Jesus didn’t care about winning the argument; he knew he had a good one to make.

I realize the religion news of this week, perhaps of this year, is a cataclysmic admission by the Southern Baptist Convention that for decades its leadership has, in the words of the New York Times, “suppressed reports of sexual abuse, opposed proposals for reform, and denigrated and discouraged abuse victims who approached them for help.”

The country’s—and Kentucky’s—largest Protestant denomination also said it would release a secret list of more than 700 Southern Baptist clergy and other church workers credibly accused of sexual abuse.

Common sense dictates that I’d comment on this, but as a former Southern Baptist myself, as one who hails from generations of Southern Baptists and other varieties of Baptists, I’ve as yet been unable to process this information well enough to say anything balanced or coherent about it. Right now, I just feel queasy. And angry.

So I’m going to hold off for a bit from talking about the Baptists. When I do, I want to be fair. I want to be rational, which isn’t where I am yet.

Instead, this week I’m forging ahead with the topic I’d already decided to write about before the Baptist revelations broke—what the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, who’s among my favorite Christian thinkers, calls “mystical certitude.”

For me, Rohr’s idea of mystical certitude is the type of religion news that stays news (to misappropriate Ezra Pound’s definition of poetry).

In a recent devotion on the website of his Center for Action and Contemplation, Rohr argues that humans demonstrate two types of certainty about spiritual matters: “mouthy” certainty and “mystical” certainty.

“Mouthy certitude is filled with bravado, overstatement, quick, dogmatic conclusions, and a rush to judgment,” Rohr says. “People like this are always trying to convince others. They need to get us on their side and tend to talk a lot in the process. Underneath the ‘mouthiness’ is a lot of anxiety about being right. Mouthy certitude, I think, often gives itself away, frankly, by being rude and even unkind because it’s so convinced it has the whole truth.”

This may remind you of too many of the preachers, politicians and pyramid marketing folks you’ve encountered. It certainly reminds me of a lot of people I’ve known. It reminds me of myself at certain junctures.

Rohr doesn’t exactly denounce this type of certitude. I take it there could be a time and place for mouthy certitude. For instance, it’s hard to imagine anyone becoming a political activist, a salesman or an evangelist without an outspoken conviction that what he or she believes is correct.

But, Rohr explains, in spiritual matters, at least, mouthy certitude needs to be tempered by mystical certitude.

“Mystical certitude is utterly authoritative, but it’s humble,” he says. “It isn’t unkind. It doesn’t need to push its agenda. It doesn’t need to compel anyone to join a club, a political party, or even a religion. It’s a calm, collected presence, which Jesus seems to possess entirely. As Jesuit Greg Boyle writes, ‘There is no place in the gospel where Jesus is defensive. … Jesus had no interest in winning the argument, only in making the argument.’”

Our English word “mystical” comes from a Sanskrit word for being tongue-tied or hushed to silence. When we encounter in some profound way the mystery that is God, we tend to become speechless. We’ll say less, not more.

“All we can do is mutter,” Rohr writes, “because we know whatever just happened is beyond words, beyond proving, and beyond any kind of rational certitude. Our present notion of God is never it, because if we comprehend it, it is not God. If you happen to have the charismatic gift of speaking in tongues, it is a physiological experience of the ineffability of true spiritual experience. Maybe we all need to pray in tongues!”

The path to deeper insight begins with admitting how much we don’t know, he says. Without both humility and honesty, we use our certainties to aggrandize ourselves. Rather than becoming wiser, we become proud and dishonest:

“Humility and honesty are really the same thing. A humble person is simply someone who is naturally honest about their own truth. You and I came along a few years ago; we’re going to be gone in a few more years. The only honest response to such a mystery is humility.”

In my observation, mouthy certitude often is driven by fear. There’s a nagging sense within the dogmatic that they could be wrong, that their certainty is uncertain—and so they shout all the louder to drown out those doubts.

Mystical certitude embraces such uncertainty. It says, in effect, I believe this thing to be true with all my heart. Yet God and God’s great truths are so far beyond my ability to apprehend them that I must surrender my feeble knowledge. I must come to love a grand unknowing. I must know less so that I might perhaps discover more.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.