The tragic events of Waco, Texas in April of this year afforded a welcome opportunity to critics of evangelical religion to fire a salvo or two across the bows of historic Protestantism. Radio parsons issued solemn warnings to their hearers to beware of 'cults', 'sects' and 'extrem­ism'. These warnings were timely enough since all the televised world had seen how a walled fortress of religious fanatics could hold out against the combined might of the American FBI for week after week, only to end up in a holocaust of flames. No one therefore could reasonably resent the advice or admonitions which followed this chilling episode. It was an event which moderate bishops and churchmen of all sorts might have been expected to seize on as a powerful argument against religious ex­cesses of every type. With this one can have no complaint.

Episode proved to be no exception. Eagerness to press the Waco affair into service led at least one religious spokesman (a man, too, who is highly placed in a very large denomination of professing Christians) to stray far beyond the bounds of legitimate application. The evils of extremism and of some 'Fundamentalists', so we were informed, included other things beside fanaticism and armed resistance. One of these was said to be 'the lust for certainty'.

It was clear enough what the speaker meant. Human nature is frail and weak. Modern society is fragile and uncertain. Life today has no abso­lutes. Man feels cast on a sea of relativity in the moral and spiritual realm. Naturally enough he craves some plank to cling to for assurance and hope. The mainline churches apparently cannot provide any such com­fortable hope. As a consequence, the 'extremists' and 'cults' are coming forward to fill the vacuum. They have a message of 'certainty' for their adherents. They simplify matters into black and white. They paint a vivid picture which all may understand, of an Armageddon nigh at hand and a glorious victory for all who will join their group. Hence they call on gul­lible people to resign their will, conscience and incomes to the cult-leader, whoever he happens to be.

We do not wish to suggest that the churchman mentioned above had no justice in his criticism of this cult-mentality. Those who preach in the name of God have no right to over-simplify the truth. Still less have they a warrant to rewrite the prophecies of the Bible or to impose on them a meaning which they were never intended to bear. We applaud a criticism of the cults which he perhaps intends to make, that they distort the heav­enly vision given to Christians in the Bible by turning it into 'this-worldly' terms. Clearly it is possible to offer to our adherents a 'certainty' which is nothing more than the figment of a fevered imagination and an over­heated brain. Cults and sects of all sorts have, over the centuries, been guilty of torturing the Word of God into a rhetoric of fair promises in order to captivate the simple. One remembers the excesses of the medi­eval Crusaders, of some (by no means all) of the Anabaptists, and of the Jonestown affair.

What grated on the ear, however, was criticism of something alto­gether different from a crass millennial kingdom or a revolutionary religious manifesto. It was a reference to what this speaker called 'the lust for certainty'.

As a phrase, 'the lust for certainty' is a rather effective one. It has the hallmark of having been coined by a church don, and one remembers that the caustic remarks of a church don of the type who wrote the anonymous Preface to the Crockford's Clerical Dictionary, and paid the su­preme penalty for it some time ago, can bite deeply. The very expression 'lust for certainty' is a clever sword-thrust at something which lies at the heart of true biblical religion. But before we look at that aspect of the phrase we may first notice that 'certainty' in matters of religion is what the speaker in question, admittedly and sadly, did not have himself. He must be typical of many who share his form of Christianity.

It is a thousand pities that there are so many preaching in the name of Christ today who have neither certainty for their hearers nor for them­selves. But the reason is not far to seek. They have traded certainty in order to win intellectual respectability. It is not academically fashionable in this age for a man aspiring to church leadership in large denominations to possess anything so vulgar as 'certainty'.

The wisdom of the scholarly churchman is to hold tight to a decent scepticism. For him the text about 'moderation in all things' is golden, and it applies always and to all things. He cannot be 'certain' really about anything, least of all about the Virgin Birth or the Atonement of the Cross or the physical resurrection of Christ. As for the old-fashioned view that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and 'the only rule to di­rect us how we may glorify and enjoy' God — the academic preacher's uncertainty reaches a crescendo on the point. Nothing is for him more certain than that he must, regarding this piece of orthodoxy, be entirely uncertain.

One does not need to be prophetic to foresee that the more the once-orthodox churches of our land play this scholarly game of dicing with their uncertainties, the more they will create the very climate in which cults and sects and all that we deplore of extremism will flourish. If poor, dying sinners get no hope from their 'parish ministers', they will go to the 'extremist' groups to find it. Hope is the very thing religion is expected to give. And hope is nothing if it is not sure and certain. After all, in the long run, as one has said, we are all dead. Whether we be kings or common­ers, bishops or bakers, the grave awaits us all in a soon-coming tomorrow. The thoughtless shut their eyes and call for more champagne. But the serious ask for a way to have peace with God. When bishops can­not tell them, the poor ignorant populace may be pardoned for wondering if, after all, the 'fringe' groups have the answer.

A preacher without certainty is about as great a tragedy as this tragic world can offer to us. What a moment of opportunity the respectable preachers have today! Free as they are from all the disadvantages which encumber evangelical preachers and 'fundamentalists', they lack neither scholarship nor aristocratic connection. Not for them the humiliating necessity of having to labour night and day to gather a modest congrega­tion together in some rented room or school house. They start off with abbeys, chapels and even cathedrals. Their congregations are numbered in the hundreds and, given a wise stewardship of their talents and graces, might easily become thousands.

This, however, is not to be, and all for one sad reason. The respectable preacher has no longer any certainty. He might have been a guide to the massed congregations of confused Englishmen who hold him to be their 'priest'. But he cannot help them, so it seems, because he himself has lost his certainty. O what a lost opportunity to put a nation back on the road to repentance and faith! O what a lost chance to rescue the morally per­ishing, to heal the breaches, to rebuild the walls, to point dear England to the good old paths which our fathers trod! O what a lost opportunity to turn this tide of permissiveness and to present a crucified Saviour to a guilt-ridden people! But it looks very much as if the chance must elude the respected preachers of the land, and all because they have no message of certainty to preach to sinners.

This learned uncertainty has something very guilty about it. It belies our history for one thing. Had those bishops, Latimer and Ridley, no cer­tainty when they lit a candle at Oxford in the persecuting times of Queen Mary? Had the Puritan and Scots Covenanters no certainty when they preferred principle to privilege and gave up their all to please God? Had the Pilgrim Fathers of pious memory no certainty when they braved the Atlantic storms to found a New World where God might be biblically worshipped? Had the Methodists no certainty when they faced angry crowds, unchurched by the Restoration, and preached under a hail of stones, rotten fruit and dead cats till England was again brought to read the Bible?

But the worst sin of the uncertain preacher is that he has not been lis­tening to his Master. Of Jesus Christ's preaching it is stated that he 'spoke as one that had authority' (Matthew 7:29). Christ's sermons are affirmations of the most necessary truths which could ever be needed by mankind; the love of God to a lost world, the certainty of future judge­ment, the reality of heaven and hell, the need for the new birth and for conversion, the absolute necessity for faith in Himself as the only media­tor between God and man. If Christ's preaching is not the ringing presentation of truths such as these, it is nothing.

But to speak in this way is only to betray our ignorance, we shall be told by the confidently unsure modern churchman. After all, we are learnedly informed, we know only of Jesus' preaching from the unreliable New Testament records. The 'real Jesus' is lost in the mists of antiquity. So who can say what he preached?

Just so. The serpent's claw is visible at last. The scepticism of the mod­ern pulpit has nothing to do with scholarship or with learning. It is just this: denial of the Bible. Evangelical preachers have been saying as much for the past hundred years. There are no 'learned doubts'; just doubts. And doubts are both damning and unscholarly. So long as doubting theo­logical colleges, doubting scholars and doubting preachers go on ignoring the Bible's own claims to be the Word of God, they will never lift Eng­land (or any other land) from the confusion that has stupefied men.

The need of the hour is for preachers who will blow a trumpet for truth and for God, a trumpet which will give forth no uncertain sound. The 'lust for certainty' in matters of religion derives from the image of God in man. Thankfully, God has satisfied this 'lust' from end to end of the Bible. If the Lord is my Shepherd I shall not want, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Will preachers fill this vacuum of doubt left for the sects? Or must there be more Wacos?