ABSTRACT
On the plains of Nebraska, the devastating power of wind and rain are familiar and feared. The extraordinary in the form of a tornado is an expected part of the landscape. Every spring as the storm clouds roll across the prairie, residents are reminded that they live their lives on the boundary between feeble attempts at order in the shape of seemingly sturdy houses and neatly planted rows of crops and the rule of chaos in the form of twisters, hail, flood, and drought. It really is a matter of faith for a farmer to put seeds into the ground every spring. It is faith for a family to build a home and a life on flatlands that offer little in the way of protection from the unforgiving, inevitable onslaught of the elements of nature. This practical faith that dares to face a whirlwind is not exactly a faith in the possibility of divine intervention or some ultimately benevolent outcome. It is a decision to plow forward in spite of ambiguity. This is a faith that takes on the everyday risks of living and loving in order to make a way in the context of the profoundly uncertain. Polydox theologies foreground the multiple and the uncertain. They take seriously this deep-seated, embodied experience of indeterminacy. Faith from this perspective is other than a simple access to certainty as a mode of protection from the trials and disasters that threaten order and surety. It becomes more (and less) than a religious conviction that accepts the unpredictable tribulations of human life as evidence of the unknowable nature of God’s ultimately compassionate designs. And it becomes more (and less) than a posture that gestures toward a naming of divine occurrence. With ambiguity foregrounded, individuals and communities, allied through presumed certainties that they have inherited or forged under the name of God, can find that their traditional foundations no longer support them. Traditional faith claims can founder and come up against a limit in the face of whirlwinds. Such disruption surfaces another possibility however, the possibility of an ambiguous, risky and life-filled conception of faith that holds loosely any alliances (Christian or otherwise) based on doctrinal certainties. In a polydox space, faith turns away from the absolute assurance of closed alliances and toward the outer edges of security in order to live courageously within indeterminacy. Here, indeterminacy is good news in that it makes possible a way that is open to something new – that is absolutely unforeseeable.
