The Myth Of Certainty Summary

Christianity has always been a little confusing for me and how many different types of Christians that there are. I am a newer Christian and I am filled with questions on a daily basis, full of doubt, full of confusion, and sometimes other Christians throw me off with their closed minds and their judgements and smugness. Daniel Taylor asks the question in his book, The Myth of Certainty: The Reflective Christian and The Risk of Commitment, “Do you resent the smugness of close-minded skepticism on the one hand but feel equally uncomfortable with the smugness of close-minded Christianity of the other?”, I immediately was curious about this book.
This week I read Taylors book and was greeted with so many questions and thoughts with highlighter …show more content…
Let me tell you a little bit about it.
Taylor describes a reflective Christian as one who is a question asker, someone that requires more information and one who is open-minded, and one who is curious. This book is about the nature of a reflective Christian and what role they play or how they fit in to our world. Taylor shows us different subcultures, or communities, and how they shape our thinking and our views of the world. He focuses on two subcultures, secular and Christian, both playing a large role in the life of a reflective Christian. The reflective Christian does not fit into either of these subcultures, but it just merely effected by them as they are by reflective Christians. These subcultures can be threatened by the reflective Christian because they do not like or agree with different ideas. With everything that they know and that they have been taught, new and opposing ideas are a threat to their everyday lives and thoughts, and there is no room for questioning or changes. Taylor points out, that being a reflective Christian does not make you so different from other followers, just because you think and have questions. At one point, …show more content…
I look forward to reading it again in the future because I think that it has so much to offer and I think that it will speak to me in different ways at different times. Every time I turned the page I had my highlighter in hand and was just so fascinated by the words that Taylor had wrote, so many things hit home for me, and there is pink highlighter all over in the book. I kept thinking of people I knew, who would really love this book, or who would really have their eyes opened with this book. I think I really can associate myself as a reflective Christian now, and reading this helped affirm questions and ideas I had about other Christians or subcultures. I really enjoyed Taylors interludes about the character Alex, and how it showed examples of different Christians and it gave you a little break from what the book was actually talking about. I actually felt like I could relate to Alex on some level. Being an apprentice last year at a church, I felt really out of place and I wasn’t even sure how I even became an apprentice at all, I was there for my gifts and I was friends with a pastor, but I had so many questions and I was very uncertain about the church. So much of the book resonated with me, I especially liked his ideas about memory, community, and perseverance are so important when it comes to faith and to keep it going and to keep it strong, because it is all so true! Without memory, we wouldn’t know or remember anything about