On being a questioner
Yesterday, for some reason, I remembered a friend at a previous church approaching me and telling me that God had “put me on her heart.” She’d heard a sermon on how the intellect can lead someone away from God and become a source of pride. (Or something like that.)
The not-so-subtle message was that she felt my habit of asking questions was a primrose path to sin. She interpreted it as challenging or rejecting authority. In reality, it was — is — an expression of how God has made me, and the function he has given me in the body of believers. Some of us are questioners — or, as another, more understanding friend from that same time put it, “truth-seekers.” It’s how we process life.
I’m not sure why it came to mind as I was pulling out of the lot at Wegmans, but there it is: an experience I recall because it typified a certain kind of response to someone — a female someone — thinking in an evangelical church. Not everyone reacts this way; I’ve written before about the welcoming attitude my childhood church exhibited to questions about faith, and I consider this one of God’s best gifts to me. But in the many years and churches I’ve lived through since, that welcoming attitude has not always been the norm.
I have to admit, though, that although I remain a questioner/truth-seeker/active engager in matters of faith, I do recognize a certain peril in it — not just to my feeling of belonging in the community, but to my sense of security with my Christianity. I haven’t always found answers that satisfy, but rather move forward in faith based on provisional hypotheses. “Living the questions,” however hip it sounds, is actually rather hard to do. We need answers to build on.
Because I haven’t always felt like the living community of the church is a place to investigate questions or doubts — about the way God’s character seems to evolve in the Bible, or the way certain Bible teachings that seem clearly cultural are clung to today when they enforce power structures, or the questions I have about inspiration — I’ve looked to books for wisdom. There I’ve found some wonderful teachers. (My book reviews page lists a bunch of them.) But even there, I see a similar ambivalence about approaching faith through an overly intellectual lens. C.S. Lewis stopped writing apologetics once he realized he never felt farther from a spiritual truth than right after he finished defending it. Mystics like St. John of the Cross move beyond the rational. Scholars like Eric Seibert end up paving over the troubling aspects of Scripture by substituting a modern worldview that “knows better.” Even Peter Enns, one of my favorite contemporary authors because of his willingness to confront bewildering biblical phenomena with wit and knowledge, seems at times to be sawing off the limb he sits on.
Where am I going with this? I suppose I’m simply trying to process that memory in the grocery store parking lot. It made me revisit this piece of myself that thinks and questions, wondering whether it has been more of a force that drives growth, or one that alienates and neutralizes. The answer isn’t simple, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s because I have been true to the personality God gave me — or whether I need still to make my peace with it.
