Wicked Uncertainty

The Bible features some very infamous questions. By this I mean that a question has been posed with some kind of disingenuousness. We might think of those places where the enemies of Jesus came to set a trap. These people wore their malice on their sleeves:

“Teacher, we know that you are true and do not care about anyone’s opinion. For you are not swayed by appearances, but truly teach the way of God” (Mk. 12:24).

Other times no such transparent flattery is used, and yet the questions are all the more deadly.

Above all of these are the serpent’s words to Eve, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1) Then there was Pilate who said to Jesus, “What is truth?” (Jn. 18:38)

Both of these questions were insincere. The first was that which ensnared the whole human race, casting doubt upon God’s word and slandering His goodness. The second had more to do with numbing the Roman procurator’s conscience from condemning the One who is the Truth incarnate. There is a kind of question that kills. In obscuring the truth, it condemns the soul that was made to feed on truth.

The Purpose of Questions

There is a common impression first year philosophy students have of this subject that they are getting into. It comes to the surface especially when we all open up Plato’s dialogues for the first time. This Socrates fellow that we find there is thought of as heroic for one reason only. The one thing he knew, so we are told, is that he knew nothing at all. Of course, there is a line like this, in the instance of Socrates speaking about his calling from the Oracle of Delphi and his own supposed wisdom. But it is torn from its context.

The dialogues themselves begin to separate those easily impressed freshmen from those who pursue actual wisdom. There may not be many in that latter category, but what comes to the surface is that all of those questions Socrates became such a nuisance for were not at all to make everyone doubt everything.

On the contrary, Socrates wanted to get to the bottom of things. And he knew that these mere peddlers of wisdom in Athens (which history knows as the Sophists) knew nothing of the essence of things. They knew the surface. They could perhaps tell you what beauty looks like in the moment, or what justice does on occasion, and they may even stumble upon a true fact—but as to the form of beautiful, the just, or the true, they turned tail as fast as those bored freshmen.

The very word “question” is made of a quest. Presumably the one asking a question does so to get an answer. No one seeks for nothing, but with the expectation of gain. And this interrogative form of speech is no different.

But like anything else in human experience it can be perverted. It can even become its opposite, used as a stiff-arm to keep the truth at a safe distance. Very early on in my ministry I learned to pose the question to young men especially: Are you asking a question, or merely using one? It turns out that the passive-aggressive question is more common than we might like to think.

My opening mention of the serpent’s first disingenuous question in the Garden was partly meant to suggest that this is nothing new. If we ask, “What caused the devolution of the question?” we may be asking a wrongheaded question of our own. On the other hand, we do not want to cheapen the perfectly true answer: Sin did this to questions. That is ultimately true, yet there are proximate causes that have only shrouded the path to truth.

The Arrogance of Forced Uncertainty

Postmodernism did not invent false humility, but let us just say that it did not help matters. In its “incredulity of metanarratives”—i.e., grand pictures of the way the world is, truths above and beyond all finite perspectives—postmodern thought pushed its own big idea that one ought never have any big idea. The moment one points out the contradiction, it may be replied that this is only one more big idea. The law of non-contradiction is itself a species of Western imperialism. To be postmodern is conveniently to be post-nonsense, or at least post-embarrassed at such nonsense.

It has been argued (I think rightly) that postmodernism is less like an enemy combatant to modernism, but more like a younger sibling taking its revenge. It is not an alien force. It is a logical extension, or we might even say, exhaustion, of the principles of the modern viewpoint which were not rationally coherent to begin with, but which needed to play themselves out for all to see.

When we do not have much of an argument, we resort to a-rational substitutes. This is part of the human predicament. We all do it in one form or another. One form of the a-rational smokescreen is in the positioning of virtues and vices associated with the positions which cannot quite be articulated. Where compelling reason fails, moral posturing will do. And since pride has always been viewed among Christians as a (if not the) primal sin, it is no coincidence that humility has played a leading role in post-Christian moralizing. As I suggested, this was true long before the peculiar role it has played in postmodern thought.

G. K. Chesterton was prophetic in saying over a hundred years ago that,

“But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert – himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason.”1

How did this come about in the modern era? Was not the quintessential posture of modern Western man pride? Specifically, it was the twin pillars of rational inquiry and inevitable progress which typified the nineteenth century. Like the collective expression of a singular man who gorges himself on the things of this world, late Western man exchanged his soul for the world—a world no longer to be colonized for Christ (that would assume a certainty that transcends the realm where all particulars lose their certainty), but a post-Christendom colonialization, which is altogether different.

To pose Jesus’ own question about that: What did he profit? The lesson to be learned will vary, depending on who one asks. The pessimism that set in by the era of the two World Wars could lead to a spiritual renewal for some, but, more often than not, it led to one exercise after another of blaming the wrong things.

Here again the ancient Greeks became a kind of type and shadow for us. When civilization is in decline, philosophy lifts its head. Where its genius is impotent (and most will never reflect), philosophy itself turns cynical. It would have been a good time to self-reflect, to become cynical about oneself rather than everything else outside of the self.

We children of Adam are very selective skeptics. “Things aren’t working out” never comes to mean, “I have sinned against heaven and against you.” And the trouble with the problem “back there” coming to mean “out there” is that this cannot ever mean anything “in here,” which means that structural blame is always resistant to the very idea of repentance. Paradoxically, it takes a kind of certainty about fixed right and wrong in order to hear the thunder of God’s law. To be transformed, by both law and gospel, takes understanding. To understand implies to stand-under, that is, for the self to die to its ignorance, to exchange that which was mistaken or simply void, for that which is correct or clearer. That which is more certain from outside of me makes its demand, and only the haughty turn inward.

Closely associated with this selective doubting is what Alan Bloom suggested was the all-encompassing virtue of modern American education: openness. He wrote of the present ethos,

“The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”2

This is where things have stood for more than a generation. Humility means uncertainty. Certainty means arrogance. Of this formula we are certain, and the only heretic left to condemn is the man who goes against this single-punctuation creed of the question mark.

The Tragedy of Getting Lost in the Quest

Let us end by zooming in our lens from the collective phenomenon to the individual under the spell of the interrogative. It is said that not all who wander are lost. But it must be countered that all who prefer wandering over the discovery of their chief end are most to be pitied. I remember even seeing a church leaflet with the slogan, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” How could a Christian ministry communicate such a thing! Do they not understand that this was precisely the spirit of autonomy that the serpent was selling back in the Garden? Such were my thoughts, but the truth is that I was not terribly surprised. Such is our present culture.

We are miserable guides out of the mere present if we are as afraid of the future as we are ashamed of the past. The Apostle spoke of those so-called teachers who are “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Such people even look down on those who confess a singular body of doctrine. Orthodoxy is to them the banner of superstition. Apologetics is to them an anxiety attack. Inerrancy is to them a doomsday bunker built around the Bible.

There is a kind that revels in the endless procession of truth-options, but finds settling on a truth to be most unsettling, very much like the man who never commits to marriage for the most obvious reason of wanting to use women. He is not being careful. He is not a picture of maturity. All of his question marks are a game which may fool his acquaintances in this life, but are not hidden from God.

I should say that not all surrenders to uncertainty are of this sort. There is a kind of person who begins to conflate certainty with comprehensiveness and in that process begins to conflate subjective certainty with objective certainty.

This is the young man who seems very much to want answers. He has suddenly heard that there were many other books which were not included in the canon of Scripture, he knows not why. His mind then moves to the Old Testament books which are even older and leave less of a trace as to the external corroboration of councils or authoritative canon-lists. This is just one example of such an intellectual test of faith. He hears different kinds of answers to how and why the canon came to be. He discerns that each involves either a kind of circularity in their reasoning, or else a convergence of facts, empirically attested to be sure, but each one rising only to high degrees of probability.

The end of this process is usually a journey from one external authority to another—something more hierarchical and historic, so as to mute the nagging inner call for a first principle, to rest in an “authority,” by which the exhausted young inquisitor comes to mean, an old enough man in a fancy enough hat with a long enough procession of people through time and space genuflecting toward his formulae and burning incense. Thus the subjective rests in the still subjective and calls it good enough, or else flies further into all-out skepticism.

Naturally all of this raises the question of whether there can be anything like certainty. If there can, are there different kinds? Those are very good questions. I happen to think that they have affirmative answers. But before I would entertain such a study with anyone—and it will require rigorous study—the one asking should be prepared to hear my initial reply: Are you asking a question, or merely using one?

__________

1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Image Publishers, 1990),

2. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 26.