This coming Sunday is the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Douglas John Hall (Bound and Free: A Theologian’s Journey) writes about the necessity of “our becoming and being a thinking faith.” I think it relates to these two commands to repent and believe.

There is a problem today that is found not only in Christianity but in most of the religions, as well as in many nonreligious ideologies. I will call this the problem of certitude. Its corrective is the importance of Christianity’s being a thinking faith – and, more specifically, the importance of doubt in the life of faith.

The people who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, were apparently inspired by absolute certainty with respect to their cause. They found that certainty in their religious belief. Their religion functioned for them as an antidote against all self-doubt, all consciousness of the limitations of knowledge, all awareness of the precariousness of human judgment. … No one religion, and not religion as a whole, has a monopoly on what (for want of a better word) we call fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, whatever the origin of the term, has come to mean a position of such exactness and certitude that those embracing it – or, more accurately, those embraced by it – feel themselves delivered from all the relativities, uncertaintites, indefiniteness, and transience of human existence. They are provided, they feel, with a firm foundation – a fundamentum – greater than their own finitude, greater than any observations of any of the sciences, greater than the collective wisdom of the race. (pp. 99-100)

He then states that biblical religion (Jewish and Christian) refuses to offer such certitude. What God offers as an alternative to certitude is trust. “God reveals Godself as one who may be trusted” (101).

Recognizing that the Greek word for “believe” (pisteuo) has a principal meaning of  trust in it, could we then interpret “repent” (metanoeo) = “to change one’s thinking” to be a movement away from personal certitude? Which then leads to trusting the trustworthy One?

Image credit: The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, Duccio di Buoninsegna, National Gallery of Art Washington DC PD-US