A Brief History of Certainty

When modernism and the Bible seem to conflict

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(An eight-minute read.)

“Jesus said to him, ‘Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’” (John 20:29)

It seems like every month or two I get animated about the topic of “certainty.”

Certainty, as you may have noticed, has fallen on hard times within some parts of the religious world—especially among “deconstructing Christians.”

For example, just recently, my friend Kevin Wilson, who’s a youth pastor and social media influencer, took certainty to task in a video he posted. Recounting an interaction he’d just had with someone at his church who told him they hated Christianity, Kevin described how he offered an empathic ear to the person.

And in his video reflections, he shared this profound thought: “Christians are willing to sacrifice empathy at the altar of orthodoxy, compassion at the altar of certainty; [they’re] willing to sacrifice kindness [and] openness at the altar of truth.”

I really dig it. I’m with Kevin.

As you may have noticed, I have serious gripes with dogmatism and certainty myself.

Of course, not everyone does. I continue to interact with plenty of people who have a hard time understanding why “certainty” has taken such a beating of late, expressing concerns that downplaying it will lead—and has already led—to the loss of any sort of objective moral compass.

I’d humbly submit, however, that certainty is an alien concept to biblical Christianity and is of more recent vintage, having been imported into the faith as a result of the Enlightenment (which began in the seventeenth century).

I’m not the first person to make this claim, of course. Far from it.

But I’d like to try my hand at providing a brief history of the concept—and then offering some reflections on the implications for today.

“Beyond a shadow of a doubt”

At the risk of stating the obvious, it’s hard to overstate just how utterly cataclysmic and influential the Enlightenment was. It genuinely turned the world upside down.

There was much good that derived from it, of course (you wouldn’t be reading this on an electronic device right now if not for the Enlightenment)—and I wouldn’t want to turn back the clock to live in a pre-Enlightenment age.

But as with most advances, the Enlightenment brought some bad along with the good.

In this case, Enlightenment thinkers acquired a heightened sense of their own abilities and thinking. They believed they could conquer the world, solve every problem, and explore every crack and crevice of knowledge. There was nothing they couldn’t figure out, nothing they couldn’t know.

Essentially, the Enlightenment was a quest for certainty. Enlightened thinkers wanted to arrive at infallible and indubitable knowledge, striving for omniscience.

Think, for example, of empiricism, which largely serves as the foundation to modern science. Empiricism relies on the senses to arrive at truth. Only those things that can be touched, heard, seen, tasted, or smelled can be verified. What can’t be encountered with the senses cannot be validated. What can’t be replicated and reproduced can’t be true.

This was a good and noble goal, of course. Because of empiricism we can fly in airplanes, knowing that the laws of physics are uniform and reliable.

Hallelujah!

The downside of the Enlightenment, however, is that their new understanding of how the world worked started to come into conflict with their religious beliefs.

What such thinkers desperately wanted to avoid was taking anything on faith anymore. That was too squishy for them, too nebulous—too uncertain. They needed an enlightened faith. They needed their religion to harmonize with their newfound understanding of how the world operated.

Though there were many enlightened thinkers who didn’t abandon faith altogether—people like Bacon and Newton and Locke—there were many others who determined their enlightened minds couldn’t accept the classic claims of Scripture.

The resurrection of Christ was now out—because no one had ever observed a person coming back from the dead.

The virgin birth never happened—because virgins don’t get pregnant.

Everything must have a natural and rational explanation—and what couldn’t jibe with the mind or the senses couldn’t be true.

It was during this period, as philosopher Charles Taylor has noted, that Western society went from a world of enchantment, in which God was behind everything, to a world of disenchantment, where the laws of physics could explain everything.

Perhaps no one captured these shifting sands more than the eighteenth-century English poet, Alexander Pope, who put it beautifully into a couplet:

“Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be—And all was light.”

God, the Creator, had now been replaced—or, at least, had been pushed aside—by the Age of Enlightenment.

Of course, religious thinkers weren’t going to go down without a fight.

And this is where all this intersects with contemporary concerns about certainty.

Christians especially, during the Age of Enlightenment, decided they needed to modernize their faith in response to and as pushback against the growing skepticism of the Enlightenment. They needed to put their beliefs and practices on enlightened footing.

In short, they decided they needed to fight fire with fire; they needed to fight certainty with certainty.

They needed to adopt the assumptions of the Enlightenment in order to prove the truth of Scripture.

Among other things, it was during this period that there was an explosion of what’s known as “evidentialist apologetics.” Especially in response to the anti-religious rhetoric of the French Revolution and the growing Deism in America, Christians decided they needed to prove the “objective truths” of the Bible in order to beat back the forces of skepticism.

The upshot of all this was that many enlightened Christians turned the Bible into a science book, which could be solved by using the tools of enlightened thinking. It was a book strictly of “facts” that could be proven beyond doubt.

But this was not only true in their attempts to prove the reliability of the Bible in general, but also in seeking to establish specific interpretations of Scripture.

The nineteenth century was perhaps the high watermark of this approach to the Bible, with just about every reader of Scripture claiming they knew exactly what it meant—and willing to divide over their interpretations.

After all, the Bible, like the laws of nature, was uniform and reliable, and could therefore be easily apprehended and solved.

And if a person simply used the proper interpretive tools—what many called the “Baconian method” (styled after Francis Bacon’s inductive method of scientific inquiry)—they could be certain they knew exactly what it meant and how it applied.

What’s more, certainty naturally bred a sense of control and power—and it could be wielded as a sword to divide the faithful from the fallen.

Thus, it was through the influence of the Enlightenment that Christianity became enamored with certainty, coveting the same degree of certainty that the scientist had.

Certainty presented itself to Christians as an intimidating foe and they decided to meet it on its own ground instead of remaining satisfied with a humble commitment to faith.

So what?

Perhaps it sounds like I’m being totally cynical about “enlightened” Christianity—but that wouldn’t be completely accurate.

I think, by and large, Christians did what Christians had to do—based on the tools and resources they had access to during the Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was the air they breathed, the water they swam in, and it would have been almost impossible to step outside that context.

So I don’t necessarily fault them for trying to bring their faith into conversation with the times. We all do it—and it’s actually often necessary in order to properly engage the surrounding culture with the gospel.

But I think it’s just critically important to understand what we’re doing when we do it, and to recognize that we don’t always keep swimming in the same water. We don’t continuously breathe the same air.

And the air the Enlightenment thinkers breathed isn’t the same air we breathe in 2024 (and that’s OK).

And, perhaps more significantly, it wasn’t the same air the biblical writers breathed either.

To put it simply: the writers of Scripture weren’t children of the Enlightenment. They weren’t wrestling with all the same questions Newton, Kant, Voltaire, or Jefferson were wrestling with.

And I don’t think the biblical writers were chasing the type of certainty that became the all-consuming quest of the children of modernity.

Instead of relying on the empiricism of the senses, as the disciple Thomas felt he needed to do, Christ declared a special blessing on those who hadn’t seen—those who weren’t able to arrive at indubitable certainty by engaging their empirical senses—and yet still believed.

After all, “faith,” according to the author of Hebrews, is the “evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

That is, faith is what we rely on when our senses want to—and perhaps even demand that—we abandon our religious commitments.

In other words, Scripture doesn’t hail certainty as the apex of the religious life.

It glorifies faith as the height of the Jesus-way—which doesn’t deny the possibility of doubt and uncertainty, but maintains an unrelenting trust in the reality of an invisible God.

Simply put, faith says “I could be wrong” and yet still deems the journey of faith worth pursuing.

This isn’t to imply that faith is totally blind—or that it remains committed when there’s absolutely no evidence or reason to do so. I believe we have good, solid, firm ground to stand on when it comes to the Jesus-story.

But even the existence of evidence doesn’t mean I can prove the claims of Jesus beyond a shadow of a doubt—the same way I can prove that an apple will fall to the ground if I drop it from my hand.

Yet I remain committed by faith to the Jesus-story—not because I have air-tight certainty that it’s absolutely true, but because it’s gripped my heart as well as my head, and has demonstrated positive (though imperfect) fruit in multiple ways.

And that’s good enough for me.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.