I like certainty. God likes certainty too, and has told us lots of things so that we can be certain of them. Of that, I am certain!
On the other hand, though, there are things that God hasn't told us. Some of them are on topics that will cut "close to home", having a significant impact on us in some way or other. They may touch upon important issues of theology and consequent practice.
Some people find this difficult to cope with, and as such are drawn towards simple solutions. The problem is, the simple solutions tend not to have sufficient reason for people who love God with all their minds to be able to say "God has said this" rather than just "this might be true, but it remains obscure because the revelation on it is partial and fragmentary". As such, it's actually wrong to say "this is revealed by God as true", even if the thing actually does turn out to be true: because our belief is not justified. We are giving false testimony; we are saying God has said what he has not, which is bad just as denying what God has said is bad.
Of course, in any particular example I give, it'll be something that some will find controversial. That's the nature of things. One man has a deeper understanding and sees things that are there, though subtle, because of prolonged, careful study and thought; another has a drive to believe that something is true without adequate grounds, and takes up beliefs on flimsy grounds merely because he likes them - or, worse, because his false certainty makes him look authoritative and clever, ahead of others, and thus more able to draw followers after himself. Which is which? That takes time and effort to work through, and even then we might not be sure.
So, let me annoy everyone (though they're not reading, so I'll get away with it) by giving enough examples to do so:
- When will the end be? We haven't been told.
- Has my young child become one of God's people? I'd really like them to be.... a doctrine like paedobaptism would be really comforting there. (Except that having an "inner ring" and "outer ring" then brings back the same problem, because being baptised in historical Reformed theology doesn't mean you're in the "inner ring" - so then people are pushed onto even more aberrant theologies like the Federal Vision and paedocommunion). (Don't misunderstand me: I do believe young children can respond to the gospel, with visible consequences in their lives. But that's quite different to saying that we will always or even, at certain ages, usually or likely know the answer to the question posed).
- When my baby or small child died, are they guaranteed salvation? (Even if you think the Bible does say "yes" to this question - I am of John Bunyan's view that where the Bible has no voice, we have no ears, but can rest content that God is astonishingly merciful and makes no mistakes - then you still can't tell anyone at what age the Bible says a child passes to an "age of responsibility").
- What proportion will be saved? (We are told that they will constitute a great absolute number; but concerning relative proportions, we are not told directly, though the imagery we are given of God's true people throughout Scripture at various times invariably pictures a remnant seed - for example, the ark, strangers and exiles, the ubiquity of sufferings before glory in discipleship, etc.).
- Is there a single best manuscript (or best manuscript family, or procedure for identifying infallibly the best reading at every point) for the Scriptures? People can speak about "the preserved text", but this begs the question, since if all the variants we have to discuss hadn't been preserved, we wouldn't have to discuss them! So much easier to boil it down to a nice, simple rule that removes ambiguity (except if you ask difficult questions, which then pushes people even further into utter absurdity, like the alleged infallibility of the King James translation).
- What would all the laws of an ideal Christian nation look like? What percentage will all the taxes be, and which heretics will be executed? (There is no such thing; you question has no meaning; none of them).
- What is the one true procedure that I should carry out for disciplining my children, dealing with a straying wife, church member, or whatever, a set of rules I can apply in all situations to know I did the right thing? What is the one proper way of educating my children to make sure that I brought them up in the fear of the Lord?
The sorts of people drawn towards seeking more certainty than God has provided may be tempted to respond to some of the above with false dichotomies. "Are you saying anything goes? We should have no convictions? God hasn't said anything? Everything's relative, then?". Well, to answer that: no; no; no; no it isn't.
Life is complicated. And since it's not a simulation and we don't get to rewind after seeing the consequences of our decisions, and since procrastinating is also an action we are responsible for, we have to make choices, and learn from them: hopefully, we will mature through reflecting upon them.
The New Testament does have some people in it who couldn't cope with complexity, and whose way of looking at God and his Word led them to try to tie everything down precisely. And of course, when cases came up outside of their very neat rules, things went wrong. (A contemporary example of that that springs to mind is when churches' rigid, one-sided understandings of martial submission and when the Bible allows separation leads them to tell abused wives and children that they have a duty to keep living with their abuser, and then begins to disciple them if they don't). Who were those people? The Pharisees. They tithed mint and herbs... but overlooked the weightier matters of justice, mercy and the love of God. They knew all the details: but unfortunately mainly the ones they'd invented for themselves.
In the mindest I'm thinking of and warning against here, there's a lot of fear. "David, if you speak that way, you've begun a journey; soon you'll be questioning the Bible, then you'll be affirming sexual depravity, and then the year after you'll be an atheist and have announced your new identity is as Deidre!" But this kind of thing is to say: we must hold on to our illegitimate certainties, because admitting "I don't know, but we can trust God and seek to honour him with what we do have" is too dangerous. Trusting God is not actually dangerous, though, when it is trusting God. God is able to take care of us when we hold onto what he's revealed whilst also confessing that we're also in the dark about other things. What is it to walk by faith, after all, if there is no darkness that matters?
Some people do claim to be ignorant of things God has actually revealed; but claiming to know things that God hasn't revealed isn't a better alternative. I really don't see where God told us when the end will be, that all babies (or all babies of at least one Christian parent, or is it grandparent, or is it great-grandparent?) go to heaven if they die young, that God has told us that a flat tax of 20% (or is it 23% or 26%) is the ideal tax rate, that all valid manuscript readings of the Bible are found exclusively in the bundle of manuscripts that Erasmus had (or is it the Majority tradition?), that God has promised that 100% of my children will be saved if I'm faithful enough (not even father-of-the-faithful Abraham had that), or (as a friend told me this week - really!) that we should have no qualms about baptising any 4-year old who says that they love Jesus), or any such. It's not in the Bible, so I don't have to believe it. If I do chose to believe something might be possible, or even probable, then that's still all. But if I make it a significant plank of my faith or practice, then to the extent that I do that, I'm actually following a man-made idol, rather than walking in the faith that should characterise the sons and daughters of pilgrim Abraham.
It seems to me that God deliberately, intentionally gives us unavoidable complexity. It's part of his call to trust him in darkness or partial darkness. He gives us things we find difficult to cope with and that go beyond what we can see: not just in every-day life, but in doctrinal questions too. At some point a pastor will preach through John's gospel. What exactly should he say about the passage about the woman caught in adultery? (Do read the article to understand the situation and possibilities. If you have a firm conviction either way, which one of the possibilities in the article are you in, precisely?).
Personally I'm comfortable with the idea that even though we can't show that it was known to anyone before the 5th century, and even though it has numerous features indicating very strongly that it has a separate origin from the rest of the gospel, yet we can trust God's providence (though on the other hand, there is also his providence in making it known to us that this passage isn't terribly well attested), and inspiration isn't the same idea as "we can name which apostle wrote every passage, and no passage ever had an inspired editor" (for it is evident in the Pentateuch that later editors wrote some things, which Jesus and the apostles accepted as Scripture - and hence we thus know that those editors were divinely inspired; so, super-intending divine inspiration does not mean believing that the final book was written at a single sitting by a single person). So, I do not see the passage as definitely non-inspired. However, uncertainty remains, because I don't hold to any doctrine that says that the church in any one particular year or Bible translation must have got everything right. I could be wrong; a mistake could have been made in my weighing up of the data, or perhaps indeed I don't have enough data to be able to know even after weighing it all up. It might, after all, not be inspired. God is providentially super-intending history, and it's that supervision that has led to the present-day complexity that leaves us with issues like this one (or if you don't agree on this one, there are many others with all kinds of different features) where we can't truthfully say "I know, for God has revealed it" - even though the thing itself is important.
Excessive certainty is not a sign of spiritual maturity, but the opposite, spiritual immaturity. And this spiritual immaturity can go with being highly educated and confident too, as history proves repeatedly. Again, don't misunderstand me. If I were saying that the list of issues I've given above is definitely the one true list of debatable issues, then I'd be making the same mistake myself. What I am saying is that here is a tendency and temptation, to be aware of in ourselves - and to be aware of in others, if we want to be discerning about healthy and unhealthy spiritual influences upon us. Unfounded dogmatism is not a virtue, it is a fault. Admitting to not knowing may indeed be "a sign of weakness"; but if you're a disciple of Christ rather than aspiring to be Nietzsche's Übermensch (super-man) , that's a good thing, not a bad.