The Way of the Cross

". . . the world, which seems,
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;”

It has been more than a century since Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, mourned the demise of the old Christendom and the slow withdrawing of the tide of faith. But there seem to be a lot of Christians still dressed in sackcloth and tossing ashes in the air while they long for the return of that lost certitude and all that goes with it. 

This Good Friday my church’s choir will sing another one of those modern settings of the passion narrative, with a subtle and inaccurate rewriting that gets to the root of this morning for certitude. As Jesus faces the cross the song-writers assure us that “he knew redemption’s hour had come.” 

This is exactly the kind of nostalgia for certitude that infects modern Christianity with nonsense. A quick read of the gospels tell us that Jesus, both as he faced the prospect of crucifixion and indeed as he hung on the cross had no such certainty. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Remember those words? Jesus didn’t know redemption’s hour had come. He only knew that he was going to die.  

What Jesus knew was what was required of him as God’s servant and Son. He acted faithfully in the absence of certitude, and exactly in this Jesus becomes the Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. 

John Wesley, we are told, sought “assurance of faith,” a certain knowledge that he was saved. This would become a Wesleyan centerpiece, morphed through Phoebe Palmer’s scriptural certitude, the emotional manipulation of hot revivalists, Methodist fundamentalists and the inerrancy of scripture, and the moral certitude of both modern Progressives and Traditionalists. Methodists have always sought the assurance that they were saved and going on to perfection whether through psychological manipulation, intricate theological reasoning, or legalistic moral rectitude.  

Well Wesley, a man caught between the old Christendom and modernity, was wrong on this. Or at least the popular image of Wesley was wrong on this.  

Wesley's society no longer offered a sea of faith in which to swim assured of his baptismal buoyancy. And he was too good a Christian to embrace Britain's imperial arrogance that would replace it. So apparently he sought it in personal experience, by far the least trustworthy of all fall-backs. A read through his diaries shows that it didn’t work for him as well as the Aldersgate promoters assert. Indeed, Wesley left the whole Aldersgate experience out of many published versions of his diaries. He would still have to face the dark night of the soul again and again. 

Methodism’s search for assurance is built on a natural human desire and a myth that John Wesley fulfilled it. 

Now its time to get real. First, Matthew Arnold was right, we don’t live in a sea of faith. At least in the North Atlantic world Charles Taylor describes the modern human condition far better: “. . part of what has happened in our civilization is that we have largely eroded these forms of immediate certainty.” For Taylor the essential condition of believing in our secular age is that we are always conscious that we can cease believing. Thus certainty based on believing is simply unavailable to us.  

But is this so very different from what Calvin, and even Wesley, understood? Whether the condition of belief is modern secularity or the most rudimentary consciousness of human finitude and sin the result is the same. Certainty about our destiny cannot rest in us or even between and among us. That is why the doctrine of predestination is a “comfortable” doctrine. It locates the source of our destiny outside ourselves and thus in the One whose decrees are certain. 

Locate certainty in human reason, human feelings, or human intuitions and you will never be certain of anything. If belief is a state of mind then whether you believe or do not believe you are always conscious that you have a choice of whether to believe. And if faith is even in part a product of the human psyche then whether you have faith or not you are always conscious that you have a choice of whether to have faith or not. Certitude is not an option. 

And it never was, it was just a illusion produced by a culture of Christendom so closed that alternatives were practically speaking unavailable. 

So what can we do? Well whether we believe that Jesus was the Christ or we don’t, he remains the pioneer and perfecter of what it means to possess any sort of faith at all, whether in God or in ourselves. And that is to act faithfully through whatever end life brings in death. That is the Way of the Cross.