Welcome to Pines of the Quietness, I'm Matt Fraad.

If you could sit down over a pint of beer with St. Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question,

what would it be? In today's episode, we'll ask St. Thomas, is the sin of certainty a sin?

You know, guys, welcome back to Pines with a gratis. This is the show where you and I pull up a bar stall next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy.

You may be confused about the title of this podcast. Is it a sin? Is the sin of certainty a sin?

Honestly, this is just something I'm beginning to think about because I'd be beginning to hear about it more and more.

It's usually from our evangelical brothers and sisters, but I think it's probably going to be popping up more and more in the Catholic community.

This is the idea that we really can only be certain about the fact that Jesus is God and that He rose from the dead, but everything else is really up for grabs.

Now, people are going to be stating this differently. When people talk about the sin of certainty, maybe what they mean is it's more important that you trust God in your life than you try to box Him in this cage or this box.

So I have no beef with that. The beef that I have with different folks is this idea that, well, just like I said, we can only be certain about God loves me, Jesus loves me.

So really, I don't know if hell exists and I don't know if the Eucharist is true and I don't know if homosexual acts are sinful and I don't know if contraception is sinful and I can't know these things.

So here's what made me want to do this episode a couple of weeks ago, my boys at catching foxes did an episode in which they interviewed one of the presenters of a podcast.

What's called bad Christian, okay, bad Christian and he kind of he kind of shared what I'm talking about here this this belief that, hey, you know, like what do I know?

You know, like God is so beyond me. So just listen to this little clip from catching foxes.

Now I'm at a point where I really and truly do not believe that anyone is like burning forever and ever and ever, but that doesn't threaten everything else.

Because I think I've learned how how to hold loosely everything else. I mean, for me, it's like, why do I need to be so sure on different things outside of Jesus and what he means to me personally.

So I really don't mean to be rude, but I just think this is.

It has some merit and some of it's just complete crap, right? Like it has some merit, right? This idea that, you know, God is infinitely beyond me.

Okay, there is a lot about God that I don't know, right? There are things that seem right to me that I might be wrong about.

Right? There are things that seem, you know, that that may be sinful, maybe I've got that wrong too.

And so in that sense, yeah, we ought to be humble, but this idea that we have to hold all of these doctrines loosely, like further on in this podcast, if you listen to it, if you want to go listen to it, maybe hear the whole thing in context.

You know, this guy says that even the canon of Scripture is, you know, it's just this, we think that's what we're supposed to hold to, but maybe we're not, you know, like how do we know that?

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