It has been disparagingly said many times that young people, who go to seminary, are really going to the cemetery where their once vibrant faith will be laid to rest. The implication is that real, tested, rigorous study of the academic facts about the Bible as we know them today will lead to the abandonment of the faith. It can easily be argued that the whole of academic biblical and theological studies can only done from a biased or agenda oriented framework. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? For it to be otherwise would imply that some human is not limited, but such a claim is sheer stupidity. In upper Seminary education, the myth that gets propagated is that we should attempt to be unbiased in how we approach the study of the Bible. The lie in this myth is that (a) non-bias is achievable. The second lie in the myth is this: being unbiased doesn’t imply a secular or atheistic set of presuppositions. While I don’t want this article to be about bias, I do want to recognize the captured nature of certain aspects of academic Seminary institutions. I attended a very conservative Seminary, and I still find my observations to be true of it as well. When I say captured, I simply mean that the whole academic endeavor is a framework of certain biases masquerading as “objective” or unbiased. More often than not, in both standard universities and those specializing in studying God (Seminary), the framework leans darwinian, materialistic, and strikingly presupposing the universe is a closed system (Atheistic). This is set forward as supposedly “more unbiased,” but such positions are biases proper to modernity and postmodernity, and of the age and times associated with these movements: if they are biases crafted by these thought trends, how is it that they are the standard for what being “unbiased” supposedly is?

With these things said, rigorous study of theology in Seminary does produce uncertainty as uncertainty is described by the secular world. It is a wonder, is it not, that we have to think and rethink through what “uncertainty” means, and what the criteria for certainty might entail? Health and healthcare is uncertain when evaluated by certain criteria. Life is uncertain, period. Despite billions of dollars spent on advertising and computer models and planning, many corporations in the stock market “miss” their earnings targets. Profits are uncertain. David Hume was the one who set the standard for theological claims to have to be more certain than all things else since the claim had the largest implications possible. However, we know that the so-called scientific consensus is that the universe started with a bang, but such a claim would never fulfill Hume’s high standard of certainty since such a claim about the universe by scientists entails just as large consequences as many theological claims. The consequences to what the nature of the universe is—does it entail God or is it arbitrary and devoid of governing intent, i.e., atheistic—boils down to two equally impactful outcomes: either the fundamental nature of the universe is Presence or it is emptiness (or endless deferment to an ever evasive supposed presence, for my deconstructionist readers out there). Both outcomes are “eternal,” one is eternal life (Presence) and the other is eternal death, i.e., the heat depravation of the universe is also called the heat death of the universe. Hume’s claim that certainty must be higher for theological claims would need to be applied to atheistic claims as well since the implications of both worldviews—Christianity and atheism/scientism—are eternal. Indeed, we might even argue that the erasure of all meaning (eternal death) for every organism ever is a more dire consequence, coming from the atheistic viewpoint, and requires greater certainty than Christian claims.

Certainty is a rare commodity, in other words. Those certainty-peddlers out there are often more gifted in sleight of hand. Is time consistent? What is time? Do we have any certainty about time, or is time just a variable of objects’ movement through space, relative to the impact of light? Is gravity consistent? Is the universe eternal (scientific consensus of 1980s-90s)? Is it a big bang (current consensus)? Or is the universe an expanding and collapsing “entity (2020, Penrose)?” Are each of those expanding-collapsing-universes a continuous sequence of matter, or does a differing time/matter structure exist for each, making each a structure unto itself that should not be considered with the so-called “earlier” universes? Let me tie this in now with my earlier discussion. When someone goes to Seminary, an increase in uncertainty in respect to the Christian faith is not a negative per se. Indeed, this uncertain might be a criteria for authenticity and growing in the knowledge of God. Karl Barth famously coined the phrase, “with every revealing, there is a concealing.” If God is indeed infinite (or so much greater than creation that He is tantamount to infinite), everything revealed about God is hedged against a backdrop of greater mysterium (mystery). We never arrive at the peak, but we always hike onward—as an aside, heaven for eternity seems to require God to be infinite or else heaven would become boring, which would make heaven into a kind of hell (I’ll write something up on this).

The certainties our scientist-types want us to accept as gospel really are plagued with uncertainties, and this is demonstrable as time passes and the so-called scientific facts change. All facts, remember, are reported by someone; this someone might not provide all context for the reported fact (how could they!!!), and such a fact is inescapably tied to the subjective influence of the reporter. This is why persons who use terms like “scientific fact” or it is “a brute fact” could again be engaging in a certain sleight of hand. I can’t go into it much here without getting far awry of my purpose, but all facts are intersubjectively constituted. This is why peer-reviewed journals in academic circles are so famed and respected. This is why we speak of “scientific consensus” rather than a singular authority imposing an absolute truth claim. This is why God is Trinity, and not a Monad. Arguably, as quantum physics are better understood, many of the scientific facts of today will be contextualized by this new realm of knowledge, reframing what was formerly understood to be scientific truth. My point in this whole article is that certainty as modernity sold it to us was a myth. This is probably why Decarte concluded he could virtually know nothing aside from his thinking capacity. The Christian, therefore, need neither have nor seek this secular and mythological certainty and try to apply it to God and His word. This certainty has always been a lie; that knowledge is bifurcated into subjective and objective knowledge is equally misleading, even if practically and heuristically useful. Knowledge, and especially knowledge of God, is intersubjectively construed. There is no authentic knowledge that isn’t delivered without an agenda or bias. The Bible is absolute agenda of meta-narrative potency! The Bible is God’s perspective; God’s view on things is not properly a bias in the same way as a creature because of His immensity—this is a theological property of God that I can’t unpack here, read up on it if you are interested. God’s view is nevertheless an agenda.

Knowledge of God comes from growth in knowing Him, which means I can know Him intimately and also means there will be an ever growing knowledge about Him that I need to press into Him to know Him more. With every revealing, there is a concealing, and this is gospel because this “more to know” makes heaven luminous and hopeful. Certainty was a secular construction born from secular presuppositions that has cast many well-meaning-Christian-ships into the rocks, leading Christians to try to achieve a certainty that is unachievable. To claim that God is infinite and so has concealed features, that there is still more to always know, can be emphasized by simply asking, “How could it be otherwise?” Limited creatures, no matter how glorified never become God, and so always move towards God—God lives in inapproachable Light, after all (1 Tim 6:16). The move towards the intersubjective relationship between me and anyone (or me and God) entails unknowns, uncertainties. There is so much analysis I could do here on relationships, that good relationships are a fashioning of “knowns” that enable trust and “unknowns” that postulate ongoing interest between the parties of the relationship. In other words, having “uncertainties” does not mean there cannot be intimate trust. All robust, healthy relationships have this conjunction of “knowns” and “unknowns” and the better the conjunction, the arguably the better the relationship. I believe most people do not want to be objectified. They do not want to be thought of or treated as a commodity. To objectify someone is to give that person “known packaging” also called a “stereotype” or “reductionistic caricature.” We make them into what we want, how we perceive them; we remove the uncertainties about that person, and assign the certainties to them that we can now control and use in constructing our truth about them. Certainty is really the roar of humankind to dominate all else. Certainty is not an evil per se, but it is a danger, especially to relationships. The leads me to reflect on why the Bible usually uses the terms ‘faith’ and ‘trust’ when speaking about the nature of our relationship with the Christ. These terms intimate relationship. Hebrews 11:1 does come to mind as well: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” The question is how to understand the word ‘certain.’ Do we use a ‘certainty’ derived from 17-19th centuries, born from the crucible of modernity with its underlying secular presuppositions, or do we search Scripture diligently to define ‘certainty’ along relational lines as I have shortly begun to illustrate here? Whatever a “certainty” is that implies trust in the Person (God), that is the certainty we should run with and use. Simply, God’s past action inspires confidence (trust) in His future actions, but this entails both “knowns” and “unknowns,” yet certainty can be defined against such a Scriptural construction. God is, in the final analysis, not a totality, or as the Church Fathers would say, God is un-circumscribable; there is no way to hedge Him in, no way to have that “secular certainty” with a Person who has no ends, but you can trust Him and what He has made known.

Dr. Scalise