Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 44:2 (NA 1993)
Article: Certain Faith: What Kind Of Certainty?
Author: Lesslie Newbigin

---

TynBul 44:2 (1993) p. 339

Certain Faith:
What Kind Of Certainty?1

Lesslie Newbigin

Summary

A frequent cause of mutual alienation among Christians is the charge of too much certainty on the one hand and too little certainty on the other. How do we find a kind of certainty which is confident and yet humble and teachable? We are heirs of an Enlightenment which look as the ideal of knowledge an ‘objectivity’ which pretended to eliminate all the subjective factors in human knowing and to provide indubitable certainty. This has led into the collapse, of belief in objective truth, scepticism and nihilism. Christian affirmation of the truth of the Gospel must not fall victim to a false concept of objectivity but must take the form of personal commitment to a faithful God.

Recently I have heard on several occasions Christians accusing one another, either of too much certainty, or of too little. We are all familiar with both accusations. There is, on the one hand, the charge against ‘fundamentalist’ Christians that they are arrogant, bigoted and blind to issues which might call their certainties into question. There is also the counter-charge nicely encapsulated in a collect by the late Ronald Knox:

O Lord, for as much as without Thee
We are not able to doubt Thee,
Grant us the grace
To tell the whole race
We know nothing whatever about Thee.

Is there a stable position between these two extremes where a Christian can stand with confidence?

It is worth noting at the outset that this kind of debate goes on only in a limited part of our intellectual world. One does not hear the same kind of slanging match going on among scientists. They are in the habit of making confident statements about what is the case without, apparently, being troubled by the charge of arrogance. To put the matter in another way, there is a large area of our public life where pluralism does not

TynBul 44:2 (1993) p. 340

reign. When two scientists, one in Chicago and the other in Tokyo, conduct the same experiment but come up with radically different results, they do not take it as an opportunity for celebrating the joy of living in a pluralist society. They do not put the difference down to differences in culture or the psychology of the two scientists. They argue the matter until they find a resolution to the difference, either by showing that one is wrong, or that both are only partially right. Our shared intellectual world thus has a rift down the middle: on one side one can use the language of assured certainty without incurring the charge of bigotry; on the other side one cannot. A Ph.D. student in this university recently wrote t...

visitor : : uid: ()