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.

The Virtue of Being Known

Theological Virtues

Sometime next fall, I hope to hold in my hands an actual copy of Walking the Theological Life, a book I wrote over the past year or so. It’s a look at the lives of a few biblical characters and way we find ways of knowing God through them. In Sarah, we see the theological virtue of laughter. Jacob teaches us something about knowing God through wrestling. Mary demonstrates a virtue of pondering, and Isaiah the virtue of being undone. In short, I’m trying to offer folks who are concerned about knowing God – theology students, pastors, and others – an approach to theological methodology that turns to virtues, rather than mechanics.

When I say virtues, I don’t have in mind a kind of flawlessly pristine uniformity of

thought or behavior. Many of the figures I’ve examined are anything but examples of moral virtue (e.g. Moses was a murderer and Sarah treated Hagar horribly). But there is something in their responses to the divine that our ancestors thought was not only worth preserving, but also encoding into the logic of our faith. In canonizing these stories, it’s almost as if they’ve said to us, “Don’t overlook this response. I know that person isn’t morally flawless, but neither are you, and you could probably learn something about how to know God from what happened there.”

In a series of posts, I want to offer brief reflections on the theological virtues I’m finding in these figures. These are little previews of the book, and if you’d be interested in joining the launch team, please let me know!

Our partners on this journey will be:

Jeremiah – On not Knowing How to Speak

Jacob – On Wrestling

Sarah – On Laughing

Moses – On Morality

Miriam – On Courage

Isaiah – On Being Undone

Mary – On Pondering

John the Baptist – On Standing at the Edge

The Woman at Jesus’s Feet – On Love

Thomas – On Doubting

Martha and Mary – On Grieving

Nicodemous – On Theology at Night and Leadership in the Dark

Jeremiah – On Not Knowing How to Speak

The beginning of Jeremiah’s prophetic epic begins, not with a call, but with a reminder: “Before I formed you in the womb, I have known you” (Jer. 1:5). It’s an odd way to begin a prophet’s story, mainly because prophets are known for how they speak – they are known for their words. But Jeremiah exhibits a different kind of virtue. He is the one who says, “I do not know how to speak…” (Jer. 1:6).

A twofold vision of theological virtue emerges: 1) Jeremiah is known before he will know and 2) He begins with a confession that he doesn’t know how to speak.

On Being Known

Theology sometimes gets a reputation for being a quest to know about God. I’ll admit that there was a nearly mystical allure to theology when I was just starting out. It looked to me like the theologians were the ones who had broken through the dross of the mundane to a glorious and hidden knowledge of God that wasn’t available to just everyone. I’d later find Plato hiding behind that myth, far more than Jesus. At any rate, theology was about gaining knowledge – about knowing.

It was also about taking that knowledge and wielding it in some way. Once I had the theological knowledge, I thought, I could do something with it, as if I had taken that knowledge in hand, placing it under my control.

That method, I think, has been used in some profoundly troubling and harmful ways. The headlines are filled these days with folks who have taken knowledge of God under their control and used it in service of their purposes. In some circles, that kind of method is even seen as a virtue.

Jeremiah, however, exhibits a kind of virtue that I’ve found to be far more helpful in theology. His virtue is being known by a living God before setting out on a quest to know.

The presence of this story in our biblical canon is a refreshing critique to the forms of theology that seek to know about God so that we can somehow employ that knowledge in constructing a kingdom of our own making. We can advance our causes, make our arguments, and generally take theology in hand as a tool or weapon. Jeremiah’s reminder to us is that we are known by God before we are called to speak. In him, we detect no bloviating sense of, “Let me tell you!” Rather, in his life we find something like, “I don’t know how to speak…but I am known by God.”

Jeremiah reminds me that long before I can know anything about God (even before I was in the womb!), I am known-by-God. That has to humble me. It slows me down to marvel at the reality that I am known before I am called to know, and especially before I am called to speak.

The opening lines of Jeremiah’s prophecy are a birthing suite for the virtuous work of knowing and being known in the task of theology. What is born out of his words is not an attempt to know for the sake of mastering but an invitation to first be known by God. As Jeremiah has it, the beauty of God is no set of hidden facts that, once unveiled through inquiry and observation, can be held in our hands as we would possess an idol of wood or bronze. We are known, rather, by a living God. Before we speak about God, before we put pen to paper or utter a single word, there is this: we are known by God. We could say it another way: before theologians set out to know God, they are known-by-God.

The beginning of the theologian’s quest to know God is in being known by God, placing all of us in a posture of epistemic humility and prayerful wonder. For the theologian, this posture even gestures to the beginning of a method. We begin by acknowledging that God knows us. We sit with that, we wonder at that, and it begins to suggest to us a way of doing our work. We are searched and known, to borrow the language of the psalmist (Ps 139:1). Our motivations, our gifts, our biases, our fears, our anxieties, hidden and unveiled, bravely acknowledged or naively undetected—all of that is taken up in the way God encounters us, knowing us. How might this shape the kind of theology we do? How might this move theology from the quest to acquire information about God for the sake of having answers and reorient it toward a kind of awareness that we are known by God first and beginning from there? What if we approached the work of theology by acknowledging the reality that the God we want to know is the one who knows us first? How might adjusting our way of knowing from first being a knower to being known shape the kind of theology we do?

Christian Faith is Seriously Funny

Somewhere along the line, we picked up the notion that it wasn’t okay to laugh in church, and it stuck. I fear theology had a lot to do with that, because far too often, theology isn’t a laughing matter. Theology, we think, is serious business, and nothing at which we should laugh. I beg to differ. Being funny should not be the enemy of being serious. The Christian faith is, I think, seriously funny.

A friend recently asked in a discussion forum what humor has to do with theology. As it just so happened, I've written a chapter on this topic for a forthcoming book on doing theology with virtue and joy, which I've drawn from in this brief reflection. Let me know if you'd like to be notified when the book releases; you can also take in a sermon I preached on the topic.

Humor is an overlooked virtue of the theological life. Bursting through the clear delineations of logic and cognition, laughter erupts as if our mind and body are conspiring against rationality itself by taking the mundane, the everyday, even (perhaps especially!) the vulgar, and conspicuously transgresses even the thinnest veneer of self-possession. Laughter overtakes us, even when we work to suppress it. If I’m honest, this may be one of my favorite things about laughter. Sometimes, the more you work against it, the more it makes a mockery of your effort. It doesn’t care that you’re at your aunt’s funeral. Your cousin’s oblivious boyfriend just walked the center aisle at the church with his shirt tail hanging out of his open fly for all to observe, and a particularly uppity funeral director who is clearly more comfortable interacting with dead people than living ones is wearing a look of horror on his face that is inexplicably and uncontrollably funny. We know we’re not supposed to laugh in a situation like that, so why is it so hard to stop ourselves?

This is precisely what I find to be so promising about laughter in doing the work of theology. It is upending, surprising, and overtakes us when we least expect it. It intrudes on the well-adjusted social norms that set the tone of our culture and the expectations for those who wish to fit in. It’s the kid who has smashed his nose and mouth onto the plate glass window of the fancy restaurant where a couple is having a romantic dinner and won’t relent until they acknowledge his sloppy impression of a blowfish. It offends the status quo and evokes a response precisely because it’s so out of the ordinary. Isn’t that something like hearing the gospel?

What if part of theology’s invitation to you was to be brought to laughter by God’s upending activity? Christians tend to find the clearest expression of God’s activity in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What if the truth of God’s work to overcome evil in the world through Jesus was at least a little bit funny because it’s so truthfully serious? If this is the case, I can’t think of anything more absurdly truthful than the resurrection of Jesus. It isn’t normal for a man who was publicly executed to return to life. In fact, the public nature of the crucifixion is precisely what makes this so preposterous. Lots of people saw him die, but there’s no category of ‘normal’ where we see him come back to life, no matter the method of his demise. The odd feeling that overtakes me when I talk honestly about what I really believe is probably an indication of just how funny this resurrection business is. “I believe that a peasant carpenter, son of a virgin, from the wrong side of the tracks got crossways with religious authorities and the Roman government 2,000 years ago, and they killed him. After they killed him, he came back to life and talked with his friends, and ate fish, and appeared in locked rooms, and generally hung around for several weeks. I think he’s God and I worship him.” Speaking it out loud reminds me of how preposterous it is, but the truthfulness of it demands that I continue to speak it. When the absurd truth of God’s activity hits me like that, how can I say it with a straight face? Put another way, the only setup for a joke better than, “A guy walks into a bar…” may be, “A guy walked out of his tomb…” Or, as we often say during our laughter at a joke, it’s funny because it's true.

Funnier still is that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is how God has opted to deal with evil, sin, oppression, corruption, and the like. That’s a reality that moved Julian of Norwich to laughter. A fourteenth century theologian, she recorded a series of visions that she received in what became the first book to be written by a woman in English. In one vision, she saw the passion of Jesus as “the overcoming of the Fiend,” a reference to the devil. “Also,” she wrote, “I saw our Lord scorn [the devil’s] malice and set at naught his unmight; and he willeth that we do so. For this sight, I laughed mightily, and that made them to laugh that were about me, and their laughing was a pleasure to me.” Imagine, if you will, the work of a theologian to help others laugh mightily because of God’s overturning of evil, and to take delight in the laughter of those who join you.

Stanley Hauerwas comments on the nature of humor in the work of Christian theology, pointing out, “a story that has at its center a crucified savior does not invite jocular commentary.” He follows that comment with what has become one of my favorite theological sentences: “But there is resurrection.” Resurrection is the surprising punchline that makes the Christian life funny. It is not only a joke being played on death itself, but also on every familiar pattern in our life that tricks us into thinking that death is the ultimate end, and thus our lives are the ultimate good. Thinking of our lives as the ultimate good strikes me as profoundly humorless. It is completely serious because it has to be. If accruing a bunch of stuff, getting the dream job, or having the perfect house is the real meaning of life, it’s got to be defended at all costs. If our life is the ultimate end, it isn’t a laughing matter.

Resurrection is the truth that can make life funny. If it’s true that we can’t really laugh while we are afraid, resurrection opens the space for us to laugh in the face of the singular reality that has shaped human motivation from the beginning of time. Without resurrection, this life is all that we have, and is therefore the ultimate concern of human existence. You can laugh at a pie in the face when your belly is full. When you are starving, wasting food is no laughing matter. In the surprising event of resurrection, then, the Christian faith enjoys an abundance of life that can join with God in laughing at death. Pointing to the work of 20th century theologian Karl Barth, Hauerwas observes the humor that shines through Barth’s work, marking his preaching and teaching with a distinctive sense of playfulness and freedom. “Because Barth’s theology was so sure of the victory of Christ, he was free to enjoy the world.” The work of theology can be laughter, if we’ll allow ourselves to be surprised by the punchline.

Funny is what happens when absurdity and truth collide. Those of us who have been trained as theologians through the careful reading of texts and the writing of essays and books tend to run in a mode of analysis; we don’t often let things burst in upon us and call it theology. While there is most certainly something to be said for the careful consideration of an argument, this isn’t the way we experience humor. A joke lands, often surprisingly, and the surprise is what makes it funny. Steve Wilkins has observed, “Humor builds on punch-line surprises, disruption of the conventional, reversal of expectation…challenging boundaries, misinterpretation, redefinition of the familiar, satire, paradox, irony, and other related devices.” Perhaps this is what has made me a fan of Winston Churchill’s humor. “A joke is a very serious thing,” he once quipped. At risk of squeezing the life out of this clever little witticism, the surprise is that joke and serious rarely belong together. We are surprised by the word ‘serious’ after the word ‘joke,’ and that’s what makes it a joke!

Churchill was also the master of surprising his listeners by turning some serious philosophical or political reality into something else altogether. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” he once said. I think I smile at this because I can’t help but picture some deeply philosophical concept like ‘truth’ as a bumbling, bleary-eyed old man, reaching for his trousers while trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes. The oddness of an image like that carries a sense of surprise. I’m familiar with old men, I’m familiar with pants, and I’m familiar with notions of truth, but putting them all together in this way makes the familiar a bit strange.

What else is Christian theology than coming to terms with the familiar being made strange? As an ongoing act of speaking the gospel, theology describes how commonplace realities are being redemptively upended by God’s activity. Can we behold the surprise that erupts from God becoming flesh? Isn’t the work of theology to help us and others receive the “redefinition of the familiar” that takes place over and over again in the history of God’s people? Not only does God’s activity surprise us with turning things backwards and upside down, but the work of theology also seeks to bring these incongruous acts of redemption to our attention. Churchill might as well have taken his line from John’s Gospel. If the Word can become flesh, the truth can certainly put its pants on.

Part of theology’s delight is when it does the work of making the familiar strange enough to evoke laughter through disruption of the familiar. Some of the greatest comedians are the ones who can take common, everyday experiences and narrate them in ways that point out how odd they really are. There isn’t usually anything particularly funny about an airport or commercial air travel until a good comedian gets ahold of the experience. Once you’ve heard a comedian bring to light how ridiculous the whole thing can be, it’s hard to ever see air travel the same way again. That also happens to be the comment I hear from folks in church after a bit of sermonic theology that has illuminated some aspect of God’s activity in the world. “I’ll never look at that passage the same way again,” I’ll sometimes hear. I only wish they’d laugh a bit more when they say it.

Learning to laugh at something that is truly funny takes theological vision. For those studying theology for the sake of ministry, this point cannot be missed. Ministry can be a life of laughter when our eye is turned to the joke God is playing on the familiar patterns of power, oppression, control, and kingdom-building. If our vision of life in the church is conditioned by the same old patterns of power, we won’t see what is so funny about the lowly being lifted up and the mighty brought low. It will offend us. Our laughter may quickly mutate to mocking.

Theology in the mode of laughter is also vital for church leadership. When we are in on God’s joke, decisions can be made in a way that help others laugh joyfully as well. Theology without the joy of humor, however, can quickly devolve into a desperate attempt to survive at all costs, or a quest to take control. This is probably why the people who have never really had much control have produced some of the funniest comedians. Theology that assumes it needs to defend or control will almost always miss the joke.

When it’s nurtured with a theological vision of true humor, the church is a community of laughter because it has long been associated with incongruous intrusions of the norm. From its early days as a kind of subversive underground comedy club, its members would get together and try out new material. They’d read out loud texts that conveyed to them what they’ve eventually call the gospel, and it would call them into an eccentrically holy life. (Eventually, they’d call those texts the New Testament.) The gospel was the truthful story that helped them chuckle even as they continued to be pressed out of life in the Roman Empire. Humor is a powerful vehicle for telling the truth, especially the truth a lot of other people can’t see. That’s most likely why some of the best comedic traditions have come from people who have been historically oppressed. This isn’t to suggest that being a member of the church in the late-modern West automatically makes one oppressed, but it is to suggest that stepping into the pattern of the gospel has usually made people a bit odd in whatever society they find themselves, and the gospel then is the story that can keep them laughing.

Doing theology with an eye to humor means that we’ll need to invite others to join in on the joke. The challenge will likely arise when we have taken faith and its institutions so seriously that we’ve lost our laughter. Doing work that is faithful to God’s comedic material sometimes puts theologians in front of what comedians might call a tough room, filled with those who come with expectations, but can’t laugh at any of the jokes. Sometimes, comedians face a tough room when their material doesn’t have a truthful edge; the jokes are too vanilla. On the other side, tough rooms happen when the jokes are just too offensive to be funny. Comedians probably have something to teach theologians here, especially those of us doing pastoral theology. If our work abandons the edgy and surprising inbreaking of God’s kingdom, it’s probably not worth our laughter. At the same time, if telling the truth about God’s activity is simply too offensive for people, that’s probably a good indicator that they aren’t in on the joke, and their commitments lie elsewhere. God’s activity has always disrupted and unsettled those who just couldn’t find the humor in it, and so the work of the theologian may sometimes mean helping them to get in on the joke by letting go of the commitments that are blocking their laughter. Gifted humorists can do this well, helping us to see issues from unique and unexpected angles, helping us to experience humor where we hadn’t seen it before. The work of theology calls on us to acquire some comedic skill, resisting the urge to offer humorless, bland material that promises the safety of not offending, while also offering a way in for those who may have built up resistance to God’s jokes, offended at what holiness actually is.

That will, of course, require that we ourselves learn to laugh first. We need to be able to get God’s sense of humor. In my work as a professor, I spend a lot of time with those who are just beginning their work as theologians. There is, of course, the evanescent beauty of uncovering mysteries of the divine that are life-giving and invigorating. There are also plenty of times I’ll look into the eyes of a student who’s struggling to get the joke. It’s not that they can’t grasp the concepts, but that they’re beginning to realize that God’s activity is making them uncomfortable. God’s activity, authoritatively witnessed to us by Scripture, sometimes even cuts against the concepts of God and God’s activity that they’ve carried into the classroom. Over the months I spend with them, I’ve come to see my job as helping them to laugh by getting the joke. It’s not as much that I do this by explaining how the joke is funny, but by introducing them to a vision of the world in which God’s activity really is capable of evoking laughter. When we’ve learned to loosen up from the theological hang-ups that make God’s material offensive to us, it prepares us for laughter. It happens in subtle ways across time, in things like listening carefully to Mary’s song, inquiring into why Peter didn’t get the joke himself, and when I can see a spark of theological laughter in their work, calling attention to it, even if they may be a little resistant at first, in words that were familiar to Sarah: “Yes, you did laugh.” And that’s perfectly alright. When you get the joke, you don’t need to cover your laughter.