For as long as I have been teaching, I have encouraged my Christian
students to embrace questioning the elusive and confusing mystery that is
God.
In Jewish tradition, questioning the justice and methodology
of God is part of being faithful to the covenants God has made with the Jewish
people. If you believe in the promises,
you hold on to your doubts and you raise your questions.
I remember a day when I asked a Lutheran seminary professor,
why Christians were so reluctant to confront God concerning his unfulfilled
promises. He explained, whereas Jews
were born into a tribe and could never stop being Jewish, Christians, through
too many questions and doubts, could lose their faith. He feared Christians could stop being
Christian. Christians, he asserted, who
had been saved by the “amazing grace” of God could never feel as free as Jews
to question their merciful God without feeling they were betraying the deity as
well as their faith.
I suppose the real question is why are we asking questions
or make accusations? If we are not going
to get an answer, what is the point of asking questions? Jews, Christians and Muslims trust they have
received promises from God. When these
promises are not fulfilled, questions and accusations are an honest attempt to
exhort God to act like God. Questioning
and accusing God is not against faith.
It is an essential part of faith.
And, by the way, questioning is quite biblical. Of the 150 psalms in the bible, over a third
are laments and complaints questioning the justice of God. Jesus’ last words on the cross were a question
rooted in those psalms and directed at God.
And the Lord’s prayer is a prayer full of imperatives exhorting God to
act like God.
If you trust in the promises of God and they are not
happening, the faithful act is not to close your eyes and believe blindly. Blind faith is stupid faith. I do not believe God gave us a mind and then
wants us to turn it off when it comes to our religion.
More than anything else prayers and liturgy give us a time
and place to stand naked before God, to be honest and speak without pretense. It’s true, we may not receive a response. But, at least, we can say, we trusted in the
promises and spoke the truth.
Can Christians question God?
As an honest expression of their faith, yes! And, questioning God needs to be part of
Christian, Jewish and Muslim public worship.
We need to train people to understand that faith and questions are not
opposites. Most people going about their
daily lives may not have questions. That’s
fine. But when craziness or absurd
suffering happens to them and they experience the silence of God, they need to
know about the intimate relation between questions and faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment