Essay
On 18 September 2026, Jehovah’s Witnesses announced a significant change in their position on blood. Individual members may now decide for themselves whether to accept red cells, white cells, plasma or platelets. The prohibition on transfusions of whole blood remains. Something that for decades had been governed by religious interpretation has, at least in important part, become a matter of individual conscience. JW.ORG
There is something admirable in that. Institutions are rarely good at changing their minds, especially when an interpretation has become part of their identity. Religious institutions may find this harder still, because their authority does not rest only on expertise, tradition or organisation. It rests, in some form, on a claim to understand a truth beyond ourselves. To reconsider such an interpretation therefore requires courage.
It also creates an almost unbearable question.
Imagine that, shortly before this change, you had lost a child for whom a blood transfusion might have offered a chance of survival. You refused it because you sincerely believed that accepting it would violate God’s will. Perhaps the conviction that you had remained faithful, even under terrible circumstances, became part of the way you learned to live with that loss.
Then the interpretation changes.
Your child does not return with it.
There is nothing disturbing about the fact that an interpretation can change. It should be able to change. What is disturbing is the certainty with which the previous interpretation may have been experienced while it still prevailed.
The important question, then, is not simply how people could have been wrong.
It is how they could have been so certain.
I am Catholic, which means I cannot comfortably observe this as a peculiarity of somebody else’s religion.
My own Church knows the tension between timeless truth and changing human understanding very well. At the Second Vatican Council, while articulating a strong defence of religious freedom, the Catholic Church acknowledged that during its history ways of acting had sometimes appeared that were hardly consistent with the spirit of the Gospel and had even been opposed to it. Vaticaan
I find that admission more reassuring than embarrassing. A Church capable of acknowledging that human beings acting in its name have sometimes misunderstood the implications of their own faith is more credible to me than one that needs its history to have been right all along.
But my own tradition offers a more intimate example too.
For centuries, Catholic theology struggled with the fate of children who died before baptism. Limbo was never defined as dogma, but the idea that unbaptised infants would be deprived of the beatific vision became sufficiently established to be described as the common doctrine of the Church. The theory entered ordinary teaching and pastoral life even though Scripture itself says little or nothing about the fate of such children. Vaticaan
For grieving parents, that was not an abstract theological distinction. They had already lost a child and could also be left wondering whether that child would ever see God.
In 2007, the International Theological Commission, with papal approval for publication, concluded that there are serious theological and liturgical reasons to hope that infants who die without baptism may be saved and brought into eternal happiness. The document itself recognises that the older understanding had created painful pastoral problems. Vaticaan
This is not comparable to refusing a medical treatment. No physical intervention was withheld and no child died because of the doctrine of limbo. But it reveals something related and important.
Certainty can wound even when it does not kill.
It is also striking that the 2007 document repeatedly returns to interpretation. Scripture, it says, is largely silent on the question, so that silence has to be interpreted. Even teachings concerning the necessity of baptism, it says, need to be interpreted. Vaticaan
There it is again: between God and the human consequence stands interpretation.
Christianity has spent two thousand years trying to understand what belief requires in practice. Councils, popes, theologians, reforms, schisms, traditions and doctrines are part of that history. Other religions have developed their own traditions of interpretation. None of this should surprise us. Human beings cannot encounter a text, a tradition or even the world itself without interpreting it. We understand reality through incomplete senses, inherited concepts, language, culture and minds whose capacities are remarkable but plainly limited.
Yet we find it extraordinarily difficult to remain with three simple words:
I don’t know.
We do not know why there is something rather than nothing. We do not know what consciousness ultimately is. We do not know whether existence has a purpose beyond the purposes we give it. We cannot demonstrate that God exists, and if God does exist, the confidence with which human beings have described God’s precise intentions on thousands of detailed matters should at least give us pause.
Not knowing is uncomfortable. Perhaps it is one of the deepest forms of human discomfort.
A gap in understanding invites us to fill it. We seek explanations for events, stories that give suffering meaning, models that make reality manageable and rules that allow us to act. Without them, individual life would be exhausting and collective life almost impossible.
So we build structures around what we do not know.
Religion develops theology. Science develops models. Governments make policy. Courts build jurisprudence. Medicine develops protocols. Organisations establish procedures. Families create traditions. Individuals construct stories about themselves and about what has happened to them.
These structures are not evidence of failure. They are among the ways civilisation becomes possible. A surgeon cannot reopen the philosophy of medicine before every operation, a judge cannot reinvent the rule of law for every case, and a government cannot postpone every decision until perfect knowledge becomes available. Much of life consists of acting responsibly before certainty arrives.
The danger appears when we gradually forget that these structures were built under conditions of uncertainty.
A model can begin to feel like reality itself. A tradition can acquire the force of morality simply because it has existed for a long time. A policy can become difficult to question because an institution has organised itself around it. A religious interpretation can travel through centuries of translation, commentary and authority until all those human layers disappear from view and the believer hears only one conclusion: this is what God requires.
At that point, interpretation has forgotten that it is interpretation.
This matters because interpretations do not remain inside our heads. They shape what people are permitted, encouraged or required to do.
Religion makes the mechanism unusually visible. Between an ancient sacred text and a decision made by a believer today may stand centuries of scholarship, cultural change, theological dispute and institutional judgement. Yet the conclusion can arrive with an authority that obscures that entire chain. To the believer, a priest, imam, rabbi, elder or theologian may no longer sound like someone offering the best interpretation available to him. He may sound like someone explaining what God wants.
That transformation has enormous consequences. Disagreeing with another human being is one thing. Believing that disagreement means disobedience to God is something else entirely.
The risk becomes greatest when the person interpreting does not bear the consequences of being wrong. A religious leader can be mistaken about medical treatment while another family suffers the loss. An institution can be mistaken about whom God accepts while somebody else lives with exclusion. Rules concerning sexuality, marriage, clothing or behaviour may be formulated by one group of people and lived, sometimes painfully, by another.
The consequences are human and immediate, while the authority invoked to justify them is absolute.
That asymmetry should make anyone who speaks with religious authority extremely cautious.
It would be comforting to conclude that secular societies have escaped this problem. They have not.
Every institution must transform incomplete knowledge into decisions. Governments turn evidence, assumptions and predictions into policy. Medicine converts the best available knowledge into treatments and guidelines. Companies build strategies on forecasts about a future nobody can observe. Experts construct models that necessarily simplify realities too complex to capture in full.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Institutions have to act before everything is known. The difficulty begins when the distinction between our best judgement and the truth starts to disappear.
Once a judgement has been translated into budgets, procedures, careers, public commitments and organisational identity, correcting it also becomes expensive. Changing course no longer means replacing one idea with a better one. It can require an institution to acknowledge that people acted, spent money or suffered consequences on the basis of an earlier judgement that was presented with more confidence than the evidence justified.
Language then begins to perform defensive work.
An error becomes a change in circumstances. A reversal becomes an adjustment. Yesterday’s necessity becomes something that no longer fits today’s insights. Often those descriptions are perfectly legitimate because circumstances really do change and knowledge genuinely improves. But the same vocabulary can allow an institution to arrive at a new position without confronting what its former certainty meant for the people who had to live with it.
The larger the consequences of admitting an error, the stronger the institutional incentive to describe it as something other than an error.
Responsibility makes this harder still because responsibility can have a price. An organisation that plainly says that it was wrong, that people trusted it and that some suffered as a result may expose itself to claims, compensation, litigation or serious reputational damage. It is therefore unsurprising that institutions learn the language of qualified regret.
Yet if honesty automatically becomes institutional self-destruction, we create the wrong incentive. Where real harm was caused, responsibility may rightly be costly, but truth and accountability should not be designed as enemies. Otherwise the organisations with the greatest reason to admit that they were wrong may also acquire the strongest reason never to do so.
We tend to associate confidence with competence. Leaders are expected to know, experts are rewarded for giving answers, and religious authority rarely becomes more impressive by adding qualifications to every sentence.
Doubt has poor public relations.
But doubt performs an essential function. It preserves a small distance between reality and our understanding of reality. It allows a model to be useful without requiring it to become the territory.
Science, at its best, institutionalises this distinction. Claims remain open to testing, criticism and revision. A researcher who abandons a position because better evidence has appeared has not betrayed science. Ideally, that is science working properly.
Other institutions often find the same discipline harder because decisions gradually become attached to loyalty, reputation and identity. Once enough has been built around an idea, reconsidering it may feel less like learning and more like surrender.
Perhaps this is why the change by Jehovah’s Witnesses deserves respect even while it raises painful questions. Continuing to enforce an interpretation merely because changing it would expose the fallibility of the institution would be worse. Revision is necessary precisely because human understanding is fallible.
The harder question comes afterwards: what does the institution owe to those who lived with the consequences of its previous certainty?
All of this brings me back to belief.
Perhaps we ask faith to do something it was never capable of doing when we use it to eliminate the discomfort of not knowing. Faith and certainty are not synonyms.
To believe is already to acknowledge, somewhere in the grammar of the word, that something remains beyond proof.
That need not make belief weak. It may make it more honest.
I can believe that existence contains more than we currently understand. I can believe that consciousness, love, beauty and moral responsibility are not exhausted by our present descriptions of them. I can be Catholic and believe that my tradition contains something true while simultaneously recognising that every encounter I have with that truth is mediated through human language, human institutions and human interpretation.
Indeed, belief in an infinite God should perhaps make intellectual humility easier rather than harder. If God is what believers claim God to be, the surprising proposition is not that human beings fail to understand God completely.
The surprising proposition would be that we ever imagined we could.
That changes the meaning of doubt. Doubt does not necessarily stand opposite faith. It can protect faith from becoming something else: human certainty endowed with divine authority.
When someone tells me what God requires of him, I can respect his belief. When he tells me with equal confidence what God requires of me, another question becomes unavoidable.
How do you know?
Not as rebellion. As responsibility.
The more serious the consequences for another human being, the more important that question becomes.
We will continue to build explanations around uncertainty because there is no serious alternative. We need theology, science, law, policy, institutions and moral traditions. We need to act before we possess complete knowledge, and we need enough confidence in our understanding to make action possible.
Wisdom may therefore lie not in refusing to build, but in building with the possibility of error in mind.
An institution should have a way to discover that one of its most cherished assumptions was wrong without treating the discovery itself as an existential threat. Authority should become more cautious as the consequences for others become greater. Rules should be open to reconsideration before the cost of reconsidering them becomes unbearable. Somewhere inside every system built by human beings there should remain a door through which doubt can enter.
The same is true personally.
I have read enough history to be suspicious of final answers. Humanity has accumulated an extraordinary catalogue of convictions that once seemed self-evident and later became indefensible, obsolete or simply strange. Our ancestors were not uniquely foolish. They were human beings trying to understand the world with the knowledge available to them.
There is no good reason to assume that we are the generation that has finally escaped that condition.
Future generations will almost certainly find some of our certainties as difficult to comprehend as we find those of the past.
That thought does not leave me unable to believe anything. Strangely, it does almost the opposite.
I believe. And I know that I don’t know.
Perhaps that is not a weakness of belief at all. Perhaps it is the restraint that prevents belief from turning into power over somebody else. It allows conviction without requiring infallibility and commitment without closing the possibility of correction.
We will always build meaning around what we do not know. We probably should.
But wisdom begins by leaving a door in the architecture through which we may one day discover that we were wrong.