It's a significant part of the discourse, as integrated into the prog faithy schtick as Kramer's abrupt arrival through Jerry's front door or a Dangerfieldian tug at one's collar.
The world is complex! The world is uncertain! Therefore, faith is complex and uncertain! One must, if one is a progressive, embrace the Holy Dark, that place where we cannot see and where our path is unclear.
This, one is led to believe, is a marker of authenticity, a sign of progressive faith's connection to the Unknown and the Unknowable. "Look at how bravely we acknowledge that we know nothing, and accept that our faith centers on simply sitting with our uncertainty! Embrace the darkness!"
There is, of course, a truth to that. We contingent, mortal beings cannot know the wholeness of the Divine intent. The Numinous is infinitely beyond us, because, like, yo, that's what makes it Numinous, brah.
But true as that might be, there's a practical flip side to that truth.
If you're a church hawking uncertainty and complexity? No-one, by which I mean pretty much functionally no-one, wants what you're selling.
Why would they? They have it already. I mean, seriously. It's the old "selling-refrigerators-to-the-Inuit" absurdity.
Our blighted saeculum provides complexity and uncertainty by the heaping bucketload, every single day. We are stuffed like foie gras geese with meaninglessness, directionlessness, and the irreconcilable cognitive dissonances of culture. Truth and meaning are torn from our grasp by the shrieking winds of political disinformation and mammonist hucksterism, and human beings feel utterly lost in the yawning chaos of it all.
We can feel it tearing at us, taking us apart, bit by bit. Our sense of ourselves trembles, and the yearning is for something...anything...that can hold us together.
A theology that says, "Well, sure, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, really, I mean, who even knows, lol, whatevs?"
Sure, you're "being authentic." You're "authentically" offering cups of water to the drowning.
That is not what the Gospel is, nor is that what souls seek when they realize how very lost they are.
Faith embraces the cloud and the Holy Dark. Sure. Fine. But it is also and more vitally the pillar of fire by night. It is the light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.
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