Wrestling as a Theological Virtue

Wrestling was never terribly attractive to me as a sport. While my friends in high school were encouraging me to join the team, all I could see was an opportunity to get a parasitic infection while taking on bizarre weight loss and weight gain practices, only to be rewarded by parading around in front of my peers in Spandex. Could there be any virtue in wrestling? What did my friends see that I didn't? More to the point, could there be any theological virtue in wrestling? Could it ever teaching me anything about knowing God well? What I couldn't have seen back in high school is being helped by Jacob.

Jacob’s story of wrestling, I think, offers us a glimpse of some theological virtues. I’ve worked this out in much more depth in Walking the Theological Life, a book being published soon. If you’d like to join the launch team and receive a copy of the full book, let me know!

The story of Jacob wrestling at the bank of a river is fascinating to me because of how oddly vague it is (Gen. 32). Overtaken in the middle of the night by some unknown adversary whose motives are unclear, Jacob wrestles until the sun comes up, refusing to let go until he’s received a blessing.

It’s not entirely surprising; Jacob is the conniving trickster who defrauded his disabled father to gain a blessing, and nothing about this story seems to suggest he’s departed those ways. In other words, we shouldn’t expect to find much virtue in Jacob, and that’s probably why this story has such a pull on my imagination. It’s almost as if it’s daring me to find virtue in it.

In the struggle, a few things happened: (1) Jacob refused to let go, (2) he became convinced that he met God face to face, and (3) it changed who he was forever. In other words, the riverbank wrestling in Genesis 32 is an enduring image that should come to mind time and again when Israel is overtaken by adversity, addressing how they might somehow meet God in the midst of an unexplainable affliction.

Refusing to Let Go

As much as I wish this were not the case, theology often happens in struggle, which means that wrestling can be a virtuous theological activity. While the work of theology often involves offering words about God, that work is usually preceded by wrestling with God. Theology can involve wrestling with an issue, a person, and even with ourselves. In wrestling whatever it may be, we may just find that we have met

God in the struggle. Most of us begin working out life-sized God questions while sitting in the ashes of tragedy, trauma, frustration, or confusion. Sometimes it is a decision in front of us that forces the issue of where God is and what God wants. Whether in pain or perplexity, we can, like Jacob, be overtaken when we least expect it by something that is ambiguously related to God. Was it God who caused this situation? Does God want a particular response from us when we are faced with this decision? Taking cues from Jacob, we are reminded that he spends no time attempting to identify whether this really is God. Jacob’s odd response is to grab on and refuse to let go, finally concluding that he met God in the struggle.

I’m struck, time and again, by the folks I’ve met in congregations and classrooms who exude this kind of virtue. They may have been overtaken by something they didn’t see coming and don’t understand, and they aren’t about to let go. They aren’t going to run from the complexity, the frustration, even the pain. Refusing to let go may be the mark of a virtuous theologian.

That’s a reminder I need when the church seems to messy, the situation to complicated, and the struggle too exhausting, especially when it’s a struggle I didn’t seek out and never saw coming. That’s probably when I need to take a page from Jacob and ask for a blessing. Blessings, after all, are only blessings if they overflow to others.

Meeting God In the Struggle

One of the things that makes Genesis 32 even more mysterious is that it never claims that the man who jumped Jacob in the middle of the night was God. And yet, Jacob comes away from the struggle convinced that in the wrestling match, he had met God face to face. That might be welcome news for anyone who has ever been overtaken by a struggle that they never saw coming. It might be even better theological news to not try to attribute every tragedy and affliction we endure to God’s direct intervention. But when we are overtaken and find ourselves in the middle of a wrestling match we didn’t ask for, is it possible that somewhere in the midst of the wrestling, we could meet God? That’s the case for Jacob, and I think there might be some virtue in it. We are people who are overtaken in the dark and forced to wrestle with things we never wanted, but in the refusal to let go, we might come away knowing that somehow – as mysterious as the text itself – we met God in the struggle.

Blessed with a Limp

Jacob came away limping. We might look at his limp as something of a tragic reminder, but I see it differently: Jacob’s limp is a mark of his theological virtue. It’s a reminder that he refused to let go and met God in the struggle.

I’ll admit that I’m a little suspicious of theology that’s done in an attempt to walk upright. It’s the kind of theology that has as its goal a well-adjusted, upwardly mobile person who walks with a flawless gait. For whatever reason, I can’t escape the images I’ve seen in photographs of seminarians of years gone by. They are, for the most part, pristinely groomed young men who are being trained to populate the pulpits of those finely kept brick churches that were the backbone of the mainline denominational boom in the 1950s and 1960s. It was almost as if centers of theological education became places to learn to hide our limp.

But limps are signs of people who have wrestled, refused to let go, and met God in the struggle.

The longer I am at the work of theology, the more I am coming to see that being named a theologian probably has more to do with wrestling than it does about the degrees I have earned or any answers I have. Being a theologian is more about the virtue of being willing to wrestle than it is about the tidy answers we have to life’s most perplexing questions. I have, after all, known some professional theologians who seem to walk with no evidence at all that they have wrestled with God. I have also known others with minimal amounts of academic training in theology who wobble along on hips that bear witness to their all-night wrestling matches. “I’m no theologian,” they will say again, but their limp tells me otherwise.

The theologians who draw my interest most are those who do their work as a tenacious, passionate refusal to let go of life’s messiest questions in favor of simplistic answers. God-wrestling simply does not settle for easy answers. It will not let go, even into the darkness of night, and when the dawn begins to break, the blessing we receive is a limp and a new name: theologian.