Between and Beyond Certitudes
We spend great energy on our certitudes. We articulate, defend, and refine them. The more we live in fear, the greater is our yearning for certitude, perhaps the certitude of absolutism or of “strong leaders” who reassure us. As a consequence we formulate certitudes concerning race, gender, and class.
Indeed, we go to great lengths to assure that “the right kind of people” have greater access to public resources and are assured advantage in seeking access and benefit. The distinction between “haves” and “have-nots” is readily maintained by the gatekeepers of society, by bank loans and redlining, and other credentialing mechanisms. The outcome is a political economy in which the advantaged accumulate even greater advantage at the expense of the disadvantaged who lack the leverage to resist or to insist on otherwise. The result on all counts, not surprisingly, is a society of advantage and disadvantage that defines, almost by default, the status and position of those who have access to resources that are delicately and covertly maintained and assured. The sum of such an arrangement among us is the maintenance of a patriarchal society that precludes challenge or threat to a protected, advantaged status.
In the face of such powerful “social engineering” that takes place formally in policy and informally in practice, it belongs to covenantal faith to resist such settled certitude that assigns specific persons to social roles and positions of advantage or disadvantage. Here are four well-known instances in scripture that refuse such certitude and that leave open alternative futures given through God’s good governance:
- In Samuel’s search for a new king to displace the failure of Saul, he comes to the village of Jesse in Bethlehem (I Samuel 16:1-13). The seven handsome, strong, impressive sons of Jesse pass one at a time before Samuel, but none of them qualifies. Finally after the seven sons, “the eighth son,” David, appears and is promptly selected and anointed by Samuel. The prophet had been instructed by the Lord:
Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him… for they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (I Samuel 16:7).
The narrative has Samuel sketch out a new notion of humanity, and a new portrayal of manhood. This young, handsome king will act out his manhood in a different way!
- In I Corinthians 13, Paul’s best known and most preferred text, the apostle identifies a list of ways of being an effective force in the world:
if I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels…
if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge…
if I have faith to remove mountains…
if I give away all my possessions…
if I hand over my body so that I may boast…
The apostle declares that none of these stratagems has any future. They come to naught. By such actions we “gain nothing.” Agape love will affect what none of these efforts can produce. So much for these strategies of certitude!
- I have long thought that Paul’s statement in II Corinthians 5:16-17 is a compelling counterpoint to the guidance given Samuel in I Samuel 16:
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
In this text as in the guidance to Samuel, old settled perspectives on human personhood are finished and overturned. While Paul’s rhetoric pertains to all humanity, it may be of special importance for our discernment of what constitutes “manhood,” that is, male maturity. In that old perception, male personhood is marked by strength, power, and domination. Along with such characteristics, such male manhood is regularly linked to “certitude,” of having arrived at clear conclusions that are beyond debate or reconsideration.
But now the new human person—including the new male human person—is not defined by certitude, control, or power. Rather, it is defined by the practice of a “ministry of reconciliation” that requires a capacity for forgiveness, generosity, and hospitality. This new humanity—including that of mature males—rejects conventional male power in the same way that Samuel rejected the seven impressive sons of Jesse. This is indeed the new human person who has a capacity “to walk by faith and not by sight” (II Corinthians 5:7), that is, to live out beyond control and certitude in a world that remains an open one and responsive to healing, transformative intervention.
-The final text I could call to mind is the chill-evoking declaration of Hebrews 11:1:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
“Faith” is not a set of certitudes. It is a tilt toward a not-yet-in-hand future that is only promised by God but not assured. Such “faith” is not easily impressed with the appearance of things, with long established habits, or with long reiterated certitudes. It is a readiness to lean toward a future yet to be given by God, but that does not and will not meet all of our settled expectations and requirements.
I suggest that the sum of these texts is an insistent summons away from our certitudes:
I Samuel 16 is a summons away from an imagined royal manhood toward recognition of an unnoticed nobody;
In I Corinthians 13, it is a summons away from power and certitude toward a practice of generous, unrestrained self-giving toward the other;
In II Corinthians 5, it is a summons away from dominant humanity toward the exposed, at-risk offer of Christ who is the new humanity in his relentless self-giving;
In Hebrews 11, it is a summons away from what we have in hand to be on the way toward “a better country,” a city prepared for us. It is the capacity to be open to a future that we cannot control or administer.
The sum of these texts—to which many others might be added—is that creation continues to teem with God’s ordering/disordering Spirit. That Spirit continues to order in the way it initially blew back the threat of chaotic waters. At the same time, it continues to disorder and disrupt our favorite arrangements of money, power, and certitude.
The Spirit attests that God’s creation is a fluid generative process that continues to generate new life and new possibility when we have imagined—either in pride or in despair—that there are no new gifts yet to be given.
When we are satisfactorily in control of our lives, we imagine there is no need for new gifts. When we are disconsolate about the condition of our lives, we may conclude that there are no new gifts being given. The work of the Spirit is to upend both our self-satisfaction and our despair by exhibiting a gift-giving world that we can neither stop nor guarantee. The outcome is a new possibility beyond our imagining. The texts attest that the world over which God presides continues to be haunted by the question that lingers in response to the nervous laughter of mother Sarah:
Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?
Is anything impossible for the Lord? (Genesis 18:14)
It is the question that God poses yet again when it is time for the holy city of Jerusalem to be assaulted:
Is anything too hard for me? (Jeremiah 32:27)
It is a question readily answered in faith by Jeremiah who, in the same chapter, looks beyond the coming exile in anticipation of God’s faithful restoration of the city:
Nothing is too hard for you (Jeremiah 32:17).
The trusting, affirming prayer of the prophet culminates with the decisive “yet” of verse 25:
Yet you, O Lord God, have said to me, “Buy the field for money and get witnesses”—though the city has been given into the hands of the Chaldeans (v. 25).
God’s deep resolve for a new restored future contains the suffering of the city, and so reiterates the steadfast love of YHWH to which the prophet attests. Given the eyes of faith and given the force of hope, the faith community knows that, in the face of every circumstance, the prospect of newness from God remains in play and on offer. Such newness is the work of God’s generative Spirit.
When we sort things out into settled slots, classes, and categories, we may imagine fixity in the world. But the work of the Spirit is exactly to countermand such fixity. The church’s recurring liturgical embrace of God’s will against such fixity is the ongoing celebration of Pentecost, the occasion when the church received the gift of God’s Spirit that overrides and overthrows all of our conventional arrangements. There is no doubt that as the Spirit breaks our social realities, we are on the way to a humanity that embraces many tongues, races, and languages. The apostle, moreover, sees that the Spirit, given in the wonder of baptism, permits a world of races, genders, and classes that are without fixity:
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:27-28).
In this context, we might conclude that our ongoing history as a community of faith is an endless contest between our penchant to organize, classify, and sort out, and the counterwork of God’s Spirit that refuses all such arrangements that bespeak control, privilege, or advantage. It is no doubt for good reason that the established churches (including those of the “magistrates” Reformation) have relatively little to say concerning the work of the Spirit. In such church traditions, we may indeed need to be instructed afresh by our Pentecostal kin who tend to be located outside of conventional social power, and who are for that reason more available for address by the disrupting force of God’s Spirit. It is for good reason that Paul, in his early epistle, counsels the church:
Do not quench the Spirit;
Do not despise the words of the prophets (I Thessalonians 5:19-20).
The propensity of established communities of faith is to curb any such empowerment of the Spirit according to our habit of “decently and in good order.” But since the church among us in our society is now mostly disestablished, there may indeed be room and opportunity for fresh engagement with the Spirit who summons us in hope beyond our present assumptions.
