Crazed Mind

Good old religion vs faith

Growing up as a Christian in a Nigerian family. We were taught faith. Not the one that comes with a deep-seated understanding, but one passed down like a family heirloom. Dumped in your hands with stories and a set of practices that you are meant to follow.

It gets to a point when, finally, we have to confront the premise of our faith truly, and we are plagued with questions.

This questioning has often led people to doubt the existence of God or any other spiritual being.

One of such questions for me was, why do we need to attribute every event to God, and where is the place of coincidence in this world?

In my upbringing, everything was God’s will. A death in the family? God’s will. A rejected visa? God’s will. A successful application or safe delivery of a child? Still, God’s will. Some argue that angels are responsible for certain happenings, as in the Old Testament. Others say God is aware but chooses not to intervene.

Then I read Jackie Hill Perry’s Gay Girl, Good God, where she writes about the unshakable goodness of God and that nothing bad can ever come from Him. And I ask myself, why do we still say that even the bad things are His will?

When Christians are asked why they come to this conclusion, they would simply answer by saying, “He is omnipresent.”

But this response only brushes the surface of what that question really represents. It leaves me thinking that many do not question their religious practices because they fear what they might find out, choosing sweet oblivion over raw truth.

Yet truth, I’ve learned, strengthens belief. As Romans 10:17 says:

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Still, a question remains: What is the point of faith if we need truth? But the presence of faith does not negate knowledge; rather, it is a complete confidence in God’s words.

I find myself caught in this whirlpool of thoughts, desperate to know God beyond family practices, worship songs, or borrowed testimonies. I want to know His goodness, grace, and mercy at my core.

Whenever I'm confronted with questions like this one, it leaves me exhausted.

During one of my exhaustion periods, when prayers felt like echoes and answers seemed far away, one thing steadied me: a line I encountered in a philosophy class, from the medieval thinker Anselm of Canterbury. He framed faith not as blind acceptance, but as a journey he called fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. He said,

I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather I believe in order that I may understand.

In other words, belief is not the reward for understanding but the starting point of it. It also taught me that questions are not enemies of faith but companions on the way to deeper knowledge of God. Jackie Hill Perry echoes the same when she writes,

Every single thing He has ever or will ever say is true. The simplicity of faith is this: taking God’s Word for it. And I might not have felt like it, but I had no choice but to believe Him.

So yes, my lips will confess His goodness and His mercies. I will sing of them with all my heart. Why? Because I believe. As simple, and as difficult, as that.

Side note: I didn't write this because I have all the answers. Writing, for me, can be an elaborate way of asking the world a question.