Life. Death. Reunion. Maybe you, too, trust that those words belong together (and in that order). But you can’t be certain about it.

Lately, trust has been playing a much larger role in my life than certainty. And I’m still learning what trust means. But I’ve begun accepting that it’s fundamental to any meaningful interaction with reality (e.g., I can’t be certain this keyboard is real, à la The Matrix, but I have to trust that it is in order to make this post).

Trust isn’t the lesser version of certainty, as if the next best thing to absolute sureness were merely a good feeling about the way things are. The two are different breeds.

Trust has more to say if we’re talking about relationships. For example, while I wouldn’t be able to explain to my 2-year-old daughter how a butterfly reconstitutes itself from the dissolved caterpillar that hangs in a chrysalis, I could assure her that her former pet caterpillar, Wiggler, is the very same butterfly before her. She could trust me even if her (or my) understanding of the facts wasn’t sufficient to produce mechanical certainty. And even if it was, without the relational grounding of trust, to accurately relay the physical workings of nature alone would be poor consolation to a fragile human heart.

The way I reckon trust and certainty, certainty is interested in pinning down facts—definable, apprehensible and unchanging. (The butterfly pinned to an entomologist’s display board can tell you a lot about this way of knowing things.) Those fond of the magnifying glass of certainty would love to show you how things work and what they “are.”

If certainty is the goal, then every unknown causes fear. I know far too little to spend that much time afraid.

Life, death, reunion. These are the matters where I’d rather be a “Trust Dad.” (A “Certainty Dad” might have more confidence in himself, but he’d also have a hard time explaining to a child why he stuck a pin through Wiggler.)

A mind that can’t interpret the human experience through the childlike eyes of faith will find itself threatened by everything it doesn’t know; it has nothing to trust when it can’t understand. If certainty is the goal, then every unknown causes fear. I know far too little to spend that much time afraid.

To Know What You Believe, Or To Trust It?

Perhaps this portrayal of different kinds of knowing can help explain/characterize/justify what Weaker Brother is. As a rule, I don’t “know” what I’m talking about—rarely will I claim that I do—in terms of a self-assured certainty. But I do hope that I always trust it. Whether written or spoken, the words you encounter from Weaker Brother ought to represent a vision of things as I trust that they could be.

If you would rather trust what you believe than know what you believe, we may mutually benefit from this shared space of contemplation. Here, we won’t pretend to know everything—even if we will occasionally take our thoughts and supposals too seriously.

Humility always looks like weakness, even in its epistemological expression.

In that spirit, I’ll define my aspirations for Weaker Brother as: mapping out an existential liminal space of Faithful Uncertainty.

If I’m coining a term there, I don’t know, but I feel the need to clarify some parameters of this devotional-philosophical position that I’m calling Faithful Uncertainty. Some may argue that faith’s antithesis is agnosticism, asserting that uncertainty is utterly incompatible with genuine belief—as if a claim of intellectual certainty didn’t represent one of the greater examples of that chief and oldest of sins, pride. While agnosticism per se has nothing to do with true faith, neither can any form of pride; to be humble in this arena avoids both errors.

Humility always looks like weakness, even in its epistemological expression. But humility is an essential part of the ironic recipe for childlike faith: to trust while also maintaining enthusiasm for discovering everything one doesn’t yet understand. To simultaneously trust what you know and yet celebrate how much you have left to know is the humble, optimistic stance of Faithful Uncertainty.

Trust: Inherently Relational

It can be seen how this stance precludes the cynicism of doubt. Trust and doubt may be cousins in that both are defined by their relationship to what they don’t know. But perhaps they differ in the object of their love: trust determines truth by its love of the other, and doubt determines its incredulities by value placed in a cynical self.

Trust, curiosity and wonder are all optimistic; they’re also not self-certain.

Trust is compelled by a charity toward its object in question to believe more than it can see, while doubt’s self-protective instinct dismisses the credibility of the other by default. A declared philosophical position of “not knowing” needn’t be seen as a pessimistic agnosticism; after all, there’s no trust without a “not knowing.” Trust, curiosity, and wonder are all optimistic; they’re also not self-certain.

Faithful Uncertainty clings above all to the revealed character of a divine Person, supremely worthy of trust. Perhaps it’s not at all in spite of but because of that trust that every aspect of “uncertainty” can then be embraced for exploration with such enthusiasm.

When your trust rests upon Someone good, you can be hopeful about every unknown in between.

And in between life, death, and reunion, I find too many unknowns to afford not trusting Someone supremely good.

As the project of Weaker Brother takes shape, I hope you read things here that cause you to wonder. I hope you hear poems in this space that compel you. I hope you encounter thoughtful reflection, beautiful imagination, and surprising hope from Weaker Brother. I don’t know what you’ll find here next, but if you’re one of the “Faithful Uncertain” too, I trust it’ll be worth your time.