"We see through a glass, darkly," St. Paul said, warning against the temptation to chase the will-o'-the-wisp of certainty. But American evangelicalism is largely based on the idea that certainty is not only possible, but necessary.
Mandatory, even. This certainty can be achieved thanks to the one-legged stool of the Evangelical Unilateral.
That's a made-up term, but it describes something real. It's a play on the "
Wesleyan Quadrilateral" -- an approach to theological thinking that relies on the four foundations of scripture, tradition/community, reason and experience.
The evangelical approach to theological thinking is exactly like this Wesleyan method, except it doesn't include tradition or community. Or reason. Or experience. All of those things are viewed, instead, as potentially corrosive threats to the pure certainty offered by scripture alone -- by the unambiguous and self-evident,
prima facie "literal" meaning of scripture. Such an approach requires not only that the text itself be pure, accessible, infallible, inerrant and impervious to misinterpretation but also that the
reader of the text be pure, insightful, infallible, inerrant and incapable of misinterpretation. It requires that the reader be some kind of Platonic ideal, a blank slate uninfluenced by culture, language, intellect or life experience. That is, of course, impossible. The point here, however, is not to evaluate or criticize this evangelical epistemology, or to point out all the ways in which it does not and cannot work, but rather to acknowledge descriptively that this is how American evangelical Christians attempt to view the world...
But for an evangelical relying on the Unilateral, weighing your own experience against the purportedly crystal clear teachings of scripture is
verboten. Something's gotta give and that something, in this case, is their own experience, conscience and instincts. That's when the panic-inducing cognitive dissonance kicks in and fight-or-flight takes over. And then anything could happen.
The stakes here are higher than you may appreciate -- their faith, and thus also their sense of identity, is on the line.
The Unilateral requires a faith that is so inflexible it becomes brittle -- it can never bend, only break. The crisis occurring for them is much like the one that happened to
my college friend in Jericho -- the young-earth creationist who was confronted with the ruins of a neolithic wall thousands of years older than his God...
That kind of crisis can result in someone chucking their faith entirely. Or
they may try to reassert that certainty even more forcefully...
