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By Len Hjalmarson
I WAS recently drafted into a weblog conversation on
certainty, which was ostensibly generated around the topic of
fundamentalism.
I chimed in with a favourite quote, attributed to Sir
Thomas More: “God help me always to seek the truth . . . and protect
me from those who have found it.”
Later, I got to thinking about the connection of
knowledge and power; these two are inseparable in the modern world, as
Foucault and others have pointed out.
Those who have knowledge tend to use it to strengthen
their own positions, and to impose their will on those ‘down the
ladder.’ Yes, the whole issue connects with colonialism, the
Enlightenment – and through those grids, to models of leadership and
change.
In my musings I was reminded of other renderings that
capture the issue with poetic beauty.
Hunger for certitude
Another favourite is Walter Brueggemann, who stated:
“We all have a hunger for certitude; and the problem is that the
gospel is not about certitude – it’s about fidelity.
“So what we all want to do, if we can, is
immediately transpose fidelity into certitude – because fidelity is a
relational category and certitude is a flat, mechanical category.
“So we have to acknowledge our thirst for
certitude, and then recognize that if you had all the certitudes in the
world it would not make the quality of your life any better –
because what we must have is fidelity.”
Brueggemann reminds us that fidelity is far more
important than certitude. Certainty is highly over-rated, and is the
favourite bastion of every brand of fundamentalism, whether expressed in
politics or religion.
Yeats’ famous lines remind us: “Turning and
turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of
innocence is drowned / The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are
full of passionate intensity.”
Right or faithful?
Ultimately, the Lord probably will not ask us,
“Were you right?” Rather, he is most likely to ask: “Were
you faithful to the truth you knew?” This latter question has to do
with faithful following, the life of a disciple.
But certainty, in times of rapid change, becomes a
commodity we seek. In times like these, we look for those who seem to know
where they are going, even if they are only spouting yesterday’s
truth.
When everything that can be shaken is shaking, we look
for solid ground.
The virtues of uncertainty, then, are hard to extol.
One of the most obvious to me is imagination – and, related,
creativity.
Liminality takes us to these places, because when our
categories expand and old frameworks fail us, we have to seek and find a
new synthesis.
When the maps no longer describe the territory, we
become seekers and learners. And that process, in turn, generates
community.
Because imagination and dreams are ill defined places,
they are wide spaces that invite participation. Imagination is thus a
fundamental component of a creative commons, and these places of shared
liminality are the only way forward.
Holy imagination
Even such practical saints as Oswald Chambers had a
deep appreciation for the power of holy imagination. Chambers wrote:
“One of the reasons for our sense of futility in
prayer is that we have lost our power to visualize. We can no longer even
imagine putting ourselves deliberately before God.
It is actually more important to be broken bread and
poured-out wine in the area of intercession than in our personal contact
with others.
“The power of imagination is what God gives a
saint so that he can go beyond himself and be firmly placed into
relationships he never before experienced.”
The imaginative saint knows that the ‘eternal
now’ is the Empire’s version of the gospel. The eschatological
kingdom is the kingdom of tomorrow.
The imaginative saint is not fixated on the present
order, as if this is as good as it gets – but knows that the eternal
kingdom is a gift that is coming, and that gift is given to those who
don’t deserve it.
The imaginative saint knows mystery is as important as
knowledge, and that to worship is to bow before a God who is totally Other.
We learn to honour the questions as much as the answer,
because to be a disciple is to be a learner – one who is on a journey
from the known, to the unknown.
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Dominant culture
We in the Western church have been enamoured with
certainty – and related, with propositions. The dominant ways of
knowing were once one with the dominant culture. Epistemology was
translated into an ethic.
Since our primary way of knowing has been
objectification, the direct application of power, inevitably our culture
thrives on violence and oppression – violence against women, against
the poor, against our environment, against those who are too different from
us. (Heidegger’s calculative thinking versus meditative thinking fits
here. The root meaning of ‘objective’ is ‘to
oppose.’)
But what if knowledge has less to do with individual
mastery and more to do with openness and community? I remember Edith
Schaeffer’s words:
“A completely new work would never have been
possible if we had not been uprooted in every way – and if, in that
uprooting, we had not decided to pray for God’s solution and leading
every step of the path, as it wound through unknown territory.”
Dependence on God
Certainty puts me in control. Most of us are addicted
to control at some level. But if we are willing to let go, we can discover
a new level of dependence on God.
What if knowing is perspectival? We can know the
position or the speed of the electron, but not both.
What if Polanyi is right, and knowing is less rational
than we supposed, and more relational: neither objective nor subjective,
but personal? And what would be the implications for the hegemony of
Empire?
Incarnation, we know, is the path to God”s
future. On this day in the history of the world, and on this day in
God’s story, we are like those awakening from a long sleep.
Like Neo in The Matrix, we have taken the red pill, and we are discovering how deep
the rabbit hole goes.
We are seeing how deeply immersed and accommodated we
have become to a narrow set of values, anchored solidly in a limited
Enlightenment epistemology: a particular way of knowing the world.
Parker Palmer and others have helped us discern the
violence of that method – and we are discovering that, while science
illuminated one set of truths, it lost another.
Rediscovering fidelity
Holy imagination is helping us to rediscover fidelity
and God’s future – and in the process, we may deepen our
ability to worship.
One thoughtful brother responded to my blog post by
quoting Brueggemann:
“We all have a hunger for certitude, and the
problem is that the gospel is not about certitude, it’s about
fidelity.”
He then asked: “The fidelity of who? And how do
we find out who this person is? . . . And if it is written down anywhere,
we have to have a certainty that something is true, if we are to trust the
fidelity of the person who is offering it. And who decides what [are] the
characteristics of this fidelity that is being offered?:
I wrote in response:
“I love your first question: ‘the fidelity
of who?’ Because our standing before God is all about the
faithfulness of God, who kept his promise in Jesus.
“How do we know about this fidelity? It is
brokered by the living community, tradition (including scripture) and the
Holy Spirit.
“Does this mean we know with certainty – and if not, then
are we always left with some level of anxiety? I don’t know with
certainty in the modern, scientific sense; but I do know with assurance
that Jesus lives.”
In A Primer on
Postmodernism, Stanley Grenz writes:
“We cannot simply collapse truth into rational
certainty. Rather, we must make room for mystery – as a reminder that
God transcends human rationality.
“Central to the task of thinking through the
faith is an obligation to rethink the function of assertions of truth or
propositions. Christian truth is more than correct doctrine.
“Truth is both socially and linguistically
constructed – and at the heart of Christianity is a personal
encounter. Propositions may serve that encounter (but the map is not the
territory).”
Further writings by Len Hjalmarson can be found at
NextReformation.com.
July 2008
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