A Faith that Breathes

Why I traded certainty for mystery, and found something deeper

Jun 23, 2025

This is part of an ongoing series about my deconstruction out of evangelicalism. You can read the posts in chronological order at my website: jamespence.com/a-deconstruction-observed.

My wife and I live in the country. Part of our property is wooded and we have trails cut through our personal forest. On any given day I can take our little Yorkie, Skeeter, for a walk along those trails and have no problem finding my way around.

But if I were to try to navigate those same trails on a dark night I’d be lost in seconds. On those rare times when I’ve needed to go out there at night, I carry my phone with me. With its little flashlight I can see far enough to take the next step.

And that’s all the further I need to see.

That’s pretty much how I live my Christian life now; walking through a dark forest, my way lit, as it were, by a cell-phone flashlight.

That’s what happens when you let go of certainty.

Before my deconstruction I would have viewed Trump’s bombing of Iran with concern but also with casual detachment.

“God’s got everything under control,” would have been my response. I might have even trotted out R. C. Sproul’s famous line that if there’s even one maverick molecule in the universe, God is not sovereign (my paraphrase).1

I used to read Jonathan Edwards a lot and I remember how he recounted his own struggle with believing in God’s absolute sovereignty and how after affirming it he considered it a beautiful thing. “I love to ascribe absolute sovereignty to God.”2

When I believed that God controlled even the movement of molecules life was easier.

Current events were totally under his control.

Tragedies were explainable.

The world, and by consequence my life, made sense.

I could rest in the thought that somehow, as the glib adage goes, “Everything happens for a reason.”

I used to live in that world. And while I wouldn’t, indeed can’t, go back to that way of thinking, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it at times. Especially during uncertain times like these.

Letting Go of Certainty

I constructed my fortress of certainty partly because I thought that honoring God meant being able to “always give an answer for the hope that was within me.”3 But mostly it was because I was trying to insulate myself from doubt and uncertainty.

Building a Fortress of Certainty

James Pence

Mar 26

Read full story

I had my theological framework and my ready answers. I knew what I believed and why I believed it. I believed that God controlled even the smallest details of my very existence. I was confident that nothing bad came into my life unless it had gone over God’s desk first.

And that worked.

Until it didn’t.

Deconstructing meant letting go of certainty, letting go of comfortable theology.

I could no longer chirp, “God’s got this,” whenever something bad happened. Now there were “maverick molecules” all over the place.

Deconstruction meant I had to learn how to say, “I don’t know,” about a lot of things.

When I began to dismantle my carefully built fortress, I had to learn to live with mystery.

Because leaving certainty behind means trusting God instead of my understanding, my doctrinal constructs, my theological systems. It means not needing to be right about everything.

It isn’t easy. That’s why I call deconstruction a dark forest.

It means being willing to say, “I don’t know.”

I traded certainty for something messier and more honest: a walk with God, step by step, through the dark forest.

I don’t have a cellphone flashlight to light my next step.

I have something better.

“Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,^[^a^]
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;” — Psalm 23:4

Letting go of certainty is disorienting. It’s scary. It’s okay to miss what you had, even as you discover something new. You may not find all the answers. But you might find something better.

A faith that breathes.

A Deconstruction Observed by James Pence

Building a Fortress of Certainty

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