Noli Irritare Leones

Shane Vander Hart, in The Postmodern Virtue of Doubt, thinks not.

The point is that we are never meant to stay there.

Doubt is often treated as a type of virtue among emerging church leaders, or rather it is framed as a type of humility or modesty – “who are we to know for certain.” It is often centered about absolute truth and assurance regarding Christian orthodoxy.

G.K. Chesterton in 1959 work, Orthodoxy said what we suffer from “is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition… (and) settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”

I don’t know, though. I love Chesterton, and he’s to the point here as always. But it seems to me that some modesty is appropriate in the organ of conviction, as well as in the organ of ambition. Modesty, at least, in the sense of knowing the limits of your own knowledge.

We all know people who think themselves way more knowledgeable than they are in some particular area – propounding beliefs about, say, what makes for health or cures sickness, which have no basis in fact. They lack enough humility in their organ of conviction to recognize what they don’t know enough about for certainty. Likewise, one sometimes runs into someone who’s convinced that he or she has a pipeline to God’s will, but that pipeline’s a bit bizarre. I remember, back when Geraldine Ferraro was running for vice president, the fellow who wanted to argue that she couldn’t possibly be Christian, because any good Christian would know that women aren’t to lead, in any situation whatsoever apparently. And no, I wasn’t disagreeing with him, I was disagreeing with God.

Of course, I’m entirely without doubt, myself, when I judge him to have been full of crap.

One shouldn’t take doubt too far, certainly not to the point of doubting the multiplication table; when you do know something, it’s OK to be firmly convinced that you know it. But, given our own imperfection, it is wise to retain a healthy modesty about the limits of our knowledge. And also not to be in too much haste to declare ourselves absolutely flawless judges of the will of God.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 8:36 am and is filed under Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.