“The answer, according to Enns, is that Christians (still) have a problem with certainty, despite the numerous treatments that have said as much. Specifically, he thinks we’ve identified our faith in God with our thoughts about God, and so have become preoccupied with correct thinking.”

“I’m not saying never doubt or question,” John Ames writes to his son in Marilynne Robinson’s enchanting novel Gilead. “I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.”

Like most pieces of sensible advice, Ames’s exhortation has been often ignored in the evangelical world. Never mind that the “walking stick” of questioning certainty and doubt themselves is by now well-worn; Peter Enns, evangelicalism’s agent provocateur, has taken it out for one more go about town in The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs.

One would hope that both time and Enns’s well-known history of conflict about his doubts and questions would improve the quality of the effort, and that he would offer deep and substantive words of the kind Ames gives us. Instead, even when Enns offers helpful counsel, it lacks novelty and insight, which left me wondering: Why write this book?

From What to Whom

The answer, according to Enns, is that Christians (still) have a problem with certainty, despite the numerous treatments that have said as much. Specifically, he thinks we’ve identified our faith in God with our thoughts about God, and so have become preoccupied with correct thinking. Certainty becomes a sin when we “turn away from God’s invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.” Against this, Enns wants us to trust in God—to have a faith “not so much defined by what we believe but in whom we trust.” Enns recognizes there’s overlap between those points, that the latter cannot really be identified without the former. But getting the priority right matters, and helping us do so is his aim. “Not content of thinking, but trust in a person”—that’s the main point Enns makes.

But Enns’s point about the need for faith to generate action—for faith to move us to be “all in”—is standard fare for evangelical youth leaders everywhere. Enns’s images for faith rarely go deeper than the “Jesus trust fall” or leaning back on the sofa and not attending to the cushions. Enns even repackages the standard claim that “God does not like being boxed in. By definition, God can’t be.” Enns may accuse conservative Protestants of a wide variety of intellectual sins and vices, but he seems perfectly happy perpetuating our most banal clichés.

Problematic Prescriptions 

Stylistically, Enns’s prose mostly buries the occasional memorable line among banalities. At one point, he assures us that “the dominoes were unwinding down the slippery slope” is a “clever mixed metaphor—think about it.” Having followed his advice, I fail to see the cleverness: dominoes don’t “wind.” (My opinion may be a minority one: Enns’s endorsers found the book “beautiful,” “delightful,” and “puckish.”) The effect is that of an academic working hard to capture the decentered, self-aware, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness style so popular today—a style The Sin of Certainty proves is harder to emulate than it looks.

Still, Enns’s diagnosis of sins of “certainty” is more accurate than many of his conservative critics might want to grant. The simplest explanation for the emergence of “doubt” as the latest “mustache and walking stick” is that young people are reacting against something. The story Enns tells about the historical sources of the trouble is a parade of the usual villains; but he follows it with an exploration of many of the psalms of lament. The effect is better than a palate cleanser; lament should be an indispensable, regular part of the worship of our churches (and our own private devotions), and Enns handles the psalms deftly.

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