I’m Comfortable

So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;  

Philippians 2:12  NASB

Work out – I distinctly remember the conversation.  We were discussing the various philosophical ideas about the nature of time.  I pressed the other person to reconsider how the Jewish idea of time affected our understanding of omniscience.  If God experiences transition in the temporal realm, just as we do, and if this is a necessary element of the biblical idea of freedom of choice, then the typical Christian doctrine of God’s ex-temporal existence must be completely re-examined. My friend responded, “Well, I’m comfortable with what I believe.”  That was the end of serious conversation.  The bulwark of intellectual ease reared its head.  Further investigation was pointless.  If the goal of spirituality is coziness, then we might as well retreat to the confines of a mental monastery.  

All these years later, I still find his remark excruciating.  I am more in line with Heschel:

“Faith is not a sustained, comfortable state of consciousness but a painful, hard-won, and impermanent conviction—a breathing spell in the midst of ongoing conflict.”[1]

Painful, hard-won, impermanent.  Those are the words that describe my journey.  How much I have had to revise or abandon as the years of passed!  Virtually all the intellectual monolith of theology has come under severe scrutiny.  It is almost in constant disarray.  If this is “faith,” then where is the “certain foundation”?  Heschel continues:

“Being a Jew, thought the Kotzker, was an infinite process.  All conclusions were but a premise.  ‘He who thinks that he has finished is finished,’ he said.  Self-contentment was a sign of defeat.  Life was the battleground of ongoing effort and tension.”[2]

Yes, it is.  A battleground.  And as a warrior in the field, if I should ever find myself being “comfortable,” I should immediately re-examine such ease.  Kierkegaard also wrote about this battle:

A man of intellect can never become a Christian, at most he can use his imaginative powers to toy with Christian problems.  And it is this formation of Christians, if one may call them this, which introduces every possible confusion into Christianity.  They become learned, scientific, they transform everything into long-winded discussions, in which they drown the real point of Christianity.  But of course Providence in His compassion can do much for a man of intellect, to change him into a man of will, so that he may become a Christian.  For the possibility of becoming a man of will is in every man.  The most wanton, the most cowardly, the most phlegmatic man, a man who argues without beginning or end—bring such men into deadly peril, and perhaps they will become men of will.  Certainly necessity cannot produce freedom; but it can bring the freedom in man as near as possible to becoming will.[3]

Many times I’ve heard someone decry the agony of belief.  Wouldn’t it be so nice to just have the answers, to not have to fight to believe, to be saved into a life of repose?  But this is not what God wants.  He desires relationship, and relationship is the most dynamic, most fragile thing in the universe.  Should it fossilize into creeds and platitudes, it would die.  Under all our rational examination we must find deeper connection.  That is the goal.  And it is uncomfortableprecisely because it evolves.

Topical Index: comfort, investigation, relationship, Philippians 2:12