Faith Should Be Uncomfortable

A lot of Christians I meet understand their faith as a series of truth claims, whatever, “truth,” might mean to them. They receive a checklist of doctrinal agreements that give them some kind of assurance that their faith is figured out for them. Like the preflight instructions on your next plane trip, the installation instructions for your water filter or even printed sheet music for your favorite score, their faith is a proven step-by-step method for their lives. Set aside that there are 45,000 different Christian denominations who cannot agree on what the preflight instructions look like, this concept of objective truth is a relatively recent development, and I think we’re probably on the other side of it in our age.

Faith isn’t a list of things to believe; it’s a way of addressing our lives that embraces our full humanity. That demands some risk. As a fan of Søren Kierkegaard, I find his writing addresses this, jolting us out of our comfortable religiosity into a more vibrant and alive faith. We can have a passionate, unique relationship with God right where God wants to meet us in our individual soul.

I’ve come to believe that comfort is a sneaky opponent of faith. Many Christians want to belong to a church that is a kind of country club where you meet to have coffee with friends, host an occasional game night and listen to sermons that amount to little more than a motivational speaker’s pep rally. They want worship services that run like clockwork, never longer than one hour on the dot. They want measurements for attendance and giving to determine success. They want Christianity to be about social identity and organizational growth.

This doesn’t work for me. I want to be startled by the Gospel.

It’s relatively easy to be a country-club Christian. You can follow the liturgy without being moved by it. You can quote scripture without understanding it. You can participate in the sacraments without breathing in the Holy Spirit. Faith becomes a performance. When you approach your faith in this way, you hold the Holy Spirit at arm’s length lest you get invited to something risky. This comfortable worship pattern softens the demands of our faith. What is there to repent if our pastors don’t call out our injustice? What are we confessing when we read the creeds except something that is merely perfunctory? What does it mean to love your neighbor if the only neighbors you listen to are the ones who look just like you?

Kierkegaard warns us that a domesticated faith loses its power to transform our lives. I cannot possibly do justice to a discussion around Kierkegaard’s stages of life here, the aesthetic, ethical and religious, but they do offer a helpful understanding of our approaches to faith. When we live an aesthetic life (and I strive to myself) we seek pleasure, innovation and an expression of ourselves through taste. Life imitates art. In church, we might appreciate the music, inspirational moments and otherwise feel temporarily satisfied without experiencing real transformation. On the other hand, the ethical is more outward facing and has to do with the duty and responsibility we feel. Many Christians live here. They keep the rules; they endorse certain moral teachings and they police respectable behavior for themselves and unfortunately for some others as well. Great things come from institutional ethics such as orderly worship and charitable works. But neither the aesthetic nor the ethical quells our modern existential anxiety and Kiekegaard is seeking something deeper. The third stage, the religious, is about abandoning your comfortable if empty faith for a deeper relationship to God where obedience transcends beyond the aesthetic and the ethical into that place where you risk everything.

I rarely feel like I’m in a place where I can take that risk, so I empathize with those who want to keep their worship pleasing, tidy and sanitized. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard holds up Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac as the ultimate model for the religious life. God is not asking for something easy. You cannot say that killing your young son is in any sense ethical. It is a paradoxical and costly act. The point is not that faith is utterly irrational, but that faith may demand you to go beyond the pleasing or even ethical social norm and to take risks that go far beyond your comfort zone.

I think it’s important to point out that I think Kierkegaard gets misinterpreted here frequently. He famously said, “subjectivity is truth,” yet I don’t think he is arguing for relativism. I think he is saying that truth only becomes truth when we bring it in personally. You must commit to it or it’s not a truth. So, truth is not a doctrinal claim to which you assent. Neither is it a sentimental call to sit happily singing in our pews. Truth is truth when it transforms you toward God. It cannot be outsourced to your country-club church, to your family traditions nor even the Bible itself. God calls you to authenticity, that is truth. Authenticity in your life – becoming who you really are with God – is a more important truth that a system that gets you into Heaven.

When God calls Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham embraces the paradox of his faith. Today, God is in every way and every place calling us to abandon our domesticated way of faith. We cannot know what the outcome will be – will Isaac live or die – we can only know what our God, our Christ, calls us toward. That is personal and risky, not comfortable. The words of Christ are offensive to many. They contradict public opinion. They certainly chafe against all our privileges. Love is unsettling, love is risky. It is not just quiet benevolence; it is about cost and risk and exposure. We want to measure our churches according to our own ego needs – how many members, how many children, how big is our budget, how do our friends think about our church? Instead, our faith should remain countercultural, leaning into the messy work of Christ that we’ve inherited.

Go to church to be so unsettled, so uncertain. If you agree with your pastor all the time, you’re not being properly fed. The Gospel is not here to make you comfortable, it’s here to challenge your ideas of what the messiah is and continues to be.