A Guard Against False Certainty

on living out our answers

Photo by Daniel Tuttle on Unsplash

Sometimes, when I’m discouraged about life—particularly the life of faith—I read Ecclesiastes. And I’m reminded that there was a teacher/preacher of sorts—Koheleth—way back in the middle of the third century B.C.E., that spoke to the incongruities, anxieties, absurdities, and the fragility of it all. Here is our discontent, gloriously in God’s word to his people today.

For a good part of my adult life, I was pursuing the certainties of the faith. I wanted it all nailed down, this is who God is, this is who I’m supposed to be, this is how to raise my kids. And may I just go ahead and add in for timing, this is who you vote for.

The security of it all is so alluring. Until you get a crack in the structure, and you realize you got the scaffolding all wrong.

For those who are weary of the black and white Christianity that thinks life fits together like a Lincoln Log house, as long as you have all the pieces perfectly in order, maybe you can give the faith another look by starting in Ecclesiastes. What if we had more preaching like this today? Our questions are still the same: “the meaning of life, the unfairness of fate, the inevitability of death—but more, death’s cruelty in stripping us of all dignity, distinctiveness, achievement.” I’m quoting from Ellen Davis’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, which is such a great accompaniment to reading what she describes as “the poetics of humility” that is Ecclesiastes.

Davis calls Ecclesiastes “a guard against false certainty.” Koheleth bids us to admit, “That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?” (7:24). I can be up at 3AM trying to find out the deep and far off. Davis compares his style of speech to Jesus’s parables, as a way of speaking to those truths that can only be hinted to, perhaps pictured in metaphor and symbol or connect through a story, rather than directly expressed in propositional statements.

Borrowing from E.F. Schumacher, Davis contrasts “convergent problems” that we can find solutions to with “divergent problems,” “the abiding problems of life, the problems that generate great literature, long conversations among friends, and hours of wordless prayer—to these there is never a full solution…never yield a single line of thought or definitive answer.” These are the far off, the deep, the agonizing, where our faith is challenged, and we where we begin to see what kind of legs it has.

Davis explains:

This is precisely the value of divergent questions for those who have the patience and courage to engage them: they push us beyond our accustomed ways of thinking, our prepared answers. By exposing our limitations, they push us into the uncomfortable position of growing in both our humanity and our faith, and thus gaining what the biblical sages call wisdom. Schumacher observes: “when things are most contradictory, absurd, difficult, and frustrating, then, just then, life really makes sense: as a mechanism provoking and almost forcing us to develop toward higher Levels of Being.”

Ecclesiastes doesn’t spiritually bypass. It doesn’t shame you for agonizing over the unanswered questions or give you canned answers that come up empty. It foregrounds the absurd and dares us to live our earthly lives.

Coincidentally, I’m also reading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, and there is such synchronicity with Ecclesiastes. There Jayber was in seminary, and yet full of questions regarding the contradictions he saw in Scripture and how faith works in real life. He’s brave enough to bring these questions and troubles to his professors, who were handing out the canned answers that were not answers. So he goes to the professor he is afraid to ask, because he knew he would shoot straight with him. As Jayber unloads and ends with the uncertainty of how God answers prayer, he says, “‘There’s no way to get any proof.’”

The professor asks, “’Do you have any answers?’”

It hits Jayber square in the face: how can he preach if he doesn’t have the answers? The professor mirrors his question, how can you? When Jayber said he didn’t believe he could, the professor mirrors him again. And Jayber felt ashamed because he thought he had been called. The conversation continues:

“And you may have been right. But not to what you thought. Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out—perhaps a little at a time.”

“And how long is that going to take?”

“I don’t know. As long as you live, perhaps.”

“That could be a long time.”

“I will tell you a further mystery,” he said. “It may take longer.”

Right?! This is the sermon of Ecclesiastes. Jayber goes and lives it—exactly what Koheleth is bidding us to do. On one hand, it’s not long at all, life is but a vapor—hevel, as Koheleth’s refrain goes. But as we see Koheleth turn that phrase and make it sparkle, we see that life’s breath, life’s fragility, ephemerality, is not a vanity of vanities as some of our translations describe, but part of its very beauty, worth, and value of the human condition. By faith we can actually live out the answers—perhaps a little at a time.