Doctrinal Probabilities

Taking off the existential pressure to be entirely certain or floating in mystery.

There’s a catch-22 in many deconstruction stories, certainly in mine. One of the catalysts for deconstruction is the accumulation of questions in a community that all but requires you to have full certainty in your beliefs as a sign of how strong your faith is. Strong faith is equated with certainty in particular doctrines (or, increasingly, positions in the culture war), and any questioning of those beliefs is a sign of “backsliding” or—nowadays—deconstructing.

This usually means that the person with the questions is drawn to a sense of mystery and wonder. There’s a freedom that comes with letting go of having all the answers and surrendering to simply not having all the answers and not needing all the answers for the first time ever.

But once mystery has been embraced, you realize how hard it is to live there for long. There’s only so long that you can say, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” We have eternity in our hearts. Ronald Rolheiser wrote that we are “Grand Canyons without a bottom.” We’re made to care. Sometimes surrendering to wonder can have the exact same effect as grasping for certainty: you give up questioning. And that old restless feeling you thought had been put to rest when you walked out the doors of fundamentalism is found to have only been napping.

This is often where people find their new fundamentalism. They might be unsure about the doctrines of old, surrendered to the Wonder Of It All, but what is certain is matters of justice, ethics, personhood, and economics. Those are things we can know! The things that we can see, hear, feel, taste, and touch with our own senses. I might be uncertain about God, but I am certain about myself and others! And while we claim there are so many things about God that we can’t know, we simply can’t accept that God might be one way and not another, approve of one thing but not another thing. And so we re-adopt our old dogmatism but in new directions. This is why the path of deconstruction is often a horseshoe. You might be on the other side of the spectrum, but you’re not as far from where you started as you thought.

One of the most useful tools to combat this in our own hearts is the idea of theological triage. That’s where we rank doctrines into primary, secondary, and tertiary importance. It helps us know where we draw the boundaries and which battles are actually worth fighting versus which ones are best let go. In my opinion, one of the best things churches can do is to incorporate this into their statement of faith and actually use it as a tool for membership and ministry rather than a dusty document seven clicks deep on the website.

But I think you can take this idea of theological triage one step further on a personal level. Not only can you rank the importance of theological (and cultural) issues, but you can also think in terms of doctrinal probabilities. By doctrinal probabilities, I mean the level of certainty you have on a particular belief based on how you understand the available data.

When we’re forming doctrinal beliefs, the Wesleyan quadrilateral is helpful here. Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience all play into our doctrinal formulations, but not all receive the same weight. Scripture has ultimate authority in our beliefs, but not all of Scripture is equally clear. Where Scripture is less clear, we look to church history and see what has been historically believed throughout the ages. Where that isn’t clear, we use our reason to think through the different possibilities. And finally, we think through how our experiences in life fit with our theology, but they always have the least amount of weight in our beliefs.

As you move through these categories, you’re doing so because Scripture is not as clear as you would like it to be on a given subject. As clarity decreases, so does our certainty. So even if something is of secondary or tertiary importance, that doesn’t mean you’re as certain of it as, say, the deity of Christ, But you still hold the belief because you find that—as you can read the data—it’s probably more true than it isn’t.

This isn’t science, but you can start thinking in terms of percentages. You might be 99% convinced that Jesus actually lived the life that’s accounted in the Gospels, died, and rose again, but only 51% sure of your view about when he will return. How vigorously will you defend your position on end times if you’re only 51% convinced of it? The same could be said about all of your classic theological controversies: Calvinism/Arminianism, Complementarianism/Egalitarianism, Inerrancy/Infallibility, Paedo/Credo-baptism, Congregationalism/Presbtry, Eternal Conscious Torment/Annihilationism, Young Earth Creationism/Theistic Evolution, etc etc. The list could go on. You could even do this with all of the culture war issues.

I used to think that you couldn’t hold a conviction unless you were 100% certain about it. I no longer believe that. I now believe that you have to be more convinced of it than not in order to hold it as long as you hold it in proportion to the level you are convinced of it.

Do I have convictions about all of the above topics and more? Yup. But I’m not equally convinced of my own positions on them. I might feel 85% about one of them and 62% about another. There might be theological dichotomies that I feel 51%/49% about, which means I’ll hold the position but with the loosest possible grip that I can.

There’s a good chance that you might have read this far and thought, “Really? That’s it? There’s nothing profound about this.” I know. I have to admit; it seems sort of obvious. Why even say this?

When you grew up in a rigid environment that only modeled 100% certainty about convictions, thinking in these terms is freeing in its own way. It provides another option beyond total certainty and just sort of giving up knowing anything at all. We might have heard about open-handed and closed-handed beliefs, but there is still a level of ambiguity about how to hold convictions, especially in the open hand.

Thinking in terms of doctrinal probabilities helps you gauge your level of conviction on a particular topic and engage with them appropriately. It allows you to hold things in mystery while still having convictions. It gives you space to either grow in confidence or change your mind down the line. It reduces the existential anxieties that come with needing to have it all figured out or pretending that you just don’t care.

Between theological triage and doctrinal probabilities, hopefully, we can begin to hold our views with both—as the now cliche saying goes—conviction and compassion. Able to stand on something solid and have the tools we need to build without using our hammers to hurt those in the house next to us.