Faith and Questions, Part III and Conclusion

Part III, Conclusion

In asking these questions we are following a number of scriptural examples of people who wrestled with God: Abraham, Jacob, Rachel, Hannah, Moses, Job, Jeremiah, Jonah, and Jesus.  These prophets in our tradition show us the way to take the words and promises of God seriously.  After all, the name “Israel” means “to wrestle with God.” And part of what it means to be faithful to God is to have the courage and tenacity to wrestle with God.  Wrestling with God can be wonderfully intimate and gracefully comforting. And it can also be argumentative, accusative, and sometimes quite harsh.  Sometimes we feel close to God and sometimes we feel there is no God.  Such is the nature of trusting, not trusting and living with an invisible mysterious God. 

In wrestling with this God we are obligated to have a broad notion of revelation.  Revelation can certainly come through our scriptures, traditions, creeds, confessions, doctrines, rituals, and theological opinions.  But there is more, much more, that we must pursue in our wrestling with God.  We must listen and carefully study the various religions of the world, the natural and social sciences, the arts, the writings of atheists and agnostics, the influential works of the great philosophers and so on.  Our wrestling with God and the truth may require a great deal of work but our fidelity to our  varying traditions propels us forward.  We have no choice but to skeptically raise any question which would gain us entry to the truth.

Our questions should not be against the religious tradition, nor for the tradition but within the tradition.   We are, all of us, heirs to these religious traditions which have in many ways, for good and for bad, influenced our morality, our understanding of the way the world works and the meanings we give to what goes on in the world.  So, the questions we ask need not be particularly hostile or friendly.  The questions must be intended to pursue the truth.  They ought not be polemical or rhetorical.  They must be direct and honest.  People within particular religious traditions may want to address their questions directly to their deity based on the divine promises made to that community.  People outside religious communities can express their questions through their vocations, their readings, and in discussions with their friends and neighbors.

But, really and honestly, what can actually be accomplished by asking all these questions?  Many people have been wrestling with this deity for thousands of years and have not received a tangible or definitive answer.  Spending all this time formulating and asking unanswerable questions can seem like a waste of time and energy.  If we scream questions at a silent sky, day after day, what have we accomplished?  Sometimes lying in bed in the middle of the night, asking questions, I wonder is anyone listening except the ceiling? 

All this may be true but I do not think we really have a choice.  We humans are meaning seeking creatures.  It is in our nature to ask “why” when terrible things happen.  While it may be true that “excrement happens” we are not content with such a philosophy.  We want to know if there is any justice in the universe.  We want know how it is possible for someone we love to be here, with us, one moment and the next to disappear.  The fact is: as human beings our lives are terribly fragile.  We are here and then we are not here.  What is that all about?  Sickness and death seem to happen indiscriminately or randomly.  Is there no meaning to such events?  Religions have always asserted that there is more than meets the eye.  Is there?  How can we know unless we raise our questions and pursue what might be there.  And even though we have not received the answers we may want, we have discovered through our various scriptures, through science, through nature, through art and literature, glimpses of the truth. 

So, the questions we ask take on a holy or sacred quality.  They are a form of prayer.  Think about it.  Each of us gives our lives to certain questions.  And the questions we give ourselves to, the questions that grasp hold of us, determine the course of our lives.  

Finally, and most importantly, the fact that faith and questions are intimately and inextricably connected does not mean that we are left without anything to do except sit around wondering.  Ultimately, we do not know who God is but we know what God wants.  And that is vital!   God wants us to be human beings.  God commands us to care for the neighbor who is in pain.  God commands us to run after justice, to do what we can do to change the world where we live.  There can be no excuse for being indifferent.  In every small situation where you live, ask yourself, what can I do to help, to change what needs to be changed, to help one neighbor, to do one kindness, to speak out against injustice?   Sometimes, it is true, there is not much that can be done but try to do something.  I know I cannot fix the many broken people and situations in the world.  I admit it.  But I can do something.  The secret resides in the doing.  It is in the doing each day that we become more human.  And questions about God are no reason to be indifferent.  Embrace the questions, be embraced by the questions and do what you can do in every situation to stand with the neighbor. In doing this you will approach becoming a mensch, a person of character. Such is the vital power hidden inside faith and questions.

Faith and Questions, Part II

Part II

Some Christians following Augustine and Luther want to do away with the questions completely.  They say to ask these questions is to try to gain access to the hidden parts of God and they call such a search a theology of glory, trying to enter into the glory or mystery of God.  Such an attempt they say is an act of pride.  Rather, the believer should be content with the revelation of God as provided  in and through Jesus Christ.  Through this revelation, we are told God is ultimately for us and not against us. Any attempt to go beyond the revelation is an act of sinful pride.  They assert, God is God and you are not.  I must admit, such an approach does succeed in stopping the questions but it is not a very pastoral or human response.  You can tell people to shut up and believe but that is not the biblical or human approach that is actually honest and cares about the the truth. 

In the scriptures all sorts of people question and accuse God seeking information as to how and what God is doing to accomplish his purposes.  The human being is caught living his or her life everyday under the umbrella of natural ambiguity.  Life is by nature ambiguous.  Some days I feel fine and safe. Other days I  can experience all sorts of problems and disturbances, some of them mundane and not very serious, others quite severe.  And this ambiguity seems to be rather random without much meaning.  How is the human being to live in such a world and remain sane?  The biblical response seems to be that we are called upon to trust and inquire.  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.”  You have a mind not so you can deny its curiosity but to pursue the truth with all that you have inside you.  Pursuing the truth is not sin.  The truth and God are not opposites.  Wherever the truth is there is God and wherever God is there is the truth. 

To place questioning God off limits is to suffocate the human soul.  But, some will argue, isn’t it possible and maybe likely, that allowing or even encouraging people to question their God or their faith or their religion will only cause them to lose their God, faith and religion?  Yes, that may happen but what it means is that the faith they had was too simplistic and that they were insufficiently loving God “with all their mind.”  This is the risk biblical texts are willing to live with.  Faith without questions is too simplistic, questions without faith are dishonest.  The fact is we are here and how we got here remains mysterious and problematic.  We are not able to get beyond the “Big Bang” and have not answered the question why there should have been anything around for there to be a “Big Bang” in the first place. That does not mean that we should not pursue this question. 

There is a holiness to the questions that is more important than the answer to those questions.  Why so?   Because the questions bear witness to the inadequacy of traditional religious answers which in effect served to close off the conversation and kill the questions by equating the questions with unbelief. 

Many religious traditions gives us a glimpse into the truth about God.  We are right to hold up and be faithful to each of our traditions and the glimpses they each provide.  But since they only give us a glimpse into the truth we are compelled to seek, to knock, to persist in trying to get at what is really going on.  The questions we must ask are questions that demonstrate respect and doubts about certain parts of the tradition.  We are obligated to ask the questions because God has made covenants with our communities and thereby opened God’s very self to the importance of questions.  Covenants, be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim,  are promises that God makes, unconditional or conditional.  We are called upon to uphold our parts of the covenants.  By virtue of these covenants, we are married to God and God is married to us.  In this marriage we are called upon to take each other seriously.  We and God love each other by grace alone, we care for each other, we question and sometimes argue with each other because we are covenantally obligated to do so.  Sometimes in the midst of calamities that cause great suffering, be they natural or moral, we may doubt each other and wonder if our faith has been misplaced.  Our questions are more a sign of our faithfulness than of our pride or lack of faith.  Because we are trying to trust in the promises of God we are compelled to raise questions with God as frontally and specifically as possible.  To not raise these questions would be a sign of unbelief.

Questions and Faith: A Lethal or Vital Mix???

Part I

The mystery and the durability of God and religion is a puzzlement that will never go away.  There is something inside our brains that needs/wants to worship or believe in something outside ourselves in order for us to remain sane.  Even those who do not believe in a God find that they have to have some kind of theory or explanation about why things are the way they are; they feel the need articulate and defend this theory they believe in.  Their theory has become their God or religion.  This theory keeps them sane.  So, why do people believe in God or Gods or religion?  First, it is a matter of control and sanity.  We live in a world that is and seems terribly random.  Everyday things happen to us and within us that seem completely random and without meaning.  Some of these things can be nice and happy things; others could be difficult and painful things, still others can be aggravating and exasperating.  Do any of these things that happen to us matter?  The absurdity of these events would seem less crazy if we thought and trusted that somehow there is a God at the heart of the universe that is for us and not against us.  This God could be a force, an energy, a personal God, or a law of nature.  In any event, meaning is vital to keeping us sane. 

Even if a person says there is no God, that it is all in our minds, that we invented God and have forgotten that we did so, this person still has to meet the day and stay sane.  So, suppose this person looks at the nature of our lives, shrugs his shoulders and  says, ‘That’s life!  Even that is an explanation that he or she believes in, that life is like that.  That is the meaning, that is their God. A person trusts that their belief is the way life is and that the explanation they have provides all the meaning that is needed to meet the day.  That is their faith.  That is their religion.

All of our Gods and explanations in the end do not work on the ground as well as we would like them to, but despite that, we are willing to live with the difficult holes they leave for the sake of sanity.  Regardless of our various explanations, we seem to need all sorts of material helps in order to deal with the gaps in our various ways of meeting life each day.  We need our phones, televisions, music, art, lakes, oceans, mountains, sex, money, the approval and applause of others, a variety of pills and drugs, and anything else that helps us keep things together. All these things are fine in their place, but they are not ultimately helpful.

The Jewish and Christian biblical or religious scriptures were aware of our dilemma and called out our penchant for seeking ultimate material supports, “idolatry.”  Those texts are convinced that we can actually stay more sane and balanced by trusting a God we cannot see than by trusting the “trinkets”  that we can see.  Were they right?  To this day millions of people continue to think so and try to follow their prescription.  In the biblical book of Exodus we see a story about a golden calf that was tried as a substitute for the invisible God.  It did not work.  Why not?  I suspect because as aggravating, unreliable and remote as the invisible God was, the visible shiny object proved to be even more unreliable and ineffective.

So, I reassert, belief in something that a person may or may not call God, an explanation, a creed, a way of looking at or explaining the world such as science, these are all Gods that we trust to keep us together and sane to meet the day. 

But, one of the things that the scriptures knew was that believers had to be given the power of questions. Questions were not merely a way to assert human pride over God’s wisdom.  Questions were a way to try to understand what God was doing in the world.  God’s methodology was always seen as mysterious, problematic and difficult for humans to apprehend.  But this understanding was not intended to tell humans they were not allowed to explore, excavate, or try to understand what was going on.  Pride is the desire to be God; questioning God is the desire to understand God.  To understand does not mean to replace God but merely to remain sane in a world that seems to operate according to random calculations.  This problem of how God works in the world is not new but it remains a difficult if not impossible puzzle to unravel.

The Legacy of Elie Wiesel

In 1979 Elie Wiesel came to our college and in a moving story filled address declared, “In memory lies redemption.”  This was his hope.  He told us if we remembered what had happened to one people, we would remember never to be indifferent to the unjust pain and suffering of others.  Years later he returned to speak at Augustana to state that he felt that he had failed, that despite all of his words, the killing and hatred had not stopped.  He wondered aloud: if the memory of Auschwitz did not stop anti-semitism, what could stop it?  He went on:   “Can you imagine how naive we were in the 1950’s?   We thought if we speak about what happened in those days the world would be shocked, awakened, never again to hate and kill. We were wrong.” 

Throughout his life, Elie Wiesel tried to find the right words to stop the killing.  I would say he was not completely successful but he also did not fail.  Many of us who have read some his many books have been moved “never to be indifferent.”  We heard him tell us, “Indifference is decadence.  Indifference is death walking around. An indifferent person is already dead but he or she doesn’t know it yet.”  We heard him exhorting us, “Don’t be indifferent.  I don’t know what you can do but do something.  Say a prayer, shed a tear, do what you can do.”  And many of us have lived our lives in response to those words.

But, as the years went by, what saddened Elie Wiesel so terribly was that the killing did not and has not stopped.  Seventy years after the Holocaust, what have we, as human beings, learned?  It is now clear, if it has really been unclear, that we will not be able to fix that part of the human being that compels hatred and murder of the other.  Elie Wiesel freely admitted his naiveté.  And yet he did not give up.  In over fifty books, articles, plays and talks, he kept on trying.  At times he spoke about feeling it hopeless and helpless.  To him that was no reason to stop trying.  And he did try; he did do what he could to bear witness on behalf of those who no longer had a voice.

Along with the central theme of human indifference, he spoke about his disappointment in God.  He would not and could not allow himself to let God off the hook.  He could not understand how a caring God, covenanted to the Jewish people, could remain indifferent in the face of the mass killing of a million and a half Jewish children.  He chided the biblical Job for not going far enough and persisting in his questioning of God.  For Wiesel, his questions were a form of prayer. And he refused to stop praying his entire life.

Throughout his writings certain themes beyond indifference were usually emphasized.  It was clear for Wiesel that to approach the Holocaust was to come close to madness.  Not only could the Holocaust make you mad but even attempting to understand what happened could make you mad.  And Wiesel asserted, only the mad could really comprehend what had happened.  Madness was the opposite of sanity.  And when someone approached what had happened in the Holocaust, Wiesel told us, it was like approaching a raging fire that could burn you and make you crazy.  Beginning with mad Moishe in Night there continued to be characters throughout his writings who were mad and because they were mad could now try to communicate what they had seen.  Auschwitz was so horrific, Wiesel thought that when God came close to see for himself he too became mad. 

Why was madness such a prominent theme?  For Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz was a another planet, a place where there were no moral limits, a place where if you could think of it, you could do it, a place that when you actually tried to look at what had happened there you would begin crying and not be able to stop, a place where even when God tried to come near, the place was so dark, God had to retreat, it was a massive insanity, and a place where there was no “warum?” no why?  When one of Wiesel’s friends had the nourished the courage to ask one of guards at Auschwitz, why are you killing us?  The guard answered in German “Hier gibt es kein warum.”  “Here there is no why.”

If it was such a terrible horrible scene how could one find words to describe the indescribable?  For Elie Wiesel, the words were insufficient, human language was unable to come close to the horror.  Language could abstractly and objectively describe what happened there without actually coming close to the horror.  The horror of Auschwitz is that it showed all of us what lie dormant in the soul of human beings.  This is what we could do to each other if we were not careful and aware.  This is what we could allow if we were not aware of the monstrous capacity inside ourselves and inside God.  And this is precisely what made people go mad when they came too close.  They were forced to face the horrific capacities that they themselves possessed.  They were forced to face the silence and absence of God.  What all this meant for Wiesel was that he had to wrestle with the insufficiency of language to communicate what he had seen and what had happened.  He decided that there was only one way and that was to tell stories. 

But he was aware that human beings have an amazing capacity to resist the truth about themselves.  So he constantly strove to find language, words, stories that could break through this resistance.  When a person is writing a story he or she must decide whether to use one word or another.  Each word reveals and conceals at the same time.  What story should be told and with what words should he tell the story?  What could people hear and what would they refuse to hear?  This was Elie Wiesel’s dilemma. 

Wiesel talked about “Night” as that dark place where human beings and God should not let themselves go.  This was the place of absence, the absence of humanity and absence of divinity.  Elie Wiesel was unwilling to justify and excuse the behavior of either and he accused each of them of having been part of that “Night.”  When Elie Wiesel was at Augustana his last time, he was asked whether he hoped the messiah would come in the morning.  He answered that it was too late for messiahs.  If  God and the messiah were not moved by the death of a million and a half children, it was too late .  As he said, “Let them stay where they are, it is too late.” And yet, at the conclusion of his talk, he asserted , recalling the words of Maimonides. “I believe in the coming of the messiah and though he tarry, I shall wait, I shall wait.”  He was determined that people know that the “Night” lives within each of us and can rear its horrific head at any time, if we are not vigilant.  The “Night” is real, it is evil, it is within our capacity.  And God and messiahs will not stop the world from being a dangerous place.

I, personally, will miss his gentle haunting voice and his terribly moving stories. He was a mentor and a teacher for me.  In so many ways my teaching life has been formed by his voice.  I know I will keep reading his books and listening to his words but I will miss him very much.