wagering faith
to reckon with god, rather than the idea of god
[God’s] ways appear always new, strangely distant, pre-eminent, beyond their horizon and possession. He who says ‘God’, says miracle… We are incompetent to see what is invisible and to comprehend what is incomprehensible. We have no sensible organ wherewith to perceive the miracle. Human experience and human perception end where God begins - Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans
If you have understood, then it is not God. If you were able to understand, then you understood something else instead of God - Augustine, Sermon 67.
It is a strange state of affairs…to be able to speak a thing you can't conceive, to be in possession of knowledge that you cannot, in any meaningful sense, know - Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light
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Faith, for me, is mysterious and elusive.
People often speak of “holding on to faith.” However, in my life, it is faith that takes hold of me. When I try to do the same, I am like a child reaching up to the sky to grab the clouds or a desert wanderer chasing a mirage.
I resonate with how Christian Wiman describes faith…Not a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound.
Because of this, I am at times envious of Christians who have such an unwavering confidence in their faith. I know many Christians who can read their Bibles and then explain the meaning of every verse. They speak of God and faith in such a tangible way that you’d think God was standing right beside them, whispering divine decrees into their ear. They fervently raise their hands in worship as soon as the music begins and open their colorful, floppy, worn-in Bibles when the pastor takes the stage.
There was a time in my life when I shared this confidence. I believed I possessed the tools and methods to unlock God’s divine purposes for the world. The mysteries of the universe were at my fingertips. I only needed to open my Bible (and my Greek concordance, commentaries, and lexicon). My evangelical bible college professors assured me of this. Readily equipped, I actively joined in the work of “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (1 Timothy 3:16).
In this season, my life was one of constant prayer. God was a conversation partner as I took the train to class. Worship music was cued up for every trip to the gym. I never missed my early morning devotionals and evening book groups. I carried a pocket-sized Bible with me, ready to share the Gospel at any given moment. I volunteered at church every Sunday—arriving early to brew the coffee and staying late to hang up the folding chairs. It was an earnest devotion. I felt as though God’s presence was a constant embrace.
To be sure, many of these practices are good. They attuned my lived experience to the redemptive work of God in the world. However, this practice of Christianity came with inescapable consequences. Because I was so convinced that my understanding and practice of Christianity were right, I had little tolerance for any tradition or expression of faith that looked different than my own. This confidence was, in reality, hubris. I considered myself a better Christian than those whose faith existed in the realm of ambiguity and unresolved questions.
In my own life, the most devastating consequence of this confident Christianity was that it set me against my own South Asian community. This Christian practice formed me to look down on my South Asian peers who embraced their Indianness as the site of God’s grace in their life and a key part of their identity. I scoffed at celebrations like Holi and Diwali and the Christians who participated in them. I viewed theologies qualified as “Asian American” as lesser than the pure “systematic theology” textbooks that occupied my shelves.
I need to remind myself of these consequences when such envy for confidence arises.
In processing these experiences earlier this year with my friend Annah, a South Asian scholar, this practice of “confident” Christianity was set against a “wagering” Christianity. If the former deals in absolutes, then the latter deals in agnosticism—in unknowing.
This “wager” is that God’s nature and purposes are rooted in love (1 John 4:7-21). It is a wager that God would rather have us be people of radical inclusivity than exclusivity (James 1). It is a wager that we are more likely to find God dwelling with the downtrodden, oppressed, and marginalized than in CEO boardrooms, campaign headquarters, private jets, and elaborate, gated-off estates (Matthew 9:10-17). It is a wager that God would rather have us fighting to save and preserve all life—whether it is in the womb, at the Southern border, or caught in the destruction of Palestine—than picking and choosing which lives are worth saving (Matthew 25:36-40).
It is a wager that if God is radically exclusive—residing with the powerful elite rather than the pressed down and cast aside, cheering on the good of every individual over the good of the community—then this is God not worthy of our devotion, no matter the cost.
This wagering faith is not like a casino bet where we are checking the over/under on God’s goodness. Instead, it is the process of drawing from one’s experience of God and the world and then approaching the scriptures with humility—not to find what we want to hear, but what the text is truly saying. It is interrogating the revelation of God that is both veiled and unveiled in the person of Jesus Christ.
In my experience, practicing faith in the mystic realm of unknowing has deepened my faith far more than when I put my confidence in method and abstract ideas about God and God’s nature. In fact, this spiritual reckoning has made me take theology and the Christian scriptures more seriously, not less.
Indeed, a wagering faith is a lived faith. It is, in that wonderful Schleirmacherian sense, a chasing after God’s pure activity of love which is found in Jesus Christ—a pure activity that we are called to embody and emulate, loving our neighbor as God has loved us. It is the cultivation of a holy curiosity to find God at work in the world, rather than assuming God is only where certain communities and beliefs reside. Wagering faith insists, as Walter Brueggemann argues, that “love of God happens in praxis, not in thought or in piety” and that “knowledge of God is a relational reality.” This faith is a pursuit after spaces of deep magic where the welcoming, caring, all-encompassing love of God and neighbor is shared.
Wiman (again): A dear friend of mine whose work has come to nothing (publicly, that is) writes in a letter, "I remain loyal to the irrationality of it, which makes perfect piercing sense, because what else that most matters in life do we find and keep by way of reason? Love? God?
Wagering faith forces us to reckon with God Godself, rather than the idea of God
Confident Christianity may come with a greater sense of security and understanding. It may lead one to live with less worry, fewer questions, and general ease. But the cost of this confidence is far too high. Instead, I will take my haunted faith—a life graced by the presence of God only felt in fleeting moments, a movement through the world attuned to peripheral vision, catching glimpses of God in the world.
The juxtaposition of a confident and wagering Christianity (or any faith) is really interesting. I do wonder whether it needs to be either/or. Is it possible to be confident in your faith, but also know that you don't know everything and can't know everything? I think it is. But I also appreciate that the words we use have a history that are unique to our perspectives, experiences, and traditions. I really enjoyed reading this post, especially in reference to how you used to view fellow South Asians. As a Muslim of Indian origin, in the past, I too have taken issue with the syncretism I found - perhaps not as overt as it may have been in your experience. I'm learning to appreciate the history of Islam in India (and the rest of the subcontinent). In an earlier phase of my life, I was made to feel that it was not "pure" Islam, but now I realize that's a woeful misunderstanding of the faith. Thanks for this food for thought, Amar!