The Fear of Uncertainty
Dealing with spiritual vulnerability
There is an element of fear built in to our Evangelical Christian mentality. It seems to be a very basic fear that’s built into our DNA as Christians — the fear of questioning the foundations of your faith; or even worse, the fear of the consequences of doubt and uncertainty. While that fear doesn’t necessarily occupy your thoughts every minute of every day, if you were brought up in an Evangelical Christian environment you probably sense something of it’s reality in your life, even if it’s not an overt fear, but simply exists somewhere in the recesses of your mind. You don’t live in constant fear, but you’re reminded of it at your most spiritually vulnerable moments.
Where does that fear come from?
I believe that, in part at least, it comes from a confusion over the biblical account of God’s purpose for humanity — a confusion that is built into the biblical story of redemption. Our Christian Bible (that is, the combined text of the Old and New Testaments), when taken as a comprehensive account of “God’s story,” presents two very different and contrary “ways of salvation.”
The questions I’m raising here are certainly not new. But the basic question can be laid out as follows — “How does humanity approach God”? or “How is humanity made acceptable to God?” The Christian answer posits that salvation is, in a universal sense, only by grace alone through faith alone in Jesus alone. And it is true that in reading the gospel accounts and the letters of Paul and the other writing apostles, clearly, Jesus is the only way (or the “door”) through whom one becomes acceptable to God (or “saved”).
The problem, of course, is that the idea of salvation through Jesus alone is a very “new thing” in the biblical story. And this is where the age-old problem of biblical interpretation comes into play. The redemption story as presented in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is very different than the way that story is viewed by Christianity. The Hebrew Bible — that body of scripture that guided the religious practice of Jews well before the appearance of Jesus on the scene — that story is a self-contained account of God’s selection of, and dealings with, a “chosen people” who are redeemed by God — “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
That story of God’s redemption of Israel is not dependent on the New Testament Gospel story for its validation. The only argument for positing that the story is, in fact, dependent on and subsumed under the gospel story is a Christian claim — a claim that says the Old Testament story assumes its own incompletion because it “foresaw” its fulfillment in the New Testament claim of Jesus. That claim is based on the idea that the prophets did in fact “foresee” the redemptive work of Jesus at a future time, and so their prophetic writings pointed directly to fulfillment in Jesus.
This interpretive methodology insists therefore that Jesus’s fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies (about the “suffering servant for example”) prove that the Hebrew Bible was simply an incomplete story, waiting for its fulfillment in the gospel story.
There are serious problems for the Christian that come about from this reasoning — the most serious question being “How does the Jewish individual, with his or her own self-contained revelatory tradition (the Hebrew Bible) become acceptable to a God who will only save those who put their trust in Jesus?
The Christian answer (that Jesus is the fulfillment of all that the prophets declared about the coming messiah), while coherent within it’s own theological framework of looking at the combined story of the Old and New Testaments, is nevertheless not a satisfying answer for the Jew.
This brings me back to my original point — that there is a fear built into the Christian gospel message — the fear of consequences of being on the “wrong” side of God’s ultimate redemptive plan. And that fear is what drives the urgency that Christians feel to “present the gospel” not only to Jews, but throughout the world. My point is that I believe that fear is unfounded because it is based on a false idea of the exclusive nature of God.
