I’ve had a complicated relationship with certitude over my many years as a Christian. I’m reminded of what an unpleasant character trait it can be. Being certain about things is good and fine, but I’ve interacted with absolutists on Twitter/X over the last couple years who take their certainty to another level, many of them Christians. These are people so convinced they are right about topic X, they won’t stop until you agree they are in fact right and you are wrong. Nothing less than complete victory and surrender will do, it seems. Obnoxious isn’t exactly the right word for such people, but they are terribly annoying. It’s amazing how difficult it is for them to accept that not everyone will see things as they do. When it gets to be too much I say, we’ll just have to agree to disagree, and even then some of them have a hard time letting go. Maybe the reason they’re so annoying is that they remind me a bit of who I once was.
It’s a personality trait some of us struggle with, and for me the realization of that struggle started when I was 18 years old, and obviously knew it all. Knowing is a very simple thing when you’re ignorant. It’s only as your knowledge grows that you realize maybe it’s not so simple after all. It becomes increasingly obvious, or should, that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. Man’s knowledge, all of it, from the beginning of time until now, is a thimble full in an ocean of infinite knowledge because all knowledge comes from the mind of our infinite God, and is thus a bottomless, never ending ocean of knowledge. Why any of us think we should have absolute certainty when we know so little is a mystery, but not really. Sinners believe and do all kinds of crazy things.
Unfortunately, many sinners miss the reality of our limitations and finitude, and they truly believe absolute certainty is attainable, even desirable. For them there is no question it’s a virtue. Some of these people come across as “know it alls,” and can be as obnoxious and tiring as “know-it-alls” tend to be. Such people come on a spectrum in how it’s expressed, but it’s usually not a terribly attractive character trait. It can be difficult for such people to truly love others because as Paul warned us in I Corinthians 8:1, “knowledge puffs up while love builds up.” It doesn’t have to, but it can. The secret to allowing our knowledge to be in the service of others in love is what he says in the next verse: “The one who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.” It seems that Paul would not be a big fan of certitude, even as certain as he could be. He understood what is far more important to know, that “whoever loves God is known by God,” as he says in verse 3. My knowledge is nothing compared to the truth that God knows me, and if that doesn’t humble us, nothing will.
I’ll get into a bit of the history of how all this came to be, but I want to explain how complicated this relationship was for me. By nature I was a dogmatic sort who wanted to be right, and I thought it was important try to convince others they should agree with me if they wanted to be right too. I didn’t realize I had this not so attractive trait until one Saturday afternoon in college. I was with some people of the campus Christian student organization I was involved with at a swap meet. The ministry leader, also named Mike, said he’d like to drive back with me to campus. Uh oh, as I would find out. He confronted me about my certitude problem, although I didn’t know that’s what it was. He told me, bluntly, that I was an unpleasant person to be around exactly because this was who I was. As I remember him putting it, he said, you always want people to agree with you, and you make them feel bad if they don’t. I do?
It was one of the most difficult, and humbling, take downs I’ve ever had in my Christian walk, but also one of the most helpful. I’ve never forgotten it, and how I recovered from the attendant emotional devastation—God! After a very dark night of the soul, in church the next morning God told me in so many words not to worry about it, but to trust him and he would help me learn how to love others. I didn’t want to love others, and told him so. It’s hard, but I knew even at that early point in my Christian life that I had no choice. The very essence of Christianity is to love others and part of the greatest commandment.
Figuring out how not to be who I naturally am has taken a lifetime of what I call the pain of sanctification. When we become Christians God begins the process in us of transformation, and while it’s a wholly supernatural process by the power of the Holy Spirit, it happens in the mundane of everyday life. The Christian life is all about him creating a truly holy people who can obey the greatest commandment to love him and love others as ourselves, something that doesn’t come easy to we self-absorbed sinners. For me, it’s only been in the last several years that I can truly not care, at all, if someone has a different perspective on something than I do. I still have extremely strong convictions about things, and I can adequately defend them. I also love getting in conversations with others about things where we disagree, if they are truly interested in my perspective, but I no longer feel any need to try to convince them how right I am and how wrong they are, thank God!
The History of Absolute Certainty
All of this goes back to an area of study that’s been a topic of much debate for millennia, epistemology, the study of how we know what we know. As I said, our knowledge is not so simple a concept after all. It’s also fascinating to me that our faith starts with an issue arising from epistemology, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Do not eat of that tree! They did, and our knowing thereafter became problematic and contentious. It took a long time, however, for epistemology to become an obsession for intellectuals in what we’ve come to call modern philosophy. Yes, the ancient Greeks debated and discussed it, but it wasn’t until one of my favorite whipping boys, René Descartes (1596‑1650), that knowledge began to take center stage in man’s grappling with existence. Prior to Descartes, ontology, or the study of being, was where philosophy started, which meant starting with the ground of being, or God. Now it would start with man’s knowledge, and thus man. Eventually God became superfluous.
Descartes was concerned about the growing skepticism in Europe, and as a pious Catholic he decided he had to do something about it. His approach was unique. First he would doubt everything that could be doubted, and from there decided the one thing he couldn’t doubt was his existence. In his Discourse on the Method, first published in 1637, he wrote how he came to this conclusion: “I think, therefore I am,” or as he would write in a later work the most famous words in the history of philosophy, in Latin, “cogito ergo sum.” If he was thinking, he must exist, and that he couldn’t doubt. This was the beginning of his search for absolute certainty, and how the idea such a thing was even possible entered the bloodstream of Western thinking.
R.C. Sproul in The Consequences of Ideas, writes that Descartes set up four rules that needed to be followed in the quest for truth. The first of which stated: “never accept as true anything that is not known to be true without absolute certainty.” Later in his life Descartes expanded those rules to twenty‑one, including this: “Direct your inquiries, not to what others have thought, nor to your own conjecture, but to what you can behold with clarity and deduce with certainty.” Because of Descartes, philosophers eventually came to believe that reason is the only means of knowing, as if knowing could be reduced to the laws of logic. That would be like thinking human beings can experience the world with only one of their five senses. Os Guinness in his book, In Two Minds, explains the helpful idea of limits, especially as we address the question of whether certitude is a Christian virtue:
Christianity is second to none in the place it gives to reason, but it is also second to none in keeping reason in its place. We never know the value of a thing until we know its limits. Put unlimited value on something and in the end you will exhaust it of all value. If we forget the limits of a thing, we fly in the face of reality and condemn ourselves to learn this simple ironic lesson: More without limits is less; less with limits is more.
Reason by itself, without revelation, is something like colorblindness. It can learn, apprehend, and know things, but it can never fully define these for what they are because only in Christ do all things hold together (Col. 1:17). Think of it in terms of universals and particulars, or puzzles and puzzle pieces. Without God in Christ, who is the ultimate universal, no particular can be defined in its fullness, for what God created it to be, its telos, or end. Reason alone without revelation is like muscles in the human body without tendons; there is nothing to hold everything together. All we got is puzzle pieces. But that didn’t stop people from believing the pursuit of absolute certainty is possible, even among Christians, and in my experience, maybe especially among Christians.
The subtitle of Sproul’s book says it all, “Understanding the Concepts That Shaped Our World.” Because of Descartes, reason was exalted as man’s most important faculty in the pursuit of knowledge, and the result is what we call rationalism. Not only was absolute certainty now possible, it was desirable. Finally man could fulfill what he’s longed for since the Garden, as the serpent put it, “you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” He might have said, “You, oh sovereign man, get to determine what reality is!” This refusal to accept our created nature makes perfect sense in light of what we read in Genesis 1‑3, that our Creator is God and we are not (shocking to some, I know). We learn that the fall from our esteemed created state was instigated by the temptation of wanting to be like God, to usurp his place as the one who defines reality. The insistence that we ought to have absolute certainty and can reason our way to perfect knowledge is an indication we are by nature rebels who refuse to accept that we are contingent beings. We are dependent on God, as the Apostle Paul told the Greek philosophers in Acts 17, for life, breath, and everything else, which pretty much covers it all.
Knowing, Certainty, and Finitude
This also leaves us with the most important enemy of absolute certainty—our finitude, that we are finite beings, limited in every way. That means the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know, or it should. When you’re a child your entire existence is mom and dad and your house. Then you’re exposed to your yard, and then your street. Soon you see that’s part of a town, and as you grow up you realize you’re part of a state, then a country and an entire world, then eventually part of an entire universe. You and mom and dad used to be your whole universe, now you’re a miniscule dot in it all. So it is with our knowledge.
That means the virtue is in realizing the limits to our knowledge, not thinking we have it all figured out because that’s impossible. The certainty we have about some things must always be tempered by the realization of our limits. This, I believe, is the context of the passage on knowledge in I Corinthians 8 I quoted above. Paul is telling us the answer to the question of our title, whether certitude, or absolute certainty, is a virtue—it is not. There are a lot of things I’m very certain about that intelligent people I highly respect see differently. In years past the less mature me would feel compelled to try to convince those people they were wrong and I was right. It truly bothered me they didn’t see or understand whatever it was like I did. Isn’t it obvious? How can they not see this or that or the other thing? G. K. Chesterton understood this dynamic well:
There are two kinds of people in the world: the conscious dogmatists, and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.
The latter are the people I called absolutists above who don’t realize how unattractive and unnecessary such dogmatism is. That was the much younger me, but it still took decades to realize the wisdom of Chesterton’s statement.
I worked through all this in my journey to what I’ve come to call epistemic humility. That word comes from the Greek, epistḗm, which means knowledge. It’s where we get the word epistemology from. When we consider Paul’s caution, it’s clear from the context Paul isn’t saying that we can’t “know” things, that we can’t have some form of certainty. Only, I’m convinced, he’s saying not certainty of an absolute sort, as if we were not finite. He affirms in verse 1 that we do possess knowledge, but this knowledge becomes problematic when we become puffed up with it. In the Greek that word means arrogant, inflated, to make proud or haughty. Earlier in Corinthians, chapter 4 Paul says something apropos to this discussion:
7 For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?
Does not this apply to our knowledge as well? Our knowledge can only make us haughty and arrogant if we think it’s ours, as if we possess it and did not discover it by the grace of God. That’s why the context of chapter 8 is so important. Paul is talking about food sacrificed to idols, and how those who have knowledge that idols are nothing, don’t even exist, shouldn’t be used to harm our brothers for whom it’s a problem. In other words, our knowledge and knowing should always be used in love in the service of others, not to prove them wrong, or how right we are. I know it’s shocking to some, but we could even be wrong! And of that, I am certain.
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