Not Sure

If you are absolutely, perfectly sure that once upon a time there were, in fact, two beautiful naked people tending the greenest garden of flowery delights ever imagined, and that those two sweethearts got themselves and all of mankind bamboozled by an upright, chattering snake who conned them into eating forbidden fruit; if you truly believe that Adam and Eve, the only belly-buttonless human beings in history, were literally our first opa and oma; if you're absolutely convinced that the world was begat in just exactly the way Genesis says it was, then John Suk's new book is going to upset you.  Maybe you shouldn't read it.

But if you sometimes have doubts about a six-day creation, if you're not exactly sure that gay marriage is the most frightful abomination ever to curse American culture--vastly worse than, say, racism; or that, in some few circumstances, removing something we call a fetus--for good reason--from the womb of a woman isn't exactly the same thing as killing a baby; if there are times in your life--say when you visit Dachau or Auschwitz--or when you consider the woman next door, scared to death and praying her eyes out for relief of her mother's cancer, and then find yourself wondering whether or not God almighty has left the room, then you'll find Not Sure something akin to breath of fresh air.

If you think Tim Tebow's flashy gridiron testimony is more than slightly over-the-top, you'll like the book.  If Mother Teresa's long and difficult battles with profound spiritual doubt doesn't surprise you, you will too.  If you don't really think you have the kind of "personal relationship with Jesus" that some smilers do, you'll find Not Sure refreshing.  If sometimes you get really tired of contemporary American evangelicalism, you'll love it. If you didn't go to Promise Keepers with your grandson or your father or your favorite uncle, even though every other guy in church did and came back be-speckled with spiritual hickies, you'll know exactly what Suk is talking about in Not Sure--and you'll thank him.  

I really, really, really enjoyed Not Sure because there are times, Lord save me, I'm not either.

I have my quibbles with Brother John.  It's not holy writ, after all.  Like many Canadian, post-World War II Dutch immigrants and their kids, he doesn't get the old line CRC people, one of whom I am.  He doesn't understand the pietism of the afscheiding, the separation people; but that's not a sin.  However, using Stan Wiersma's parents as an example of how all pre-Kuyperian CRC people looked or thought is like using Amos 'n Andy to define African-Americans, or any of a thousand absent-minded professors to critique American higher education. There was a time when most everyone in northwest Iowa planted their corn on the square; but thousands--Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans--did it because that's the way they were taught, not because it somehow patterned predestination.  Give me a break, John.

His discussion of the Half-way Covenant and the early American pilgrims and puritans might well be stronger had he read Perry Miller, and I tend to think he's a little over-enamored with communication theory.  We change, but there wouldn't be a Hamlet if we evolved as radically as I sometimes guess Suk believes we have or are.  What we read and how we read changes dramatically; human nature doesn't.


Most embarrassingly, he trashes his two-year stint here at Dordt College because of what he seems to believe was a ideological straight-jacket, DC's too vigorous espousal of the neo-Kuyperian way.  I think we make, for him, a too convenient punching bag; but then he was 18 years old and here during DC's own tumultuous, un-civil war years.  Big deal.

Truth be told, I found his confession of doubt far less thorny than I thought it would be.  Honestly, I expected something more Christopher Hitchens.  Most of the time, I know pretty much exactly what he feels.  Last night in church, we sang "Abide with Me," and I told myself that my memory contains childhood moments when singing that great old hymn was vastly more sweetly satisfying to me than it was last night. The Holden Caulfield in me wanted to return at that moment to my childhood because as I've grown older my own doubt has grown, but then so has my understanding of the world we live in and just who I am.  These days I think I know my sin more fully than I care to say, and that's why I find also find grace vastly more amazing than I ever could have as a kid.  The sweet old hymn sounds much different today, beautiful but different.  Sometimes I wish I could go back.

A Laotian woman told me her story in great detail once upon a time.  She told me how she'd crossed the Mekong in what she described as a little homemade dugout, her children inside.  She was aware of soldiers ready to shoot her and her kids out right of the water, which they often did.  It was night.  The water was cold.  But she wanted to get to the other side, to freedom.  She described herself, chest-deep, in the waters of the Mekong.  "I prayed and prayed and prayed," she told me, almost crying to remember.

That was years before she'd ever heard of Jesus--or if she had, it was but the slightest mention.  And I remember wondering who exactly was she praying too?  And would God--who I believe had to hear it--simply shrug it off because it didn't come in the name of Jesus.  Would he say, "Well, sorry, but you're on your own, lady."  Really?  

John Suk's Not Sure lays out the nature of the faith a lot of us struggle to hold to at times, me among 'em.  When I got to the end, however, the only thing I really believed about him was that he was even doubtful about doubt because Not Sure does not end like Psalm 88.  It ends more like 13--with faith.  At least what I'd call faith.  It ends with honesty and aspiration and the kind of trembling trust that lots of have, even though the Tebows get the headlines.  

Would Suk's views on gay marriage and human evolution and other hot button items keep him out of the pulpit at my church?  (We're looking, by the way.)  Yes, it would.

And there lies the problem, maybe the most difficult problem the book creates.

He's got an approach to that problem.  He's asking for a church that doesn't judge, a church that only loves, a church without doctrinal walls.  In the history of Christianity, those kinds of places generally don't do well, and that too is a problem.

But most of the time I found Not Sure to be thoughtful, earnest, and, finally, faithful.  

And I found the book encouraging.  Some won't.  But King David would, and so would Mother Teresa.  They've been there themselves--not always perfectly sure, that is.