The place of questions…

Paula, a young adult who attended the Deep Stuff group in Wellington a few years ago, had previously held a deep commitment to her faith and participated fully in her church, in leadership and in the discipling of others until her 4^th year at varsity when she left church frustrated and disillusioned. She was struggling with issues that later she discovered many others also struggle with but no one talks about. 

“I have so many thousands of questions regarding my faith, scripture, God, church etc. they are genuine questions which have had me in tears of frustration over the last couple of years.”

These questions drove Paula to read and attend seminars and discussion groups in her search for “honest discussion with people who aren't scared to ask the big questions”….. “I long to talk with someone who won't throw out Sunday -school  lines like band-aids. Who won't think I'm a borderline Christian or spiritually ‘not in a good place' if I dare to doubt.”

Although she had many questions she wasn't actually after answers – “I'm not looking for a clued-up person who will make everything clear for me, because I am quite sure they do not exist. I would love someone to feel comfortable talking to me and bashing ideas around, even if they're not ‘theologically sound'. It would be good to know that other Christians were secure enough to be real with me, to be vulnerable and to join me in my search for spiritual reality.”

Unfortunately this wasn't what she found among Christian people – “I got a shock. I found that people don't like difficult questions, they aren't safe and they aren't nice, and it is much better to pretend that everything is OK than to ask ‘dodgy' questions.  My experience has been that if no pat answers are available, the question is usually disregarded. Some people were honest, saying they'd rather not think about such questions, that they're comfortable the way they are, that I should just have faith or pray more for answers or as one significant church leader kindly warned me, ‘if you rock the boat too hard it will flip over.'

In a world full of questions what Paula found was a church that only had answers. Paula is not alone in this discovery. This is what often makes it difficult for people to remain in  their church. One man put it thus: “You just don't question. If there was a doubt there you get rid of it.”

In EPC[1] churches it would seem answers hold a very important place while questions are generally treated with much greater suspicion because who knows where unanswered questions could lead people.  In this sense EPC churches tend to share a different ethos to that espoused by the popular culture as illustrated by  Cmdr Cisco in Star Trek – “It is the unknown that defines our existence; we're constantly seeking not just answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers.”[2] While the wider culture may be encouraging and fuelling people's questions and exploration of issues, faith and spirituality, the ethos in EPC churches tends to discourage open voicing and discussion of faith and life questions.

Mary Tuomi Hammond, an American minister who works with people she calls ‘dechurched' says: “If people cannot speak openly in church and ask their questions, express their doubts, tell their stories – they will go elsewhere to find authentic community and support.”[3]

When we confront the questions that go to the very core of our faith and will not go away we inevitably find ourselves at a crossroads and at those crossroads we have before us three options. Option one is dogmaticism, where we reinforce our faith stance from any doubt by shoring it up with points of evidence and appealing to external authorities or learned figures.  Metaphorically, we dig our heels in and ignore any evidence to the contrary, even when our personal experience may have provided such evidence, as we hold onto our faith believing what we always have believed despite the emptiness or shallowness these beliefs now convey. Far too often this is the road to growing inner resentment and a closing down to much of the reality of life.  It is also often the path continuously chosen by the most vocal stalwarts of faith in EPC churches. Having chosen not to explore their own questions they remain the most unwilling to allow the questions of others to be heard.

The second option is a form of reactionism where the power of doubt and the lack of answers take over and the tenets of faith are cynically withdrawn from. People who had grown up in churches and may once have believed in God, in an orthodox Christian sense, now reject such a belief taking on a new fundamentalism regarding their new non-theism which can now often be held to as strongly and rigidly as the Christian fundamentalists they ridicule. The options for dogmaticism  or reactionism represent two polar extremes. There is, however, a third option. It is the decision not to retreat to simple answers (dogmaticsm) or non-answers (cynical withdrawal) but to live with the discomfort and the tensions of not knowing. In this direction lie gateways to the wonder of mystery and a paradoxical faith that holds powerful seemingly opposite truths.

It takes real courage to face the possibilities laid out and not try to attach ourselves to any one before we even begin the journey of doubt. As Veiling, a writer on faith in the post-modern context, puts it: “there are times when we need to lose our way in order to be brought to a place where the question can emerge, it is not this lostness itself that sustains us, rather, it serves to point us in a new direction to find another way.” [4]

It is the same with the probing, irreconcilable questions of faith, where faith and doubt are not seen as the antithesis of each other, but are the two sides of the same coin. Often greater doubt precipitates greater faith. It is certainty not doubt that is the antithesis of faith.

In many evangelical circles it seems there is an unnecessary fear of questions. The fear appears to be, if we leave a question unanswered people might head off in the wrong direction. Yet it is often only when we are free to make a choice that we are able to do so. Only when we have real choice are we able to fully choose the best. It is when we are not given choice that we are most likely to rebel. Entering the realm of doubt and questions means entering a very vast expanse. An expanse that God invites Job into. God only answered his questions with bigger questions but in so doing God had spoken to him personally and Job was free to move on with a new trust and his unanswered questions.

Neils Bohr, Nobel prize winning physicist says while “the opposite of a true statement is a false statement, the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.”[5]  This leads us into the realm of paradox. Bohr argues if we want to know what is essential we must stop thinking the world into pieces and start thinking it together again. Profound truth is the stuff of which paradoxes are made.  To quote Parker Palmer – “the poles of a paradox are like the poles of a battery: hold them together, and they generate the energy of life; pull them apart, and the current stops flowing. When we separate any of the profound paired truths of our lives, both poles become lifeless spectres of themselves – and we become lifeless as well.”[6]  Relying on the reductionist approach of much modern religious study feels at times like the person of Jesus, the mysteries and otherness of God, the wonders of the trinity and the paradoxes of the scriptures are being placed on the operating table and dissected blood vessel by blood vessel, nerve by nerve, organ by organ until the life-blood has long since drained away.

Paula: “I still have many questions. But I have discovered something of the beauty of mystery, of things that are ‘too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.' I feel that my spiritual journey was one that required me to die on the inside in order to truly come alive to God, a God that was a lot bigger than I'd ever imagined, giving me a new understanding of the verse: ‘Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it can bear no fruit.”

And as we wrestle with our own questions the following words of St John of the Cross may be worth holding on to:

To come to what you know not

You must go by the way where you know not . . .

To come to what you are not

You must go by a way where you are not.[7]

            Alan Jamieson and Jenny McIntosh