“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)
“Uncertainty, doubt, fear, terror, and angst gnaw at the heart and mingle themselves in the lives of nearly every person.” - Herman Bavinck, The Certainty of Faith
The idea for this article arose one morning when I juxtaposed a passage from an early-20th-century Dutch theologian against a few headlines from the New York Times.
That Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, argued that Christian faith is “an unshakeable conviction that all things work together for good…[a] firm assurance in the hope of eternal life…[a] boasting in persecution, jubilance in the face of death.” (The Certainty of Faith, all citations hereafter are taken from that book, pg. 29)
Then, I put the book down and picked up the iPad to read about what’s going on in the world. It didn’t take long before the clash between Bavinck’s soaring vision and the world’s shifting sand caused me to ask:
How can Christians today have unshakeable faith in God when everything about the world is shaking around us?
Or put another way, is Bavinck’s description of faith an unfortunate combination of surely biblical and surely unattainable?
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If it is self-evident to you that the world is increasingly in flux and the future is increasingly unimaginable, then perhaps skip this section. If not, then I’ll underline a few sobering places to underscore my argument.
Let’s start with work: Even in a least-disruptive scenario, the World Economic Forum predicts a sizable amount of the core skills necessary for your job will be replaced within five years by AI. Three hundred million jobs globally will be automated, according to Goldman Sachs. And even when we set aside the AI-induced impending white-collar apocalypse, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index—the most widely cited measure of economic-policy uncertainty—has reached its highest sustained levels ever.
Whether you are in the C-suite trying to position your company so that it skates to where the puck is going or you’re a data analyst white-knuckling your way through Excel spreadsheets to keep your job, you’re anxious about what’s coming.
When we move from economics to politics, the world does not get any more stable or clear. In the past 10 years, we’ve swung from a 2016 populist insurgency to a 2020 social reckoning to a 2024 campaign that had an incumbent step aside and his opponent survive multiple assassination attempts.
Do you know what 2028 will bring? I don’t.
The current betting favorites for the presidential race according to Polymarket—Gavin Newsom, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—diverge on just a few issues: namely, AI regulation, trade policy, abortion policy, foreign policy, border policy, climate policy, public health policy, and the core identity of the country they’re leading.
The chaotic past and uncertain future of our politics causes a palpable tension which you can feel at extended-family gatherings, work meetings, and when your kid (or grandkid) looks up at you and asks what it means to be an American.
Indeed, the challenges of parenting today might be the strongest indicator of our collective confusion about what's ahead. Parents must pass down to their children the skills, values, and wisdom they will need to succeed, once they venture out in the world on their own. Is that possible at this moment?
The great German philosopher, Hartmut Rosa, has a concept for a society that is moving so fast it cannot imagine what's ahead: "the contraction of the present." The present contracts on both sides: a past before people used iPhones becomes as unimaginable as a future without them.
Sometimes I look at Luke, my one-month-old, as I’m sitting in our nursery chair burping him at 3 in the morning amid the foggy haze of a late-night feeding and I think to myself, “I have no idea what kind of world you will live in. Or what you’ll need to know to succeed in it.”
And while success in the world to come is incomparably more important than success in this world, uncertainty about one tends to boil over into uncertainty about the other.
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Bavinck says that “uncertainty, doubt, fear, terror, and angst gnaw at the heart.” He’s echoing Proverbs 12:25, which states that “anxiety in a man’s heart weighs him down.” The instability all around us causes anxiety which weighs down the heart. A gnawed and burdened heart won't reach the mustard-seed levels of faith that Jesus says can move a mountain.
Or so it seems.
Ross Douthat paints a different picture for the Church's future in the midst of rapid cultural change in a recent article, published by the New York Times. He argues that although many will depart from inherited Christian faith, many will also depart from inherited non-belief.
“Some people’s impulse to seek after God in new terrain, to leap or swim into a new tradition, can grow stronger during exactly the sort of unstable cultural moments that make other people less likely to stick with an inherited and loosely held religious commitment.”
If Douthat’s right, we should expect more conversions and de-conversions, the religious teams getting reshuffled. And I buy that. But what if you like your team, and don't want to become a free agent?
How can the believer in Jesus attain, as Bavinck says, “a certain knowledge, a firm confidence, a consciousness and conviction so strong and decided that it excludes all doubt and fear.” (pg. 40, emphasis mine)
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Here, I suggest we look at the Children of Israel and the story of their exile.
Israel had lost her political self-determination, her agricultural economy, her Temple-based religion, and her homeland. These were tied tightly together—God gives them the land, installs their King, lays down their worship plan, and vows to protect them—so when all of that falls apart, you would expect their faith in Him to crumble. An exiled Israelite would have looked back and thought that their entire world took a left-turn from the future they had imagined. When they looked ahead, they couldn’t put an optimistic face on what could be headed their way. This is a fruitful place to consider what God would say to us—we who inhabit similarly dislocating times
(For the sake of transparency, here I should say that God says a lot. Read Daniel, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, and Esther for the fullest picture.)
Here are some clear directives for us, taken from these books.
First, embrace surrender. Before the exile, Israel stubbornly refused to live as God had commanded them, believing their future was under their control. When Israel worshipped Ba’al, believing they could fanangle more crops through worshipping the local rain god, God reminded them that He is the Lord of their farms—in dramatic fashion. When they believed they could get rich and buy God’s favor through donations (sacrifices) while neglecting justice, God looks at their religion and says
“Your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hates…
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
Your hands are full of blood.” (Isaiah 1:14a,15b)
They wanted a god who would allow them to remain in control, but the real God forced them to heel and brought them to their knees.
Some of us (myself included) will need to relinquish control over our future, America’s future, and our family's future. But how do we do that? How can we place all our hopes into God’s hands and go forward in our daily lives, firmly trusting in Him?
Here I suggest we remember what God said to the promise-breaking, politically-dysfunctional, economically-ravaged and spiritually-depleted exiles in Jeremiah Chapter 31.
God says “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” (Jeremiah 31:3)
When the future was completely hidden from the Israelites, God told them to remember that His covenant with them is from everlasting to everlasting. When they were shaken by the storms of a changing world, He drew their attention to His unceasing and unshakeable love.
Bavinck says that to believe is “to know his love, to lean on his grace, to hope in his faithfulness." (85)
If I have faith like that, I can dare to believe that all things work together for good and that eternal life awaits me on the other side of the grave.
No matter how hazy and dark the future appears, Everlasting Light still shines at the end of the tunnel because His love remains constant in our constantly changing world.
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