Faith as Risk-Taking — and Why That Changes Everything

What we call faith may be, at its core, a form of risk-taking — a decision made under uncertainty, with no guarantee of outcome. And if that is true, then any honest spiritual framework has to remain open to being wrong.

I grew up in a Christian environment — not by choice, but I hold no grievance. If anything, I am grateful. It made possible the beginning of my own thinking.

Years passed. Then one night, gazing up at the sky, a thought came to me that has stayed ever since. The brightness of day is actually hiding the real sky. That was it.

I have no argument with the value of light, nor with the idea that brightness is something worth pursuing. But stepping back from that philosophical and moral direction, and imagining the universe as it actually is — it is not bright. It is black and dark. And pressing further, I came to see that existence precedes philosophy and religion. That was the moment I stepped outside the frame of Christianity.

Could a material being create the entire universe, the way a person uses tools to make something? By every measure of common sense, even now, I do not think so. That leaves me with two possibilities: spontaneous origin, or a non-material existence. Either way, the question of what came first cannot be answered. What remains is a matter of choice. I chose to accept that a non-material existence brought material existence into being.

I am aware that some Christians find it uncomfortable to frame faith as a matter of choice — and that directly challenging the idea of God's grace being centered on humanity unsettles them further. I understand that discomfort. But this is simply where my thinking has brought me. There is no obligation to stand in the same place, and no intention to persuade. Each person has their own reflection.

If asked to name the core verses of the Bible, I would once have pointed to John 3:16, or Matthew 22:37–40. But at some point, the declaration of Genesis 1:1 became more important to me. What followed in verse 2 opened up an imagination of what existed before the material world.

Chaos, void, darkness, the deep, the waters, and the Spirit moving over the surface. This is a scene before the material world unfolds. It overlaps with the structure found in Greek mythology — Chaos, Erebus, Nyx, Abyss — primordial existences that preceded the material world. I place a non-material existence in that same position. That is the God I read in Genesis 1:1.

This existence is not identical to all things. Not a god dissolved into the world, as in pantheism, but an existence that was there before the world. The one that made possible the flow of the material world — its birth, growth, and dissolution. When I say that the flow itself sometimes feels like God, that is not a definition. It is a feeling. I believe that stopping short of definition, in the face of the limits of perception, is precisely what preserves the transcendence of that existence.

The background, the capacity, and the will of this existence — I do not know them.

Even now, at this very moment, stars are being born. Among the countless planets they hold, there may be worlds where plants are appearing, where animals are appearing, where intelligent life is appearing. That flow — of birth, growth, and dissolution — came to feel like God to me.

In the age when humanity did not yet know this vast structure and its flow, people sought God. And perhaps God came to them within the limits of what people at that time could receive — taking shape as religion.

A finite lifespan, the suffering that comes with living, conflict and doubt within the group. The instinct to escape these things gave rise to a longing for salvation — for eternal life free of death and pain — and drove people to seek the grace of God. And I have come to see that this has limited what humanity is capable of.

Personally, I can think of two possible clues to what lies beyond material existence: will, and a guess at how order is maintained among the existences of the abyss. Had salvation through human effort and will formed as much of the Christian mainstream as salvation through God's grace, it might have led to exchange and development not so different from the Eastern traditions of nirvana, ascending transcendence, or moksha. Not only in religion, philosophy, society, and politics — even in science, changes far different from what we have today might have taken place. The concept of complete transformation found in Eastern low fantasy — what is called Hwan-Gol-Tal-Tae, the total renewal of bone and flesh — might have offered at least a discussable clue, rather than being dismissed outright as delusion. 

When God's grace is directed too exclusively toward humanity, the result is that God gets pulled down into the size of a human.

Let me offer a few examples.

No one travels to the Sahara to see a single grain of its sand. No park ranger clocks in for one thumbnail-sized pebble in the Grand Canyon, and neither rain nor wind nor sunlight adjusts its course for it. No one eats and exercises and cares for their body for the sake of one microbe among the thirty trillion living in it.

And yet — if that grain of sand, that pebble, that single microbe were to believe that the footsteps of travelers, the ranger's hand, the rain and wind and sunlight and nutrients were all meant for it alone. The belief that God's grace is directed solely at humanity looked the same way to me.

Parents give everything they can for their children. But picking up the spoon, eating well, moving the body, learning, feeling — those are the child's own choices, efforts, and will. Things provided do not become yours automatically. The environment a parent provides — that is God's grace. What is done within it — choice, effort, will — that belongs to the human.

And yet people have a habit of trying to separate God's grace from human choice. It is like asking, when a child grows up to live well, whether the credit goes to the parents or to the child's own effort. The division itself is already off.

The word "faith" carries too much inside it. Replace it with the right word for each situation, and it nearly disappears. When past experience leads someone to expect a certain outcome, it is simply expectation, or grounded hope. When a deep longing or desire is expressed, it is hope, or trust. When a decision is made in uncertainty and its outcome accepted, it is commitment, resolve, or risk-taking. Faith is, in the end, a linguistic shortcut. And of all its meanings, risk-taking feels closest to its essence.

Imagine someone who needs a letter posted but cannot go out, and asks a friend to do it. The friend considers a few things. How far out of the way is the postbox? How desperate is the person asking? If the friend passes by it anyway and drops the letter in, and this is called the grace of God — and if the friend cannot do it because it is out of the way, and this is blamed on a lack of faith — that is the same structure of confusion as the grain of sand, the pebble, the microbe.

There is one exception. When the path does go out of the way, but the desperation and urgency of the request moves the friend to say yes regardless — that, I think, is the case closest to what Christianity means by faith.

Salvation, nirvana, moksha. Read the texts of each tradition in context, and these point to a transition into non-material existence. This is not something that can be argued — it is something each person within those traditions can see for themselves.

North, south, east, west — these are agreements that only hold on the surface of the earth. In the middle of the universe, they mean nothing. Space has its own coordinates, its own systems, its own agreements. In the same way, the teachings about a personal God, the ethics of human relationships, the values people pursue, the categories of good and evil — in that other world, they may exist in an entirely different language.

What I see is an abyss. And in that abyss, existence is already present. The abyss cannot be endured without the standing to enter it. And that standing does not begin by turning toward the existence in the abyss — it begins by turning toward the same kind of existence: the human beings beside us. When one turns toward the abyss first, the direction tends only toward limiting what humanity can become.

For turning toward the same kind of existence, Christianity offers love, and Buddhism offers compassion. Many other traditions offer their own values. The value I have arrived at is coexistence, co-living, and shared flourishing. And more than anything, the attitude we bring to the people we meet each day in ordinary life — that is the first and greatest commandment.

(post from r/myReligion)