Trust theology

A church mate of mine finds it in his responsibility to ‘counsel’ all other fellow church mates on how to be a good Christian. He never fails to find a moment in social conversation to bring in his evangelical agenda of making ‘better Christians’ out of fellow Christians. I shall refrain from making this post a gossip post, because my main intention is to talk about a thing that he likes to preach about, and to examine it in my writing.

So this thing that he would usually say to a fellow believer goes somewhat along the lines of “In everything that you do, do you put God first, and trust him fully and wholeheartedly? Or have you tried to take things into your own hands, and put the trust in yourself? Are you following God’s will, or your own will?”

I wonder what would be the best way to respond to this line of reasoning. It has that rhetoric quality that would make most Christians nod their heads along and accept the statements as necessarily being incontrovertible axioms of the Christian faith. Yet, it also has that guilt-forming property that makes the Christian feel inadequate about the way he has been carrying out his life. One can never put God first enough, nor can one trust him wholeheartedly enough, and neither can one follow God’s will enough.

It adds to the cringe when that church mate of mine adds that “If you didn’t follow God’s will, and trusted yourself instead, don’t be surprise and blame God when things in your life turn out wrong or badly.”

There is that instinctive part of me that wants to rebut him on every point he has made, and prove him to be the adherent of some misguided theology. But there and then on the spot when he is putting forth such exhortation, I am not intelligent to know what to say. I would have preferred to avoid such conversation, except that he sees it as a obligation to ‘benefit’ people by putting such a point across.

In my talk with my pastor, I surfaced this up, and he refereced the term ‘trust theology’ to describe this set of thinking. It is not necessarily health and wealth prosperity gospel. Nevertheless, there is a constraining element to it, that the focus of the individual’s faith becomes very much centred on the individual’s ‘trust’ in God. And I would add that there is a quality of false dichotomy to such statements as well. It’s either God first, or you first; trust in God, or trust in yourself; God’s will, or your will.

Truth be told, I am not sure whether such a characterization of God is actually valid based on the bible. I feel that this property of ‘trust theology’ is enunciated in the bible. Just today, at a Varsity Christian Fellowship group gathering, we were going through the passage of James 1. And I could identify that quality of ‘trust theology’ in the verse “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.”

I don’t have enough academic knowledge of the bible or of theology to substantiate my point, but my preference of understanding right now is one that values the genuineness of an individual’s sentiment towards God. If an individual truly has doubts, or has trust issues about God, I prefer that the individual be free to acknowledge them and continue to live as a Christian despite these apprehensions, and that he or she need not be particularly worried that he or she might be missing out on some aspect of the goodness of God’s will etc. What then is the goodness of trust? It is for the individual himself, who finds a sense of peace from trusting in a God that is deserving of such a trust.