Joe Carter on Doubt, Faith, and Certainty March 20, 2008
Posted by Paul Edwards in Certainty, Emergent, Joe Carter, Postmodernism.trackback
My friend Joe Carter at The Evangelical Outpost has an excellent post today on being certain about your faith.
…while I may embrace and defend my opinions with firmness, it is a humble form of certitude in which I have to acknowledge that there is a statistical likelihood — whether trivial or significant — that I could be wrong. Not so, however, when it comes to matters of faith. I don’t doubt that God exists or that the Bible is his Word. I don’t doubt that Jesus was born of a virgin, that he died and was buried, or that he rose again after three days in the tomb. I don’t doubt that he died for me, a truly wretched sinner, or that I will spend eternity in His presence. I would find it easier to doubt my own existence than to doubt the Nicene Creed. Maybe I’m delusional (though I doubt that) but I have few doubts about my faith. My certitude is admittedly personal. I believe I have justification and warrant for my beliefs and that if pressed, I could attempt to provide proof and evidence for these claims. The level of “proof” I could give, though, would not provide the same level of certitude for you that I find sufficient for me. Proof is rather limited in that regard. I couldn’t prove that Joe Carter exists much less prove that he likes the color blue, that he kissed Christie Cozart in the 7th grade, or that he hates referring to himself in the third person. While I can’t prove those things beyond a shadow of a doubt, I don’t doubt them at all. Similarly, my certainty in my faith isn’t based on what I can prove to other people or even, for that matter, what I can prove to myself.
Read the full post here.
A very humbling statement, his confession is something that we all should realize that our confessions of faith are personal and often times not provable. This is why we shouldn’t try to run around with so much “biblical” certainty when it comes to social issues. We live in a pluralistic society which means that there are going to be laws and practices that are acceptable outside our scope of reality. The thing that Christians should be doing is trying to effect individuals on a personal level and not making bed with a political party to enforce our personal views on the society as a whole. This is the concept that those who consider themselves on the right don’t seem to understand or they don’t care to embrace. Our faith should be real, but it should be personal, no one in the secular humanist crowd cares who or how we worship, they care that we are imposing our values “family values” on our society. It is not something Jesus ever did and if we are followers of him we should try to mimic him.
You know…Jesus was pretty “certain” in lots of areas, and I really think He was intending to “impose” values on humanity as a whole with the rather “gobal” content of His total message. His comments were somewhat offensive, and if He had just kept them to Himself, maybe He wouldn’t have gotten crucified. *; )