A Case For Tentativeness -- By: John W. Carlton

Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 05:1 (Fall 1987)
Article: A Case For Tentativeness
Author: John W. Carlton


A Case For Tentativeness

John W. Carlton

Emeritus Professor of Preaching
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

[Matthew 11:1–6]

Oscar Hammerstein once noted that “Too many people become too certain about too many things too soon in their lives, and they lack both the wisdom and the knowledge to expose their hastily adopted ideas to further doubts and reflections.” He added: “‘In these immature absolutists lies the seed of tragedy.” This malady arises in no small measure from our fear of ambiguity, our inability to live with a question mark. With the blind man in John’s gospel we want to cry out, “One thing I know.” Like the angry Jews who turned on Jesus long ago, we demand “tell us plainly.” We have a deep-seated craving for clarity. There are ministers who decry any fluted rendition of the faith, who are quick to quote: “If the trumpet give forth an uncertain sound, who will order himself to battle?” (I Cor. 14:8). In matters of the faith they lay claim to a “blessed assurance.” Such an attitude may well be intimidating to those who have a less certified postulation of the faith, who agonize over a slow maturation of thought and experience, whose spirit would be that of John Henry Newman’s hymn, “Lead, Kindly Light”:

I do not ask to see the distant scene; One step enough for me.

Is it not time to raise the question; What price certainty? Is it as important as we have pretended? Is not the search for it often an evasion of the insecurities that are inevitable in growth, an attempt to freeze the map of life at a given stage? The desire and need for new experience and venture is just as basic to life as the craving for security and certainty. Indeed, a part of the boredom of our age arises from our attempt to bleach the spirit of adventure out of life.

To be sure, our religious tradition has organized itself historically around some great certainties, and we would be spiritually adrift without them. Moreover, a quest for order, coherence, and unity in the midst of the clamorous irrationality of our world is a legitimate enterprise. Yet in matters of religion, a quest for assurance can grow into a shell of dogmatism that deprives us of further growth. Hard and fast conclusions may be comfortable if our experience of reality is relatively static.

Built into the very structure of life is an element of tentativeness, and to recognize this need not issue in shallowness, intellectual laziness, or naivete. Tentativeness is our disposition to accept the provisional nature of reality, to reconsider a position, to receive new information, and to reformulate i...

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