exactly why Christians of the era supported slavery. Does it come from listening to Scripture over our observations? No, because we had abolitionist preachers drawing from the exact same source and on top of that, modern-day evangelicals believe the Bible opposes slavery. The truth is, slave-owners did what any Bible-thumper does: they started from a position they conceived out of convenience (wanting to justify owning slaves), and then they hunted Scripture to find justification for this position at all costs. The mistake came in how they got there, because they made up their mind beforehand and no Bible verse in the world would change it. They had a vested interest in ignoring whatever criticism may have come from the abolitionists.

And this is precisely why I’m so wary of the way in which Christians assimilate to ideology, how they let themselves be in concord with the political institutions and practice of the time. We give a lot of lip-service towards opposing the world, but we usually substitute “the world” for the section of society we have political grievances with. The world is not a fraction of humanity, it’s not half of humanity, it’s not a certain era of humanity, it’s the entirety of humanity. It represents the unity beneath all the disagreements, factionalisms, and conflicts. It’s not a conspiracy but a common logic, the various ways in which the same pathologies of mankind manifest over and over. You’re not exempt, I’m not exempt, and if the Reformation taught us anything, the Church is not immune.

All of that aside, let’s move onto the more important thing. We are never going to have full knowledge of the Absolute. The further we try to chase it, the more we get wrapped up in the contradictions of this reality, and the more that our reflection spirals into something entirely perpetual. Every time we think we’ve figured it all out, uncertainty rears its head again. Answers often yield more questions. But should we not have anticipated this? If the Lord could be so easily grasped, then that would be a sign that he isn’t infinite. Even Christ himself, the manifest reconciliation of man and God, is a living paradox.

The world we live in revels in this uncertainty, this doubt. The God of Modernity has long been killed, the Enlightenment’s dream of continual human progress has crumbled before reality. All that’s left is a bleak void in which no absolutes exist, in which for every assertion there’s a critique, for every law there’s an exception. The lines between fiction and reality increasingly blur, as the only source of meaning we can cling to anymore is spectacle and spite. Nobody is immune, for it has manifest itself in all social relations. This foreboding aura of nihilism which hangs over us is what is often referred to as postmodernity.

The most revolutionary thing to do in the face of this is to spontaneously affirm. Not in the shallow sense that we have become accustomed to. Even the fundamentalists, who cling desperately to an intricate belief-system, do so in a fashion which is underscored by their true feelings of fear and doubt. The more they cry out, the more apparent it is that they are insecure, desperately seeking any form of validation. It’s all scripted, it lacks the spontaneity. This affirmation I speak of moves as if it had certainty, while also putting aside the need to seek it out. It’s faith as sprung from a void, God moving a man in the most literal sense. “Rightness” or “wrongness”, in the sense that we commonly conceive them, are irrelevant. What matters is the action that is belied by said belief. That the choice was made, the either/or was confronted.

A thousand years ago, we didn’t have access to anywhere near the wealth of information, technologies, or methodological rigor that we do nowadays. Did this lack of knowledge damn the Christians of that era to hell? Did it absolve them of their responsibilities to the Lord? Of course not. They were still called to the same task and expected to fulfill that task with the utmost confidence, even if they may not have been as quote-un-quote “enlightened” as modern man.

But this assertion is only subversive if it testifies to something both certain and universal. To reduce this affirmation to a personal myth or to an approximation of the man-God relationship is to rob it of its power, to instrumentalize it. When we do that, our relationship becomes personal in the sense of it being an extension of our person, but it ceases to be personal in the sense that we cease to see God as an autonomous will we come into an authentic encounter with.

Faith is not like a Jenga tower. Pulling out one piece does not make the whole thing collapse, unless it was exceptionally fragile to begin with. It is something, however, where we can inadvertently erect barriers which obstruct it. And if it becomes a habit, then we have to ask ourselves why we even believe.