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Our faith is really strange, isn’t it? When we sit down and actually talk it out, try to explain it to someone: This is who I think God is. This is what a life with God looks like. This is what I believe about Jesus, creation, heaven, hell, salvation. . . . Every now and again I find myself trying to explain my faith to someone outside Christianity—the Uber driver who got very curious when I said I was a theology professor, the agnostic student in my undergraduate theology class—and it’s an odd encounter, the kind where you start with the everyday words, scripts, and phrases that we use in our homes or with our Christian kin and then see the strained look on the other person’s face. Inside, I am asking, What am I even saying right now? It sounds like I believe in a secret society of magicians living in a world under the world we see everyday, or that somehow we are all living in a simulation. Those stories might even seem more believable.
As odd as those moments are, they’ve pressed me to take a step back from the language I once took for granted. “Who is God?” has become somewhat of a daily question for me, a kind of centering I’ve needed as God and Christianity and the Bible are invoked alongside policies of death and confinement and deportation and exclusion. We have similar words, but we seem to be speaking a different language, to have profoundly different ideas of what our world should be.
I find myself in a kind of disequilibrium, given the strangeness of my faith in the face of those who do not share it and the differences between my hope and that of others who share Christian belief. In this confusion I come back to the question, “Who is God?”—answering it in an attempt to find a small handhold, something to keep me from slipping into a deep sleep in the face of the evil around us.
