When I first opened Brandon Ambrosino’s chapter “Getting Comfortable in the Basement” from his book Is It God’s Will?, I was struck by the image he uses. He contrasts the “living room,” where faith feels tidy and safe, with the “basement,” where we wrestle with raw questions we would rather avoid.
For many of us in Palestine, the basement is not just a metaphor. It’s where our faith has lived for generations, quietly, sometimes painfully. I kept thinking: Yes, this is exactly it. And then I thought some more, like, really thinking.
Ambrosino’s honesty is refreshing. He resists the clichés that rush too often to explain away suffering. As he observes, “We now do theology via meme,” and in those memes suffering gets reduced to either punishment or reward.
Jack Nassar
His refusal to settle for easy answers rings true. When he reflects on the Genesis flood, he even dares to imagine God rushing to judgment and learning from it, with the rainbow serving as a reminder against turning disaster into divine retribution. That image — it stuck with me. Days. Just kept coming back, like a ghost in my thoughts.
Dismantling divine control
What strikes me most about Ambrosino’s work is his systematic dismantling of what he calls “all the omnis” — referring to omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence. This is not just academic theology; it is pastoral care disguised as biblical exegesis.
His treatment of omniscience particularly resonates. The idea that God knows all future events but chooses selective intervention creates what Ambrosino rightly calls an “emotional impossibility” for a loving God. His analogy of a parent watching their child play in traffic, knowing disaster is approaching but choosing not to intervene to teach a lesson, hit me hard. I kept thinking, “Wow, that’s morally heavy.”
From my Palestinian perspective, this theological shift feels both liberating and dangerous. Liberating, because it removes the crushing weight of believing our suffering is somehow part of God’s predetermined plan. When Israeli occupation forces destroy our homes, schools, farms and churches, when economic blockades strangle our communities, when children lose parents to violence — well, traditional theodicy demands we find God’s mysterious purpose in these tragedies. Ambrosino’s nonomniscient God offers something different: A God who grieves with us because this God, too, is caught off guard by the world’s cruelty.
Yet, it also feels dangerous. It challenges the very foundations many Palestinian Christians rely on to maintain hope. If God does not control everything, if God does not have a master plan ensuring ultimate justice, then what assurance do we have that our suffering serves any greater purpose? I think about this late at night sometimes, just turning it over, over, over.
The God who regrets
Ambrosino’s interpretation of the flood narrative is perhaps his most provocative contribution. His reading of God’s regret — “the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth” — as genuine divine surprise and remorse challenges centuries of theological interpretation. When he suggests the rainbow represents God’s backup plan, he is offering a framework where God is learning, growing and changing in response to creation. I found myself nodding and muttering, “Yes … yes … exactly.”
This resonates deeply with Palestinian Christian experience. We have watched empires rise and fall, witnessed promises made and broken, seen liberation movements succeed and fail. A God who adapts, who changes tactics, who moves from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C — that reflects our reality in ways predetermined divine blueprints never could.
However, Ambrosino’s analysis reveals both strength and weakness. His reparative reading of Genesis offers valuable tools, but he doesn’t fully address what this means for biblical authority. If we can dismiss parts of Genesis as reflecting human misunderstanding of God’s character, on what grounds do we accept other parts as revelatory? I kept circling this in my head, scribbling notes, erasing, scribbling again. It felt endless.
Weaponized Scripture
Reading as a Palestinian Christian, I found myself both comforted and restless with Ambrosino’s focus on individual believers wrestling alone with God. This individual focus becomes tricky when we consider how Scripture has been weaponized against Palestinian people. The same biblical texts Palestinian Christians have cherished for centuries — promises of land, divine blessing, salvation and restoration — have been systematically reinterpreted by Christian Zionist theology to justify Israeli occupation, displacing indigenous Christians and Muslims.
“Palestinian Christians face not only physical displacement but spiritual exile.”
Christian Zionist leaders present Israeli colonial expansion as God’s predetermined plan, using passages like Genesis 12:3, “I will bless those who bless you,” to sanctify political actions that cause Palestinian suffering. The theological violence of this appropriation cannot be overstated. Palestinian Christians face not only physical displacement but spiritual exile, watching their own sacred texts used as weapons against their very existence.
God is on our side, but whose side? Is God on the side of Israeli Jews or Palestinian Christians, Muslims and Samaritans? Since we all claim to believe in the same God, whose prayers will God listen to and answer, or choose to ignore? I mutter the question sometimes just aloud, like a whisper in the room.
This historical context makes Ambrosino’s critique of strategic theology even more urgent. The kind of apologetics he describes, designed to win rather than wrestle with truth, becomes genuinely dangerous when applied to geopolitical conflicts. When theology prioritizes being right about God’s plan over wrestling honestly with human suffering, it can sanctify oppression.
In my community, faith and endurance always are collective. When tragedy strikes, we do not suffer in isolation.
I remember the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian-American journalist killed by Israeli occupation forces in Jenin in 2022. The church overflowed with mourners, more Muslims than Christians, and the streets of Jerusalem filled with people from across the Holy Land, making it the largest funeral in modern Jerusalem history. Shireen had been one of the Arab world’s most famous and beloved journalists.
No theological explanation could make sense of her death, but the community’s presence, crossing religious boundaries, gave meaning. Solidarity transcended sectarian divisions. I remember thinking, quietly, “This is faith.”
Questions without easy answers
Ambrosino’s work opens as many questions as it answers, which seems precisely his intention. His basement theology invites continued wrestling rather than final resolution. From a Palestinian Christian perspective, several questions deserve further exploration.
“His basement theology invites continued wrestling rather than final resolution.”
How does a nonomnipotent God relate to systemic injustice? If God cannot prevent all evil because God respects human freedom, what about situations where human freedom itself becomes a tool of oppression? Does God’s self-limitation become complicity when it enables systematic injustice?
What does hope look like in Ambrosino’s framework? If God does not have a predetermined plan ensuring ultimate justice, if God works within the same constraints we face, what grounds do we have for hope that things will ultimately be made right? Ambrosino’s concept of God’s hope for the world is intriguing but underdeveloped.
His central insight remains powerful: “As Christians, we are not promised tidy explanations. What we are promised is presence.” This move from explanation to accompaniment offers something crucial for communities living in prolonged suffering. The God who descends into the basement, who gets comfortable with uncomfortable questions, who does not provide answers but provides presence, is a God worth trusting.
I pause here and just … sit with that thought sometimes.
A necessary beginning
For American readers, Is It God’s Will? serves as an important invitation to sit honestly with questions that often are avoided. For Palestinian Christians, its insights echo familiar struggles while opening new possibilities for understanding God’s relationship to a world gone wrong. Ambrosino does not provide final answers, and that is precisely his point.
The book’s greatest strength lies not in its conclusions but in its method. By getting comfortable in the basement and refusing to rush upstairs for tidy explanations, Ambrosino models a way of doing theology that honors both human experience and divine mystery. This approach is particularly valuable for communities whose experience of the world does not match neat categories of systematic theology.
Despite its limitations, Is It God’s Will? succeeds in its primary objective. It gives permission to admit uncertainty while maintaining faith, to question divine action while affirming divine presence, and to wrestle in the basement while still believing we are not alone in the dark. That permission is not the final word, but it is a necessary first word for any theology adequate to our broken and beautiful world.
As Palestinians, we know something about hoping in the face of uncertainty, maintaining faith without guaranteed outcomes and finding God’s presence in the absence of divine intervention. Ambrosino’s basement theology does not solve our theological or political challenges, but it does offer companionship for the long wrestling match authentic faith requires.
Sometimes, companionship in the questions is far more valuable than premature answers that fail to honor the complexity of our experience.
Jack Nassar is a Palestinian Christian based in Ramallah, Palestine. He holds a master of arts degree in political communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, and brings professional expertise across multiple sectors, driving positive change.