How can I know with certainty what the Bible is saying? How can I be certain what books really belong in the Bible? How can I be sure that my interpretation of any text is correct, and, still more, what its proper application is when I draw lines from texts that are two or three thousand years old and written in another language and in another culture, to our life in the early 21st century?

In mid-June of this year, a former theology student (let’s call him Demas) posted the following. Demas had successfully completed his M.Div. at a well-known evangelical seminary, and then had served a few years as a fruitful pastor of a growing church in a metropolitan area, while pursuing a PhD in New Testament studies. He was a pretty good student, a steady preacher, and was invariably warm and personable with people. Sadly, he entered into an adulterous relationship and ended up selling real estate. Mercifully, he and his wife held their marriage together. So this is what Demas posted on social media in June of this year, several years after resigning his pastorate:

Here’s my public contribution during #PrideMonth: Whenever I talk with a conservative Christian or pastor (who [sic] I love and esteem, and whom I believe good things about, and which I used to be) about homosexuality now, whatever I actually end up saying to them—what I’m actually THINKING is, “Look. I’ve done biblical and theological training at a very high level. At least as high if not higher than you (for 99.9% of the population). And I’m telling you: You. don’t. know. for sure.”

You don’t know for sure that your reading of the Bible is right. Or if your hermeneutics are correct. You do not know for sure how interwoven or weighted the divine and human authorship(s?) of the Bible is. You do not know that.

You don’t know 100% for certain which ancient books are actually God Almighty’s eternal Word. Because there were a lot of books. And we rely on these particular books because they’re the ones the Church happened to be using when the Church first put a “Bible” together. Moses did not bring the whole Bible down the mountain from God. We love these books, but we have very thin understandings of how this collection of books came together and why and on who’s [sic] authority. We do not know.

We don’t know for absolutely certain how God wanted us to use these books. How he wanted them applied to the 21st century western world.

We do not know for certain. We cannot know for certain.

Believing in the Bible is an act of faith. For everyone. And I believe in the Bible. But when my eyes are open to the fact that I can say BOTH “This book is holy” AND “There is a lot of uncertainty about how it should be applied to our society” I immediately realize that I could get the “answer” to the homosexuality question wrong—one way or the other.

I could end up approving something God hates or hating something God loves. Could go either way. Because the issue is not certain. It’s not. We know the same facts. You know it’s not certain.

So, if my potential mistake it [sic] to love something God hates, then I’m going to err on the side of what looks and feels to me most like love. Because whatever else I believe about God, I believe that God Is Love. So, I should try to approve of the things that look most like love.

Which makes me an LGBTQ+ affirming Christian. And I should be willing to say that more.

Happy Pride Month.

In the past, Christians who spoke about the status of the Bible tended to speak of the Bible’s truthfulness, reliability, sufficiency, inspiration, inerrancy, and so forth. In line with many contemporaries, however, Demas, without overtly calling into question any of these more familiar categories, has undermined several of them by raising epistemic and hermeneutical questions: How can I know with certainty what the Bible is saying? How can I be certain what books really belong in the Bible? How can I be sure that my interpretation of any text is correct, and, still more, what its proper application is when I draw lines from texts that are two or three thousand years old and written in another language and in another culture, to our life in the early 21st century?

At a milder level, many preachers who are not entertaining the sweep of the epistemic challenges that Demas raises may nevertheless face somewhat similar challenges as they prepare their Sunday morning sermons. Which interpretation of the text in front of me is correct? How can I declare what the Word of the Lord is saying if I cannot be certain what it is saying? Or which of us have tried to explain what the Bible says on some sensitive topic or other, only to be dismissed with the line, “But that’s just your interpretation”?

The subject is much too large and multi-faceted for a brief editorial, but it may not be inappropriate to lay down a handful of markers, the first four in a little more detail than the final entry.

First, it is deceptive, and even idolatrous, to set up omniscience as the necessary criterion for “certain” or “sure” knowledge. Recall that Demas keeps saying that you cannot know “for sure” or “for certain” or “for 100% certain” and the like. His argument seems to be that if you do not know something “for 100% sure,” then you do not truly know it. In other words, you must possess omniscient knowledge about something before you can legitimately say that you know that thing well enough to build life-decisions on your putative knowledge. In the concrete example that is the focus of Demas’s concern, unless you know with omniscient knowledge that the Bible really does condemn homosexual behavior, and unless you know with omniscient knowledge that the books of the Bible with those passages in them really do belong to the canon of God-inspired books, and unless you know with omniscient knowledge that this is the way God himself wants those ancient texts to be interpreted and applied today, then you have no right to speak as if these things are truly known at all. According to Demas, you are free to choose some other path.

But it is deceptive to set up omniscience as the necessary criterion for “certain” or “sure” knowledge, and this for at least four reasons.

(1) We commonly speak of human knowing without making omniscience the criterion of true knowing. This is true even in the Bible. For example, Luke tells Theophilus that although many people had undertaken to hand down reports of Jesus’ life and ministry as reported by the eyewitnesses, he himself carefully “investigated everything from the beginning,” and then “decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:3–4). Luke uses words that are entirely appropriate to human knowing, to human certainty; he is not promising omniscient knowledge to Theophilus. Again, John tells his believing readers that he is writing his first epistle “so that you may know that you have eternal life”: he is not writing so that they may become omniscient with respect to their knowledge of their status. When Paul encourages Timothy to become “a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15), he is anticipating that Timothy will become a faithful interpreter of Scripture, but not that he will become an omniscient interpreter of Scripture.

(2) If Demas’s arguments are valid for the issues that concern him—that is, if because we do not enjoy 100% certain knowledge about what the Scriptures are saying regarding these ethical issues, therefore we cannot legitimately adjudicate their rightness or wrongness—then to be consistent we must adopt the same agnostic position on everything the Bible says, including what it says about the most deeply confessional Christian truths. For example, Christians hold that Jesus is truly to be confessed and worshiped as God. But the deity of Christ is denied by Arians old and new, including Jehovah’s Witnesses: one cannot say that there is universal agreement that this is what the Bible teaches. Must we therefore say that because we don’t know “for sure” what the Bible says about these things, therefore we should leave the matter open?

(3) Believing in the Bible, Demas asserts, “is an act of faith.” True enough. It appears, however, that Demas pits faith over against knowing. If I understand him correctly, his argument is as follows: You may believe that the Bible says such-and-such about LGBTQ+ issues, but you cannot know “for 100% sure,” and therefore you are not warranted to pronounce that LGBTQ+ behavior is disapproved by God. This, however, buys into not only a misguided view of knowledge, but also contemporary secular definitions of “faith.” On the streets of New York or Montreal, “faith” has one of two common meanings: either it is a synonym for “religion” (there are many “religions”; there are many “faiths”), or it refers to a personal, subjective, religious commitment, without any necessary connection to truth. Something like the latter is what Demas appears to accept, even though “faith” is never used that way in the Bible. In the Bible, faith is intimately connected with truth. The Bible never asks you to believe or trust what is not true or trustworthy. Indeed, in the Bible one of the most commonest means of strengthening faith is by articulating and defending the truth. What is to be believed or trusted is often propositional, sometimes not, but it is never untruth. To pit the truth of what the Bible says against the beliefs that the Bible elicits, makes, from the Bible’s perspective, no sense at all.

(4) One cannot help but ask how Demas knows that God is a loving God. Many so-called “new atheists” viscerally deny that God is great or good.1 The Bible itself depicts God as standing behind judgments that amount to genocide, and many people wrestle with God’s “goodness” because of such passages. So why does Demas base his ethical decisions on his conviction that God is good? To be consistent, shouldn’t he say that we cannot know “for 100% sure” that God is good? Isn’t he making ethical decisions on the basis of what (his own logic must tell him) he cannot know?

It appears, then, that Demas has succumbed to the categories of this present evil world to arrive at, or at least support, his conclusions. Essentially, Demas is undermining the clarity and the authority of Scripture on the ground that we cannot truly know what Scripture is saying because we don’t enjoy omniscient knowledge, and that even our view of the Bible is grounded not in knowledge but in (his understanding of) faith. But I have tried to show that this appeal is deceptive, for our common use of language shows that, whether in the Bible or in general usage, we commonly speak of human knowing even though such knowing is not anchored in omniscience. But the ploy is not only deceptive, it is idolatrous. It demands of human beings that they enjoy an attribute that belongs to God alone, if they are to know (“for certain”—i.e., well enough to make ethical decisions) anything at all. Of course, Demas and his friends are claiming we don’t enjoy omniscient knowledge: we are not to pretend we have the attributes of God. So why am I charging them with idolatry? It is because by claiming we cannot know anything (“for certain”) we are being forbidden to think about human beings and human knowing in a biblical fashion: the Bible demonstrates, often implicitly but sometimes explicitly, that human beings can grow in knowledge, with appropriate certainty, responding to God’s revelation with thought and active faith and obedient submission to our Maker and Redeemer. The ideal of knowing God and making him known is traded in for dogmatic focus on what we cannot know, without reference to what God says about human knowing, and by the forging of epistemological chains that make us deaf to and careless about what God has disclosed of himself, of our world, of moral and ethical conduct. God has been de-godded. The name of this game is idolatry.

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