What you don't know
...just how hurtful is it?
Fair warning: grab your popcorn or your margarita, because it’s going to get salty in here.
One of the strongest tenets of the Christian religion today, sometimes explicit but always implied, is that in order to be safe you must believe correctly. This unwritten rule is also one of the greatest sources of anxiety in Christians (which is how you know it has nothing to do with the Gospel).
Here’s how it works: anytime you believe something incorrectly, especially about God or the Bible, you are putting yourself at risk of judgment, maybe even the eternal kind. Your “real Christian” card is at risk not only if you believe incorrectly about either of those things, but also depending on how you believe about a whole host of other things as well, including, but certainly not limited to: the devil, humans, nature, money, sex, or music.
Now a rational Christian can look at that paragraph and be like “Geez Faith, I know that nobody can believe everything right, why are you being so unreasonable?”
Of course I know it sounds absurd when I put it this way, and probably everyone could agree that no one could believe the correct way about every thing. But the point I’m making is that most of us have sacred intellectual assent cows, and if we discover that other people think a certain way about them, or even that they don’t care to think about them at all, it’s a sign that they are in danger of hell, or that they aren’t “true” Christians. We might respond with concern (because we need to protect people from the ways that they think since their eternal wellbeing is obviously on the line) or frustration or dismissal, and often when we feel our most prized doctrines – and quite possibly our way of life – are being threatened, we will try to protect ourselves by the thoroughly un-Christian practice of dehumanizing and/or bearing false witness about those who would dare disagree with us, or bring up uncomfortable questions that we don’t like.
These kinds of reactions come from a place of fear that we’re very possibly not even aware we possess… the fear that God’s love or our salvation or something else important is contingent on this standard of correct belief, and that we ourselves may not measure up to it. But we can’t actually bear to entertain the idea that we may be the ones who come in for judgment, so we have to die on these hills – because God forbid the whole system operates in a way other than we believe it to, in which case then what the heck do we even do? That sounds like a crisis of faith in the making.
So earlier I called them “sacred intellectual assent cows,” and this is why: because they’re actually more about what beliefs we mentally assent to and cognitively espouse, more a sifting between goods and evils and deciding which items MUST be either good or evil – which is the practice and coping mechanism we come by from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – and less about the measure of faith that is given to each of us; the kind of deep and foundational inner knowing that, if we’re willing to allow ourselves to honestly sit with and witness it, causes us to say “I don’t know, all I know is ____.”
There is no safety in the belief system of intellectual assent where we argue over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and we know it. We can feel it. But we distract ourselves with these useless arguments to avoid the lingering, subconscious, existential dread that God may not be who he says he is – that we may not actually be who he says we are.
So where is the safety, then? It’s in “knowing the love of God that surpasses knowledge;” a statement which I love because it obliterates our paradigm of having to know enough in order to believe correctly enough thereby attaining the safety of being on God’s good side.
“But Faith, what you don’t know CAN hurt you!”
Of course it can, and so can what you do know, and so can what you think you know.
Listen. I’m not believing everything right, and neither are you. And you can’t, and neither can I. But are you willing to believe that you are safe in the love of the One who created you on purpose and adores you in spite of your ignorance and your failures of doctrine? Would you rather put your trust in all the knowledge of good and evil you can gather and weigh and classify, or in the love of God?
And if your immediate response to this is '“Yeah, but if you believe THIS thing incorrectly, then”– then bro, try Jesus, not me.
“So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, ‘if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’”
John 8:31-32
“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ…”
2 Corinthians 10:5
“I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, thought formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief, and the grace of our Lord overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.”
1 Timothy 1:12-14
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”
1 John 4:18
“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”
Psalm 46:9
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith–that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with the fullness of God.”
Ephesians 3:14-21