c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com).

UNDATED _ As angry letters go, this one was mild. But I was struck by the writer’s assertion that a”true Christian”wouldn’t hold my views.”How can she be so certain?”I wondered. What is it about faith that lends itself to the language of certainty?

I remember being certain, at the age of 15, that my high school was the best in the country. Later, when I ceased to need that certainty for an academic prod, I switched allegiance to what I now saw as, certainly, the best college in America. My views on the Vietnam War drank at that same pool of certainty.

I didn’t discover true certainty, however, until I moved to Boston and discovered sports talk radio. There I heard that Carl Yasztremski was the greatest _ or the worst; Yankee fans were a lower life form; Bobby Orr had remade hockey; and John Havlicek deserved canonization. It made for great drive-time amusement.

Except for the drunks in the bleachers at Fenway Park, no one took such certainties seriously. They were a way to express hometown loyalty. The absolutist language was for fun.

Religious certainties aren’t so much fun. Much of the ugliness in human history has derived from certainties held by true believers _ certainties that have justified executions, pogroms, wars, inquisitions, crusades, slavery, apartheid and every manner of intolerance.

Definitions keep changing _ my correspondent, a lay woman, would have been imprisoned in an earlier age for daring to question a male cleric _ but the urge toward certainty remains a surprising constant. You would think the ambiguity of facts would obstruct the drive to certainty. But the more we know in realms like science, medicine and psychology, the more certainly we express our views on faith.

Indeed, Fred Burnham of New York’s Trinity Institute, says the ambiguities of vastly expanded knowledge and modernity’s rapid pace of change have produced a hunger for certainty, and that quest for certainty is what drives fundamentalism.

I find just as much certainty in the realms of”liberal”Christianity as in”conservative.”My own Episcopal denomination is plagued with competing certainties about sex, the role of women in the church, and the Bible. When we square off next month at our General Convention in Philadelphia, you can be sure temperate language and admissions like”I’m not sure”won’t carry the day.

Faith, it seems to me, is one of two things, but not both. Some see faith as a quest, a journey, a searching for the God who is searching for us. Like the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness after liberation, we are bound somewhere but not there yet. Along the way we learn, we forget, we collapse in our frailty, we are rescued by a faithful God, we turn against God, we are forgiven, we hunger, we are fed, and we keep going. To each other, we are fellow pilgrims needing encouragement.

Others see faith as a confrontation with absolute truths _ expressed as laws, moral propositions and statements of reality _ and the work of faith is to verify the truths and then accept them, to God’s pleasure, or reject them, to God’s displeasure. Our obligation to each other is to name truth, refute error, and fight truth-deniers.

My correspondent, it seems, comes from the world where one can know with certainty. I come from the world of searching.

Where in the world will we meet?

This division is far deeper than biblical interpretation or moral theology. It derives from profoundly different ways of thinking and seeing. The same data feed both views _ the Bible, most especially _ which is why arguing over the data leads nowhere.

I struggle to find a parallel. Maybe it’s like a white person’s view of racism vs. a black person’s view. Or a starving person’s attitude toward food vs. a weary chef’s. Starting points shape outcomes. Objective reality is an illusion, especially when it comes to faith.

Personally, I find it ironic that some people approach faith with certainty, when the essence of faith is seeing what cannot be seen, speaking about one who is beyond language. But that is a searcher speaking. Another believer _ not a bit less or more faithful than I _ might ask,”If the aim isn’t to discern certainty, what’s the point?”

MJP END EHRICH