what's in a question?
My five-month-old son Mateo is still refusing to speak coherently, but when he does at last open his mouth to do something other than eat, puke, drool or blabber (perhaps at six months?), I’m pretty sure I’ll be facing a lot of tough questions – to which I will undoubtedly give fairly flippant, “imaginative” answers. ”Why is the sky blue, daddy,” he’ll ask. “ Well, son,” I’ll reply, “ it’s because the photovoltaic cells in your eyeball are receiving the one wavelength of color that hasn’t been absorbed by the billions of semi-translucent fairies that fly around over our heads, composing the atmosphere and protecting us from frying like eggs in the sun – so start clapping.”For some reason, that has always been how I have dealt with children. It is not that I am not a fan of the truth, it’s just that I am more a fan of stories. Besides, children will have more than enough time in their lives to bang their heads against stone-hard facts. When it comes right down to it, I personally have spent more quality time in the last few years asking questions than I have goosestepping around with answers – life’s just too mind-boggling for little old me to have figured it out.
I have, however, picked a few principles that I figure are pretty freaking essential to asking questions wisely. The first is Love. I reckon every answer to every question has to be weighed against another question: “Is this lovely?” If even asking a question makes me likely to love somebody (or myself) less, I probably ought to just sit on it.
The second is Awe. Not as in, “awwwe, shucks”, but as in “Holy Rusted Metal, Batman! This Universe is Amazing!” If I am not remembering this, then it is going to be pretty easy to forget my place and waste my time trying to fit elephantine ideas into manageable teacups. Elephants don’t fit in teacups.
The third is hope. I do not want to lose hope. I am not willing to ask questions that kill real hope. Fake hope – that is another story. I will gladly crush someone’s dream if that dream is telling them that “this ship ain’t sinking… they told us at the dock it was unsinkable”.
The fourth is gratitude. I have even less of a rational argument I’d punch you over than for the previous three, but it just seems to me that all this Amazing-Loving-Hopefulness has got to come from somewhere, and I’m glad about it and all full up with a need to say, “Thanks”.
With these principles in mind, I recently talked my way across America, visiting old friends and meeting new ones, asking them questions and hearing little bits of what their thoughts have been as they have been skating around wondering about the thickness of their theological ice. In Wenatchee, Washington, I bit my lip and attended a “worship night” for a college-and-career aged group at a friend’s house.
When the singing was over, a girl started sharing about how she wondered why she couldn’t be spiritually high all the time. I asked her what she thought that would look like, and wondered aloud if maybe it would be neither possible nor pleasant to be “up” all the time. Then I asked the group this question: “what do you think you have to do to have a good relationship with God?” If you are at all familiar with the contemporary protestant north american Christian norm, you will know the sort of answers I got: spend more time reading the Bible, praying, meditating, et cetera. One guy made a bit more of a thoughtful comment and then asked what I was getting at.
“I don’t know”, I replied, “it just seems to me that you don’t have to do anything. That the whole point of Christ, as told in the Bible, is that everything has been done and that you can now breathe a deep sigh of relief and just enjoy the life you have been given.”
I was not trying to argue that an encounter with Truth won’t change a person – I think it will. I was just saying that I think that the real point of Christianity is unmerited Grace, and that you can stop worrying because you aren’t spiritually high enough. When you spend your life chasing a spiritual high you’re running after the wind – life is good enough without an unending spiritual orgasm (which isn’t even possible)! Life is just good, period! Be grateful! Enjoy!
I did not really have a chance to get into all that, because one fella decided to tear a bit of a strip out of me. He wanted to nail me down and get me to admit that I didn’t really mean that I thought you didn’t have to do anything to have a good relationship with God. Then he disagreed with my definition of the word “relationship”. Then he informed me that as one of the older leaders in the group, he was just trying to protect the younger members from heretical ideas, “because he loved them”. I tried to talk to a place of shared opinion with him, but it just didn’t seem to work – everything I said got him more riled up, and before I could even get a word out of my mouth he was shaking his head in disbelief.
Now, I’m not trying to attack the guy here in this forum where he has no chance to defend himself (Okay, maybe I am). After the “discussion” was cut short, I went over to talk to him more one-on-one, because I didn’t want to leave it at that. He was literally shaking all over for about the first ten minutes, but gradually he calmed down and was able to see my point a bit more. I, too, got the impression that, (intellectually at least) he was not really coming at it from too much of a different place than I.
Emotionally, though, he was chomping at the bit. I found out later that he quit the group a few days later. Our “discussion” was not the only reason, but it was certainly the drop that overflowed the glass. In an email he subsequently wrote to the leaders of the group (my friends), he got a bit more vitriolic than he had in our cozy one-on-one in front of the gas fireplace.
The following is most of the bulk of what he wrote in the email he sent to my friends in which he was backing out of being a part of their group. I could probably write a book responding to the different charges he lays against me – heresy being perhaps the most notable – but I think it would be better to just let you read it through and think for yourself. I’ve edited it a little bit (as indicated by the ellipses) for length as well as to remove some of the more personal comments.
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“…the recent meeting where Josh and his wife strongly expressed their view that we ‘don't need to do anything to follow Jesus or be a Christian’,
[not really at all what I said, but a telling interpretation, nonetheless]
and that God loving us alone constitutes a ‘relationship with Him’, regardless of whether we are loving Him back, even if we are ‘spitting in His face’, and the fact that you both agreed with him and were strongly opposed to the Biblical view I was expressing, that relationship is a two-way concept (John Ch. 15, the book of James and most of the Bible), made it very clear just how different our views are. Since two-way relationship with God is the very core of Christianity and without it there is no life or salvation, I see this as an issue that cannot be compromised on…
Though I don't claim to know everything about the Bible (no one can!), I have studied it for around twenty years. So --though I am only human-- when I disagree with something, there is usually a good reason, and I do so as a last resort and only after listening carefully
[oh, is that what happened?]…
In the case of Josh's comments, he was speaking as one who is a teacher of the group and instructing people in doctrine. I listened to him very carefully and waited several minutes to make sure I was hearing him right. I also asked him to clarify, and he and his wife were adamant in their views. He seems like a nice guy, but what he was saying was WAY out of line with the Bible! It would have been good if you both could have… supported me in gently correcting him. As leaders, it is our responsibility to keep a handle on things if someone starts teaching heresy. In any type of spiritual leadership position we are ‘shepherds’. We watch over the flock. I'm not talking about being legalistic or ultra-strict, but simply making sure that someone doesn't go teaching our group things that will lead them away from God.
The ‘do whatever you want, because God still loves you’ heresy is one of the main reasons that the Western Church today is so ineffective and powerless.
[Really? Couldn’t it be, rather, because the Western Church is largely comprised of culturally-absorbed consumer-conformists who are ignoring Christ’s call to care for the widows and orphans in favor of lives of selfish indulgence and smug Phariseeism?]
Thousands are going to hell right at this moment because they believe that they can ‘spit in God's face and still be in relationship with Him’. To tolerate evil in order to bring about more grace from God is a heresy that Paul addresses in Romans 3:7-9… Just to clarify, when we talk about ‘spitting in God's face’ we aren't talking about someone who wants to serve God but is still struggling with sin, we are talking about someone who has no intention of actually following Jesus and thinks they have a ‘get out of hell free card’ to wave in God's face when they die.
[How does he propose to tell the difference? Does anyone even know him or herself that well?]
I have lots of grace for people who struggle, we ALL struggle! No one follows Jesus perfectly, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying--He has provided the strength.
[I don’t get it – is he saying he doesn’t have lots of grace for people who aren’t bothering to struggle? How much does he think we have to struggle to merit his beneficent grace? And who the hejeebee is he to give grace?]
We should not follow because we are trying to satisfy a religious requirement or are afraid of being ‘smited’ by God, but because we love Him and want to be like our ‘Daddy’. God is always infinately close to us, but we need to be close to Him too (James 4:7-9, Acts 17:26-28)...
God bless you,- J…
‘Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.’ James 4:7-10”
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Now, I could be reading too much into it, but that last little quote seemed a bit pointed. I’m the devil (or in league with him, apparently), and a sinner who needs to purify his heart and grieve, morn and wail before God for my obvious wickedness. There, at least, I can agree with the guy. I am in fact the most grievous of sinners that I know – but how did he manage to extrapolate all that from my assertion that you don’t have to do anything to have God love you? And how could I have missed the fact that I was in the presence of such a divinely insightful man, who could see into my heart and identify things that, to my knowledge, were known only to God?
What I really could not understand, though, was why oh why he was so upset by it? It was just a question, right? I know I pointed at an answer, but it is not like I was saying that my answer was the entire story and that the group should don robes, grow beards (as able) and drink Kool-Aid with me. I was just trying to get a discussion going, and to ask if perhaps some things they may have been taught were maybe missing the mark a bit. Why was one little question so deeply, personally unsettling? Why was the answer I was pointing at so earth-shattering that the guy developed the shakes?
Well, if you know the story of Socrates, you might have a good idea. Socrates was an early Greek philosopher who made points by asking questions and getting people to think their way to some unsettling conclusions. He was really, really good at it – better than me, if you can believe that. While Plato’s description of Socrates’ teachings paints him as a pretty wise, gentle guy, he managed to get people so riled up that they ended up killing him. Why? Well, the official charge was that he was corrupting the youth and encouraging the worship of new gods. The truth, though, was that he made them realize that they did not know as much as they were letting on they did. The whole basis of their authority over other people was being called into question. The power structure they had so meticulously constructed was crumbling to dust. Who cared if he was right… they were about to lose their jobs! So they killed him.
Fortunately, Americans don’t take their philosophy quite so seriously (or do they? hello, war for oil!) or I could have been in some real trouble. I am starting to realize the real danger inherent in some lines of questioning. The question I have to ask is: what if I’m running along pell-mell off a cliff and like some cartoon character I start to ask where the ground went? I could fall! But is life like a cartoon? If I don’t ever look down, will I be able to run all the way to the other side of the canyon? I honestly do not know. I do know that I personally really, really, really like having dirt under my feet (or at least a tree branch).
Nonetheless, I was once a child like Mateo, getting ready to bust out the questions. The only difference between me and some people is that I never really got to a point where I said, “All right. That’s enough. I know enough, and I’m ready to stop asking”. Two nights ago, for instance, I tossed around in bed a while and then got up, grabbed a pencil and some loose-leaf, lined paper and started writing down the following list of questions. Were they worth the lost hour and a half of sleep? It sure felt better to get them written down (at least then I could sleep) but did I transgress my principles of Love, Awe, Hope and Gratitude? You know what, I’m not really sure. I am not sure I should even go ahead and ask you to ask them with me.
Shucks, though… caution is for wimps and commies – let’s go for it! Do me a favor, however – promise me you’ll take each question on its own merit. I know my biases are going to inevitably shine through, but please give each question the benefit of the doubt and pretend that when I was asking them I really, truly was not sure what the answer might be (and probably still amn’t). Ready? Here goes…
I. What’s in a question?
A. Are there any questions that should never be asked?
B. If you don’t ask questions, is it inevitable that you will receive answers anyways?
C. If you are always receiving answers to questions you did not ask, will those answers inevitably be propaganda (an attempt to get others to think your way in the absence of an act of will or questioning mind on their part)?
D. If you feel you know the right answer to a question (like, say, how to tie a square knot or the right way to get starving people to start eating healthier) is it all right to propagandize someone into doing it your way?
E. Is it possible to know if you really know the right answers to questions?
F. Is propagandizing an intrinsic part of fundamentalist thinking?
G. If it is, does that necessarily make it wrong?
II. Why are thinking people turning away in droves from fundamentalist patterns in North America (or why does it seem like they are)?
A. Is it because it is completely bogus, and they’re realizing that?
B. Is it because people always turn away from what people before them believed?
C. Is it because evil forces are at work, and the devil is winning?
D. Is it because the globalization or interconnectivity of everything precludes the isolationist conditions necessary for fundamentalism – for example, regular contact with people who disagree with our worldview humanizes “the other”, making them us?
E. Is it because a steady diet of pluralism in mainstream entertainment is having its inevitable effect on religious thought?
F. Is it the morally neutral result of an inevitable intellectual progression from the conclusions of enlightenment rationalist thinkers?
G. Is there a dialectical progression of human understanding? Are we getting smarter?
H. Is it not really happening, but we’re being tricked by Ted Turner (who is really just trying to gloss over his guilt over a pornography addiction) into thinking it is?
III. Can and should a person maintain a non-pluralist, non-skeptical mindset in a pluralist/skeptical intellectual climate?
A. Is questioning everything worth the brain cells?
B. Is questioning some things worthwhile, and how do I know what is worth questioning and what isn’t?
C. Is pure “not-knowing” possible, or is some amount of rational (and fundamentalist) thought inevitable?
D. Is the pluralist’s claim to know the Truth about there not being any Truth self-defeating and, let’s face it, silly?
E. What can be Known?
F. What should a person attempt to Know?
G. Does it matter what I know, or just how I act?
H. At what point should a person bother to assert to other people that he or she knows something?
I. How loudly should a person assert it?
J. Is armchair philosophy positive? Useless? Harmful?
IV. Does what I believe about God matter?
A. If God is real, but I can never know this with absolute rational certainty (which is the starting point of faith, and probably an intellectual necessity), does it matter what I will rationally accede to?
B. Does it matter if I “know” or just how I act?
C. If I admit intellectually the existence of a God of Love, but don’t actively love others, does the intellectual admission matter?
D. Can I believe in God without loving?
E. Can I love without belief in God?
F. Will I want to?
V. What about Hellfire and Damnation?
A. Is Hell really what I have been taught it is in Sunday school?
B. If it isn’t, why would people misrepresent the Truth?
C. Is it because they don’t know it – are not good enough scholars of the original text – or because it is the inevitable result of any attempt to explain in purely rational terms what is in essence a mystery and an inextricable part of a greater narrative?
D. If I have to do or believe things to be saved from Hellfire and Damnation, what if I am unable to do/believe them because I am ignorant of them or mentally incapable of understanding them?
E. Would a good God who created and/or allowed these conditions (my ignorance or low intelligence) hold me culpable for them?
F. If Paul the Apostle says that nature proclaims the Truth so clearly that people have no excuse for rejecting it, does it follow that people can be saved in a Christian sense without ever hearing the explicit Christian message (like, say, the thousands of people who live and die even today without ever hearing)?
G. If they can be saved, does it follow that someone who has in fact heard an explicit Christian message, but one so distorted by a corrupt church person as to be incomprehensible as the Truth (like, say, a muslim-born person who only hears, “Praise Jesus or Die, you Flea-Bitten Camel-Jockey!”), could such a person reject that lie but still somehow accept the Truth and be saved?
H. Can someone say different words, but mean the same thing?
I. Can someone say the same words, but mean something entirely different?
J. What does it mean to love God?
K. Is it a feeling?
L. Does God still love me if I don’t believe in God?
M. What if I do believe in God, but I don’t love God?
N. If God still loves me if I don’t believe in or love God, why would God ordain that I be thereby tortured forever for it?
O. I know that punishment is sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone when you want to teach them a lesson, but what lesson do you learn from an ETERNITY of punishment?
P. Is the lesson just for the other people, the ones who said the right things and managed to get away with it?
Q. If punishment is necessary for God to maintain God’s Purity and Justice, then where does Grace fit in? Just every once in a while? When God feels like it? How is that Just?
R. Again, does it matter what I say I believe?
S. Is a Christian culture and language divorced from the culture around it going to be very effective at saying anything Truthful to anyone but those already enveloped and submerged in it?
T. If that culture and language are only something Christians experience in Christian gatherings a few times a week, is it likely that it will mean anything even to them?
U. Can I ask difficult questions like these without endangering my soul’s connection (tenuous at best) to the Truth?
VI. To take it a step further, which of the following questions (if any) can a person ask without getting tossed into a lake of fire, where there is hopeless gnashing of teeth and no air conditioning?
A. What if Paul was a good guy and a great preacher/speaker/spreader of Truth, but that he was also wrong about some stuff (like women needing to cover their heads in church)?
B. If we in our infinite wisdom can discriminate between what Paul wrote that does and doesn’t apply to us (or what in the Torah we can ignore as “merely cultural”), should these writings be included in a cannon that purportedly emanates directly from the mouth of God?
C. If, on the other hand, being True and applicable is not a prerequisite for inclusion in the cannon - if the point of the cannon is rather to tell an overarching, very human story – then what (if any) of the canonical writings can I take as True in a modern, rationalist sense (as in: it is what it is, it means what it says, shut up and eat your crackers and drink your grape juice)?
D. If we must read the Bible in a rigid, unquestioning manner, would it be wiser to condense the cannon to the direct and seemingly literal statements of God in, for example, the ten commandments and Christ’s words at the sermon on the mount?
E. What if having homosexual tenancies is no more unhealthy/wrong/corrupt than treating people of the opposite gender as objects to be used for the stimulation of our genitals?
F. What if judging homosexually-inclined people is far worse than being homosexually inclined?
G. If one church says something is wrong and another church in the same denomination says it is right, why should I believe either of them?
H. What if the reason churches tend to judge and claim they have a monopoly on the Truth is that they don’t have faith in God?
I. If churches are places for being right all the time, instead of places for having faith, why should someone trying to be a person of faith go to church?
J. If intellectual accession to a few theological points is the prerequisite to the reception of Grace, is it still Grace?
K. If the first part of that question is true, how many points must be acceded for it to “stick”?
L. At what point are the intellectual accessions I am willing to make not enough?
M. Do I just need to believe the whole kit-and-kaboodle; and if that is the case, from whom to I get my kit-and-kaboodle?
N. Who decides what it takes for Grace to “stick”? God? Pastors of Dutch Reformed Churches? Seminarians with long beards?
O. If it is God, how will I know the difference between Truths I receive from God, and Truths I or other people are inventing for whatever reason (like, say, a desire to control the truth, or a desire to have a convenient or comfortable lie be True)?
VII. What about the rapists and the gluttons?
A. Does evil exist, or is it just a non-entity, an emptiness in the fabric of Reality that occurs when, through acts of human volition, less than the absolute Good is chosen?
B. Is the absolute Good ever chosen?
C. Is there good and evil in absolutely everything I experience?
D. If a pure and holy God is unapproachable except by Grace (whereby God ignores our evil) and evil (or not-good) is a necessary aspect of the Best Possible Reality (for now) then what happens if in the end (as the Bible asserts) evil is eliminated?
E. Does the Bible say that in the end evil will be eliminated (or just sickness and sorrow)?
F. If evil is necessary now, how can it be that it won’t always be necessary?
G. If evil is not necessary now and God is all-powerful and all-good, then why does evil exist?
VIII. Is Jesus a noun (person, place, thing or sometimes idea)?
A. If Jesus always existed (see John 1:1&so on), did “salvation” pop into existence at the cross?
B. If it did, does that mean the application of Grace before the cross was arbitrary and selective and we should shut up about it and stop questioning the Deity; or does it mean that there was no salvation before Christ, and we should be glad we were lucky enough to be born now?
C. If that is the case, can we really call God good and loving (in the sense we normally mean) without performing some serious mental gymnastics?
D. If it isn’t the case and salvation was universally available before the cross, is our current (modern/protestant/north American) understanding of salvation really grounded in Truth?
E. If our current understanding of salvation isn’t based on the Truth, what is it based on and what does that mean for how we share our understanding of salvation with others?
F. What if the substitutionary atonement of Christ is not a “blood-for-redemption” formula, but rather more “just” a Love Story?
G. What if the whole “God is Three” thing that “Christians” have been killing “Muslims” over (and vice-versa) for millennia is really not intended to be rationally broken down – what if it’s supposed to be experienced as a mystery and left at that?
H. What did Jesus say people had to do to be “saved”?
I. What if salvation is not about saying a “sinner’s prayer” and getting plucked from the jaws of hell, but rather about recognizing an ultimate Reality and gradually being shaped by that realization into alignment with said reality?
IX. To bring this line (or meandering multi-dimensional walkabout) full circle (or burgeoning ellipsis), do our answers to any of these questions matter?
A. If people wallow in these questions their whole lives, are they just a troop of monkeys banging sticks on trees (and each other)?
B. Is it worthwhile to ask these questions?
C. If we don’t ask these questions, do we get the answers we deserve?
D. Are we only asking these questions because as the wealthiest, most leisure-rich people in history, we have far too much time on our hands?
E. Are we dithering around with these questions because we don’t want to do the hard work required to really live and love?
F. Can we do the hard work and ask these sorts of questions at the same time?
G. Is it worth living and loving without asking questions?
I guess that’s the extent of the questions I felt like knocking together at one go. They really never end – each question leads to six more, on and on into forever – so it is legitimate to question whether or not it’s worth my time to bother asking any. Believe me, I am no different from anyone else in that part of me wants there to be easy answers. Part of me would love to stack the Universe and beyond into neatly labeled boxes, sit back in my plush wheeled chair and eat a Popsicle. Another part of me, though (a more annoying, persistent part), doesn’t want to let me be. It says, “Revel in the mystery! Stand in awe at the brink of the unknowing abyss, tossing rocks and hollering for an echo!” In this, it seems to suggest, I might just find the humility that is the prerequisite for giving and receiving Real love.
Questions are not the enemy. Questions imply ignorance and a desire to know. They imply humility, awe, love of Truth and hope that Truth is in some way perceivable.
I am not trying to destroy anything here. I don’t want to blindly accept anything I am told, but neither do I want to waste the work of wiser men, to stand on the shoulders of giants believing I owe them nothing for this fabulous view – doubting that they even exist. I have read and studied the words of many wiser men. But knowledge puffs up, and one thing I know about puffed cereal is that it is full of air. I don’t want to be empty, nutritionless cereal – I’m going for granola.
posted by josh @ 4:50 AM
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