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.
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