If anyone thinks he is Christian and yet is indifferent towards his being a Christian, then he really is not one at all. What would we think of a man who affirmed that he was in love and also that it was a matter of indifference to him?1
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD
When I was in high school, there were a lot of Christians of one kind or another. The funny thing was, nobody really acted like a Christian. Christian faith, at bottom, meant simply belief that God exists and a loose identification with the Christian religion, with maybe a few theological details or ideas about the Bible thrown in. It didn’t really have much to do with how you lived or made decisions.
Our modern American definition of the word faith can be anemic and hollow. We think believing God exists is the end of the story, never considering that God might desire more of us than simply acknowledging He is there.
This is true now, and it was true in Jesus’ time. In the apostle James’s passage on faith, he surfaced this kind of thin faith by saying, “You believe that there is one God. Good!” He then pointed out the irony by sarcastically adding, “Even the demons believe that” (2:19).
If “believing in God” isn’t all that is meant by faith, what is faith? Could God be calling us to something more than we have been taught to think?
This anemic definition of Christian faith was also prevalent in the nineteenth-century Danish church, during the life of one of Christianity’s most provocative pens: Søren Kierkegaard. He spent his life conducting what he called an “attack on Christendom,” trying to return the church to a robust, true definition of faith.
I remember being twenty-six, reclining on a lumpy futon, with warm sunlight streaming in through the window of my rented room in La Mirada, California. I was flipping through the pages of Kierkegaard’s book Fear and Trembling, hungry for clarity. Fresh out of a relationship, I was wrestling with God over the pressing question of marriage.
I was dying to know whether or not I’d ever be married. All I wanted was a straight answer. If the answer was no, then I’d drop the issue, move on, and never worry about it again. But if I was going to get married, I wanted to know when. At least then I could remove myself from the emotional frenzy of dating, put my head down, and continue working hard.
But I learned something during that season of wrestling with God: in the midst of uncertainties about life and the big picture, real faith doesn’t allow for easy answers.
Kierkegaard’s insight in Fear and Trembling began to unlock for me the mystery of trusting God. He taught me that, like so many other aspects of the Christian life, faith demands the ability to remain caught in the balance. Living the question. Suspended in tension.
KIERKEGAARD, MAGNETS, AND UNGROUNDED FAITH
Fear and Trembling is Kierkegaard’s philosophical interpretation of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1–19, which he published under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silencio. In this book, Kierkegaard deepens the definition of faith by pointing out two elements of the story that we shouldn’t miss: (1) faith can be perplexing, unreasonable, and scary; and (2) faith requires a blind leap to trust.
The story begins before Isaac was born. God promised that Abraham would be the father of a large nation, even though he and his wife were barren and she was past childbearing age. Finally, after decades of waiting, Isaac, the promised miracle child, was born.
But several years later, God gave Abraham an incomprehensible command: “Go to Mount Moriah and sacrifice your son.” Abraham left the next morning, made the journey, climbed the mountain with Isaac, and prepared to sacrifice his beloved son. But just before he killed Isaac, God stopped him and instructed him to sacrifice a ram caught in the bushes instead.
Picture the story: Abraham gets up the morning of the sacrifice and says nothing to anyone, not even his wife. There’s really nothing he can say, right? What God is asking him to do is so outside the bounds of reason, wisdom, and ethics that he can’t tell anybody about it. It is the ideal example of unreasonable faith.
There’s no morality or logic Abraham can lean on to defend or explain to his wife or others what he’s about to do. God is calling him to do something in faith that is completely unreasonable. I like to say it this way: true faith is “ungrounded”—the resolution isn’t always apparent.
Imagine trying to fly a magnet through the center of a metal pipe without letting it touch the sides. There is constant energy pulling the magnet toward one side or the other, to ground it on the side of the pipe. Keeping the magnet in the center requires a lot of tension, energy, and effort. But if it slips just a little in one direction, it grounds on the pipe’s wall, and suddenly the tension and difficulty are over.
That’s how Abraham must have felt: caught in the middle, completely in tension between what he knew God had asked of him and what he must have wanted to do. The sides of the pipe represent all the things that make it easier to trust God: certainty, foreknowledge, satisfaction, and reason. But when we act on faith, we remain trembling in the center, unable to touch the sides.
Faith often feels that way. This is not a chapter about sacrificing sons or selling everything you own. It is a chapter about God’s call and our response. It is about our willingness to live by genuine faith.
The problem is we are always trying to walk by sight but call it faith.
If God calls us to something extreme or absurd (Kierkegaard’s favorite word for faith), we can feel a little bit like the magnet flying through the metal pipe. We’re trying desperately to move forward, but at every moment we want to veer off and ground our faith somehow—like the magnet continuously being drawn to the sides of the metal pipe. We look for something that will relieve the uncertainty and give us a sense of why God is calling us in that direction or how everything will turn out. We look for certainty. We hunger for closure.
Every Christian has wrestled with this at some level. We seek to resolve tensions as fast as we can.
Obedience is frequently the opposite. It is a jump into the unknown. A move based on trust, not in a certain future, but in a dependable God.
If you are called to leave a steady job, trusting that God will provide, you are living this out. If you leave a peer group, believing God is calling you elsewhere, you experience the anxiety of faith. If you move to a country that lacks law and order to work for justice, you’re giving away your protection, yet trusting that God will somehow take care of you.
Today, as when Jesus lived, there are very few people who are willing to treat the weightier matters of life with absolute surrender.
We want to call ourselves Christians, but are we willing to go beyond only believing God is there and actually trust and follow Him? As the Abraham story illustrates, the stakes are high.
GROUNDING OUR FAITH
Kierkegaard used the Abraham story to talk about the ways we escape faith by grounding our trust in something other than faith, something more stable and controllable—and ultimately meaningless.
The natural thing to do when we’re feeling like the magnet flying through the pipe is to find ways to ground ourselves. When we are plagued by anxiety, stress, or uncertainty, we naturally try to find relief. When God calls us to do something scary or difficult, we usually want some kind of guarantee or security blanket to make the task seem safer and easier. The most common ways we do this are by resigning ourselves to our fates, by playing the martyr, by drowning God out with other voices, or by using our imaginations. Let’s take a look at each of these.
RESIGNATION
Kierkegaard allegorized his greatest weakness in faith with the “knight of resignation.” The knight of resignation grounds emotion by dutifully resigning or giving in to God’s control. The person who turns to resignation will say things like “I guess that’s just God’s will”; “I guess God wants me to suffer”; or, “I guess that’s what I get for wanting my own way.”
Resignation can give us a sense of independence. It is different from submitting humbly and joyfully to the call of Christ. When I resign myself to God’s control, God has my feet but not my heart. He has my movement, but not my trust. Much like a prisoner being dragged along in handcuffs behind a jailer, we are walking the same direction He is, but we’re not really following or trusting in His goodness. Resignation, a finish line of sorts, is the reward.
Resignation is synonymous with suppressing desire in an attempt to be more spiritual. But we see that Jesus’ desires were very much at work in his faith: “Jesus . . . for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2 ESV; emphasis added).
When we turn to resignation to ground our emotions, we forget or ignore God’s promise and lose sight of His goodness. It’s not that we have to believe everything will turn out good in the end, but assuming it won’t or assuming God doesn’t care isn’t trusting in His goodness.
Resigning is not following—it’s finalizing. Resignation quits; faith hopes.
Martyr complexes are another way we ground our faith. “God has decided to bless me with this horrible burden, just like He always does. I guess it’s because He knows I can handle it and will always follow Him.” Martyrs seek to find satisfaction in being the person who is suffering or struggling. The reputation is the reward.
The martyr complex is an easy trap for leaders to fall into. It was this very thing that led Moses to strike the rock instead of speaking to it, as God instructed him in Numbers 20:8. His sister had just died, there was no water, and his people complained and panicked for what probably seemed like the hundredth time. God told him to speak to a rock, and water would flow out of it.
In a fit of emotion and frustration, Moses played the martyr. He called the Israelites “rebels” and struck the rock with his staff instead of speaking to it. Though God chose to provide water anyway, He was so angry that He forbade Moses to ever enter the promised land. God cares a great deal about faithful obedience, the kind of obedience grounded only in faith and hope, without our added ways of resolving the felt tension.
OTHER VOICES
Some of us choose to drown out God’s voice with other voices. We read an endless stack of Christian books, seek advice from family and friends, and look for anything we can to provide some logical reasons why we shouldn’t do what God is asking us to do. We start looking for safer, less absurd, and more seemingly spiritual options and rationale. Bathing in spiritual conversation, as a way of ignoring or minimizing the tension of God’s call, is the reward.
That’s what King Saul was after when he went to see a medium in 1 Samuel 28. God wasn’t telling him what he wanted to hear, so he decided to find his own answers by contacting his dead mentor. We do the same thing when we look for reasonable alternatives to God’s will that fit more comfortably into our lives.
There is much wisdom in listening to your spouse, reading Christian books, and seeking advice. But we run into problems when we use those things to deliberately drown out God’s calling or direction, when we busy ourselves with what looks to be wise in an effort to avoid heeding God’s call.
IMAGINATION
The way I sometimes attempt to ground my faith is by using my imagination. Instead of allowing trust to drive my obedience, I let my imagination fill in the reasons why God is asking me to do something. “Of course, God. By letting go of this opportunity now, I’m freeing my hands to receive this other one. I see how this will play out.” By exploring all the wonderful reasons why God might be asking me to trust Him, I reason myself into surrender. Imagination dreams up a potential reward.
But, again, creative intellect is not faith. On my best days, it is part of my hope and belief in God’s goodness. On my worst days, it is less about faith and more about fantasy.
My dreams may or may not have truth in them. Regardless, it is God I should follow in faith, not my imagination.
TRUST + OBEDIENCE = FAITH
All four perspectives lose sight of the fact that God isn’t cruel. He doesn’t require us to surrender what we love most because He delights in taking away our joy (a severely misaligned perspective I have encountered in a lot of believers). God requires surrender because that is the only way we can truly find Him. It is only there that trust is made real.
All of the Beatitudes express this to some degree. We don’t typically think that the meek are the ones who are going to be glorified. Or that the persecuted are going to be blessed. Or that the peacemakers are going to somehow get ahead in life. Yet in Jesus’ formula, and in the upside-down logic of His kingdom, becoming weak in the eyes of the world ultimately leads to our greatest blessing and fuels the happiness that we all crave.
When we look at God’s covenant with Abraham, we see that because Abraham obeyed, God said He would keep His promise (Genesis 22:16–18). This is the first time in the Old Testament that a form of the word obedience is used. That seems significant to me. Abraham’s story, the biblical picture of faith, the story of the man whose faith was credited to him as righteousness, is the first story where God uses the word obey.
However, there is something we can’t overlook if we are trying to understand what faith actually is. God praised Abraham’s obedience. But notice that Abraham never actually carried out the sacrifice. So how did God know Abraham had obeyed? Kierkegaard points out that Abraham made the decision to obey, and moved forward with certainty that God would deliver on His promise. But he was stopped before the deed was done.
The point? Faith is not mere resignation to obedience, simply doing what God asks. It doesn’t believe that God has destined us to suffer. It does not covet wisdom from others or worship intellect. Faithful obedience is inseparable from the belief in God’s trustworthiness that subsequently moves us to follow, trust, and obey Him. Faith is unconditionally trusting God and acting as He commands.
THE LEAP OF FAITH
Kierkegaard surfaces the tension: true faith is more than just giving up. It is more than feeling cursed and accepting a gloomy outlook on life. Faith is more than public opinion or punishing oneself.
True faith is a radical obedience, a willingness to risk everything—surrender anything—with the belief God can, and will, reward the faithful and make firm our hopes.
This is why Jesus speaks of faith as small as a mustard seed. The idea isn’t the size of faith. What matters is simply the presence of true faith—the willingness, in fear and trembling, of the one with barely a shred of faith to walk forward in obedience and hope.
One of the scariest and most confusing elements of Abraham’s story is that he was asked to sacrifice the very thing God had promised him—his son. To have faith, he had to believe that God would keep His promise, and he had to obey by destroying that promise. To have faith, we have to be willing to give up the promise itself—to hold the blessings of God more loosely than God Himself.
Kierkegaard doesn’t offer us much comfort: “No, the easiness of Christianity is distinguished by one thing only: by the difficulty. Thus its yoke is easy and its burden light—for the person who has cast off all his burdens, all of them, the burdens of hope and of fear and of despondency and of despair—but it is very difficult.”2
The prize is inextricable from the sacrifice.
Faith offers God the very best of what we have. Trust puts its greatest security on the line and says, “Nothing will I hold back from You, Lord.” The comfort and the promise of faith is that God will deliver, make good on His covenant, and lead us where He knows we are meant to go. When we have faith, God proves faithful. When we trust, God proves trustworthy.
In one of his other works, Kierkegaard coined the phrase “a leap of faith,” which has often been wrongly assumed to mean that belief in God is irrational. However, Kierkegaard’s point has much more to do with obedience to God when you don’t have rational reasons or information to motivate the action—nothing except a trust in the faithfulness of God.
When we take the leap of faith, we are always going to be living out a kind of anxiety, emotion, and fear . . . in spite of these emotions we trust that God is going to keep the promises He has made.
The leap of faith isn’t always extreme, and it doesn’t always look the way we think it will. Americans often have a “bigger is better” mind-set. But it’s not about the size of the leap; it’s about the leap itself.
Maybe it would be more accurate if we used the phrase “leap to faith.”
I have several friends who have passed up lucrative careers to continue doing difficult, unflattering, often dangerous justice work. Their obedience to what God wants them to do has been lived out daily for years and even decades.
Throughout the history of Antioch Church in Bend, Oregon, where I pastor, and in the programs that have found their beginnings within our church family (the internship for college students and graduates, and Kilns College, the school of theology and justice), I have seen expressions of the kind of faith that Kierkegaard means. Time and again I have watched as different people move forward to join in what God is doing because they’ve sensed Him calling them here. From one of the first staff members, who moved here to serve the church voluntarily while working at Starbucks to make ends meet, to the interns and Kilns students who have given up their security and future plans, I have seen many take the step forward in faith for the sake of heeding God’s call. In many cases, their decisions haven’t been the safest decisions, nor did they come with a guaranteed end result.
The point is that they each have been assured that they were being called, but unsure of what it was they were being drawn into. Still, they went. This is what a friend of mine calls “necessary endings,” moments when you realize the time has come for the current season to end and a new one to begin. You may not know where you’re going, but you know you need to go.
Starting a family seems to happen this way. When you are sure of the fact that you want to marry the person you love, or when you and your spouse know that it’s the time for kids, you don’t wait until you have the money (you’ll never reach the point where you think you have enough); you just do it.
Being generous with money and tithing are similar moments of faith. They are moments that come as a regular reminder of the fact that handing over our money and trusting God with our finances just doesn’t make sense. But God gives us the grace; we do it anyway; and we are able to catch a greater glimpse of His faithfulness because of it.
What Kierkegaard knew is this: we are required to step out in authentic faith, not in resignation or creative imagination. In the midst of uncertainty and the paradoxical tension of having to believe God for the impossible, real faith requires actually trusting in Him, despite our inability to always understand Him.
The leap of faith is all about the moment of trust, not the size of the jump. Imagine you’re standing in a thick fog, and you can’t see more than a few inches in front of you. You don’t know what hazards or cliffs may be around you. But God has told you to walk. The leap of faith is simply the move forward.
Even an inch or two is a leap forward into faith.
God may call us to move an inch or a mile. We might find resolution in a second or grope our way through the fog of faith for a decade. We won’t know before we leap . . . but we do know this: taking Kierkegaard’s leap is the answer to the paradox of the messiness of life, the mystery of God, and the challenge of authentic spirituality.
Whether faith feels like a big leap; a long, slow journey; or a combination of both, it involves obedience. As mentioned previously, faith is not simply believing God exists or having a thin feeling that He is good. Faith, true Abrahamic faith, takes the shape of obedience.
But in order to obey, we need to know what God wants us to do.
The Bible gives us the big picture of God’s character and how He wants us to live. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could get our hands on what He specifically wants us to do? Wouldn’t it be ideal if we could engage with God in our own specific contexts? What if we could feel that we know God, could hear His voice, and know what He’s asking?
We can, and that’s where prayer enters the equation. The question we turn to next is: How can we hear God?
To the faithful you show yourself faithful.
—PSALM 18:25