Benefit of the Doubt: Breaking the Idol of Certainty

In his new book, Benefit of the Doubt, Greg Boyd seeks to show the reader the difference between Biblical faith and Certainty Seeking faith, which at its core is idolatry. Boyd argues strongly against the model of faith that says "the more psychologically certain you are, the stronger your faith is. In this conception of faith, therefore, doubt is an enemy." Boyd says that this model of faith is "gravely mistaken" and damaging to the believer, the Church, and the mission of God. He has multiple objections against certainty seeking faith including how it makes a virtue of irrationality, it makes God in the image of Al Capone, replaces faith with magic, requires inflexibility and thus creates a learning phobia, tends towards hypocrisy, creates the danger of certainty and leaves the one with certainty seeking faith only concerned with their belief being true, not having a true belief, and, finally, that certainty seeking faith is idolatrous. If that list doesn't whet your appetite to dive into this book, I am not sure what will!

Boyd's general admonition and apparent motive for writing is that the believer should doubt, meaning that the believer should consider other truth claims and seek to know whether he/she is right or wrong, should be applied by all. If the Christian claim is true, it will be proven true even under scrutiny. If the Christian claim is false, then the believer should desire to know that more than anyone, regardless of the cognitive dissonance this will assuredly bring. If, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, then Boyd is right in saying that this "applies to faith as well". The unexamined faith is not worth believing."

While I wholeheartedly agree with Boyd's point of the dangers of certainty seeking faith and the need to doubt and to examine, there were many parts of this book I struggled with greatly. It seemed, oftentimes, that Boyd was embracing pluralism and submitting Scripture, God's revelation of Himself to us, to culture and to our experience. Boyd's handling of the book of Job is at times simply horrible.

He begins early on by making the claim that God was surprised when Satan appeared in Heaven and uses Job 1:7 as his evidence of this surprise. He then goes on to show how Satan forces God to act via his cleverness and God's apparent inability to keep control and His motivation not to lose face after being unwittingly challenged by His enemy. I cannot find a translation that even comes close to indicating any of this. I really wished that this was the extent of the butchering of Job, but Boyd takes aim at God's sovereignty(not surprising) but does so in a way that is very unfaithful to the text (very surprising). Boyd looks at the statement by Job that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away and says that this is a "misguided conviction". He says that people are "arrogantly misguided" if we ever "blame God (as Job did) when tragedy strikes." "Blaming God" in the sense of Job's words in 1:21 and 2:10. Boyd claims that God rebukes Job for making these statements. Boyd uses some real emotional, heart wrenching examples as to why one cannot attribute these things to God and how offended he is when people use these verses to draw comfort, but he refuses to address the immediate context which refutes entirely his premise. The author of Job, immediately after each statement, anticipating a negative response, cuts it off with the statement, "In all this Job did not sin with his lips." The author of Job seemed to know how shocking these statements would be to the human mind, the sinful, self-loving, rebellious human mind. So he cuts the argument that Boyd raises off before it can even be raised...unless of course you just ignore completely those statements. This seems to be the approach Boyd takes, and it is well beneath a scholar of his repute.

I did love a definition of faith that Boyd offered. Faith is not "psychological certainty" but "trusting another's character in the face of uncertainty." Amen! For his example of this he offered Jesus as He suffered through the garden of Gethsemane. He showed how Jesus, who had perfect faith, struggled in the garden and begged for another way to be offered but in the end submitted wholly to His Father's will, knowing that His Father was and is worthy of perfect trust and allegiance. Boyd offers that this is true faith, and I would wholeheartedly agree. "So whether your struggle is with doubt, confusion, the challenge of accepting God's will, or any other matter, the fact that you have this struggle does not indicate that you lack faith. To the contrary, your faith is strong to the degree that you're willing to honestly embrace your struggle."

Boyd spends a lot of time attacking penal substitutionary atonement and attributes its existence to lawyers becoming theologians and attributes to it almost all the ills that face Western Christianity...this seems like an exaggeration, but not so much. I found it slightly amusing that Boyd would attribute the lack of faith-led works in the life of a believer to the belief in penal-substitutionary atonement, seeing as how the Reformers and the Puritans wholly held to this view...and we all know how lax those Puritans were in pursuing personal holiness!! The false dichotomy Boyd creates between accepting a legal view of salvation and a fruitful Christian life is laughably absurd and somewhat offensive.

Boyd concludes the book by looking at how a Christian should deal with a modern, pluralistic world and Scripture. He makes some very interesting arguments, abandoning a house of cards model of Scriptural authority for a concentric circle model and submitting all revelation in Scripture to the revelation in the God-man, Christ Jesus. Boyd says one of the keys is not basing your faith in Jesus on the Scriptures but rather basing your faith in Scripture on the person Jesus. While he gives some examples of how one could come to faith in the person of Jesus apart from Scripture, I think his examples are flimsy and do not take into full account the fact that apart from the revelation of Scripture, we today would have no understanding of the revelation of the person. We receive our revelation of the person of Christ in the revelation of Scripture. To act as if we could, and should, come to faith in Christ apart from the Scriptures seems misguided.

That reservation, although a large one, aside, I was greatly intrigued by how Boyd dealt with all of revelation being in submission to the ultimate revelation in Jesus Himself and how this impacted how we deal with certain debated points (the historicity of Jonah, evolution, global deluge, Samson, the character of God in the Old Testament, etc...). Essentially, the point of revelation is to point us to Jesus Christ and Him crucified and inerrancy is only important as it deals with that specific revelation of God's character.

Boyd labors intensely to deal with the violence of God in the Old Testament. It is especially troubling to him and he feels a genuine need to go beyond the surface reading and, in some way, rescue the character of God from the plain reading of the text. This is imperative in a system that, while claiming to submit all Scripture to the person and work of Christ, actually quite often submits all Scripture to the experience and opinion of men. Not once,as best I can recollect, in this book does Boyd even offer the argument that instead of doubting the Scriptures when conflicted with experience, reason, science, visceral reaction, etc..., that the reader should maybe doubt his or her experience or reason or science or visceral reaction. The doubt always seems to be placed at the foot of Scripture and Scripture seems required to conform, rather than vice versa. Boyd trumpets this throughout as a new way to look at Scripture, but it really seems like the same old way that unbelievers have always looked at it. The unbelieving heart is probably not the best role model for faithful, Biblical exegesis. Boyd seems to feel that appealing to mystery in these hard texts is a cop out, that it is not genuine faith. I think that maybe it would be a more humble and more faithful way of dealing with hard texts that we all agree are troublesome to one degree or another rather than feeling the need to be absolutely certain about what they do or do not/cannot mean.

Boyd is a great writer. This is an easy read that really makes the reader think. While I disagreed with much of this book, I would recommend it to the discerning reader to have his views on many things challenged, to be led to doubt, and to find that the truth of God and the faith He gives to believers can and will withstand much scrutiny and much doubt.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher through Netgalley.com for review purposes

Greg Boyd is the best. His honesty in this book is refreshing.

Heavy stuff; I must re-read. Boyd's writing style is sometimes hard to follow,
so one needs to be vigilant when reading it.

I didn't realize how much I needed this book. Not only does Greg speak to my own experiences of shifting beliefs, and agonizing doubt about a number things over the years, it also makes sense of the certainty-seeking faith held by others close to me who think I've gone off the deep end.

Greg says that many Christians think faith is feeling certain about everything, therefore doubt is the enemy of faith. These folks can't handle any ambiguity. Doubt is sin. Everything in the Bible is black and white.

Those with certainty-seeking faith get their life from feeling certain about right beliefs. Greg believes that their salvation is even wrapped up and hinges on believing the right things, and feeling certain about them.

"Believing that one's salvation depends on remaining sufficiently certain about right beliefs can cause people to fear learning things that might make them doubt the rightness of their beliefs. It thus creates a learning phobia that in turn leads many to remain immature in their capacity to objectively, calmly, and lovingly reflect on and debate their beliefs." p.76

Having grown up among conservative evangelicals in the South, this is something I've seen over and over again. The very people who say they want to learn seem almost incapable of processing anything that challenges or contradicts what they were taught and believe in their church.

Greg says that certainty-seeking faith is a self-serving quest. He writes, "Though certainty-seeking believers claim to care about believing the truth, they are actually only concerned with enjoying the secure feeling of being certain while avoiding the pain of doubt" (p.52).

Benefit of the Doubt is an honest glimpse into Greg's on journey of faith and doubt. He talks about how he was an atheist as a teenager, came to Christ in a fundamentalist church, lost his certainty-seeking faith in college, and discovered a faith built on the foundation of a living Christ.

Greg learned to embrace doubt as a part of a covenantal (relationship based) faith with Christ. Ultimately, biblical faith is found in a person, not in any particular belief found in or about the Bible.

He writes, "The all-important center of the Christian faith is not anything we believe; it's the person of Jesus Christ, with whom we are invited to have a life-giving relationship." He goes on to say, "Rather than believing in Jesus because I believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, as evangelicals typically do, I came to believe the Bible was the inspired Word of God because I first believe in Jesus" (p.159).

Greg is calling for a restructuring--a new model of faith. He calls it the "Concentric Circles" paradigm (Figure 8.1 on pg. 171).

At the center is belief in Jesus Christ, the first circle is dogma (what has traditionally been understood as orthodox Christianity), the second is doctrine (different ways the church has interpreted dogma), and the third outer ring is the realm of opinion (different ways of interpreting doctrine).

"Identifying the center as the intellectual foundation of the faith, and sole source of life, and by distinguishing it from all other beliefs, this model allows hungry people to enter a relationship with Christ and participate in the life he gives without requiring them to first resolve a single other issue." p.173

Greg believes this model "creates space for people to think on their own" and that it does so "without watering down the traditional definition of historic-orthodox Christianity." Doubt is allowed, even beneficial.

Yes, but what about all of the verses that seem to make doubt an enemy of faith (e.g. John 20:27; Mark 11:23; James 1:6; etc.)? Greg addresses each verse that has been used to uphold the certainty-seeking model of faith.

"You may end up disagreeing with me, which is fine, but your convictions will be more refined and stronger for having done so. On the other hand, you may end up embracing a kind of faith that is more secure precisely because it is free of the need to feel certain. You may discover a way of exercising faith that is more vibrant precisely because it empowers you to fearlessly question, to accept ambiguity, and to embrace doubt. And you may end up agreeing with me that this way of doing faith is not only more plausible in our contemporary world and more effective in advancing the kingdom, but it is also more biblical." p.32

If you feel beaten down, overwhelmed, or turned off by certainty-seeking faith, and you want to understand how doubt is an essential part of real covenantal faith, I highly recommend reading Benefit of the Doubt.

D.D. Flowers, 2013.

The best!! Boyd nails it

Makes you think!

Interesting and thought provoking.

Well written, I had to read it slowly and sbsorb the info but so worth it. Deepened my faith and enriched my prayer times.

Greg Boyd is an incredibly honest communicator and this book helped me through many tough questions I have about the faith.

A MUST! It will change your life forever. Brings peace to your heart, mind, and soul. It takes you to a different spiritual journey...without guilt. It brings you closer to Jesus, after all, it's all about relationship, isn't it?