Insecurity


There are times when it does no harm to leave questions unanswered.


The apostolic church in the first century had a far slimmer set of beliefs than any church today. They did not have any doctrine about the exact trajectory and detailed fate of souls after death, the metaphysical details of communion celebrations or of a hundred other matters that we take quite seriously today. We take such matters so seriously that we divide our church denominations one from another on account of them.

Some of our added doctrines arise only in the desire to answer, sometimes to criticize, the beliefs held in other churches. I call these counter-beliefs, because they are invented in answer to questions like, "Well, we believe this  in our church, what do you believe about the matter in your church?" For example, the Lutherans need a highly developed theory of communion because the Catholics have one. They feel the need to answer the Catholics, and to do it in kind.

I was not there to see the early church, so I can offer only my conjecture about it. I think the first century church did not worry about the blank spaces in their knowledge because of a strong and simple trust in the Lord. They celebrated communion because he said "do this," and they did not fret overmuch about the circumstances of the dead, for they trusted in the Author of life. Where they did not know they trusted.

A lot of the doctrines that divide one church from another have their origins in our desire to know what to believe in when a matter is ambiguous, or to answer doctrines developed for that purpose if we find other people's answers unpersuasive. This is a wild thought, and I offer it to provoke thought: What if our single answer to all the tangled metaphysical puzzles we think up, and argue about, and divide over, was instead to shut up about them? There are times when it does no harm to leave questions unanswered.

For a case in point, consider the following. If the doctrine of transubstantiation is true, supposing it is for the sake of argument, then transubstantiation functions whether we understand it or not, because truth is not conditional on our understanding. (Otherwise we must say that the early church's celebrations were not valid.) Or, if the truth about communion lies elsewhere, the truth is likewise not changed by our understanding or lack of it. Thus each time communion is celebrated in our era, at least half the world's churches are wrong about what they think they are doing. The earth has not swallowed them, neither has lightning struck them. That may disappoint some of the more zealous adherents of one view or the other, but the simple fact is that what is true in God is not dependent on our thoughts about it. It is what it is, and we make our best efforts to fathom it after the fact. I think we're trying too hard.

All in all, it may be useful to consider the following question. Is insecurity over points we don't easily fathom the cause of elaborate doctrine, and our subsequent arguments?

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