Keeping The Faith When Questions Outweigh Answers

Lately, several people have asked me about books to read in their struggles with questions about faith. Together, we have been looking into a number of recent writings on the subject. And I have been thinking a good bit all over again about how the Christian tradition articulates not only what those beliefs are that Christians are supposed to uphold, but the reasons for our believing that they are true at all times and everywhere.

One thing I have discovered in the process is that there is still a considerable number of books out there on dealing with questions of faith that are very well put together and deserving of serious attention --- e.g., William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd edition, Crossroads, 2008; Kenneth R. Sample, Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions, Baker, 2004; Ted Loder, Loaves, Fishes, and Leftovers: Sharing Faith's Deepest Questions, Augsburg, 2005. Another is that these popular writers, along with more theologically sophisticated ones such as James Gustafson (An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt, Fortress, 2003) and Peter Berger (Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Approach, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), take a very different approach to their subject than I have come to do.

All of them adopt the classic stance of apologetic theology, which is for a teacher or theologian to define questions of faith in a way that is too often abstracted from particular individuals' expressions of them in their own concrete struggles, and then to give their own scripturally-defended and logically-argued, but generic answers to them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. I myself like it and think I have done pretty well with it in my own ministry. But I also think that it leaves much to be desired.

A defense-of-the-faith approach to peoples' questions and doubts is necessarily teacher/theologian centered, not student/inquirer centered. It wrongly puts the respective caregiver in the position of an expert (especially when he or she has looked up the answer to a faith question in a book or books) on matters of a particular believer’s faith and practice, to whom it is then presumed that people in a faith quandry should look instead of trying to discover the answers themselves. But when we are struggling with questions and doubts about faith we need, most of all, to be listened to, respected, and encouraged to seek the answers that make the most sense to us, on our own terms. Meeting this need is much more difficult than spouting off answers, even good answers, to another’s faith questions and then summarily moving on to other topics on the answerer's own terms.

An illustration: One evening on our way back from Laity Week, a popular event sponsored by my seminary, a well read member of our church brought up what he deemed "a bizarre exchange" that took place in the course he was taking. Seemingly out of the blue, a man in his group threw out the question, Do you think people who don't go to church can get to heaven? Irritated by the interruption, the teacher of the course pounded out a Latin formula on the chalkboard (this was a very old classroom), translated it as “There is no salvation outside the church.,” and then treated the class to a tedious exposition of Cyprian of Carthage, ostensibly the formula's originator.

What especially interested my friend was not so much the abruptness of the instructor's reply or the the smugness of the elaboration, offensive as both were. It was the absence of any attempt, as he put it, to find out where the man who asked the question was coming from. At one of the class session's breaks, he and several others tracked the man down to try to find out just this, and got quite an earful for their efforts: The guy told us that his mother died the previous week and that all of her family members, himself included, were worried that she would be cut off by God because she had cut herself off from the church. Maybe knowing that would have changed the teacher's whole approach to the man's question. I'd like to think so, anyway.

There was much wisdom to be celebrated in that classroom that day, but not only from the instructor’s side of the lecturn. Theology does indeed have as one of its responsibilities figuring out the central core of Christian beliefs, especially in and for rapidly changing and challenging circumstances. But just what answers these beliefs have to offer cannot possibly be grasped until we plumb the depths of the questions to which people are seeking answers. Or in my friend’s words, until we know where our fellow strugglers are coming from.

IVF And The Right To Life

In vitro fertilization has long been a controversial issue for our society, except for couples who want children and for whom IVF is either their best or only option. It violates the (in my judgment, debatable) teachings of more than one religious tradition. Its failure can leave crushing disappointment and hopelessness in its wake. Its high cost creates pressure for quick success, and tempts physicians to increase the odds for such by transferring a larger rather than smaller number of embryos to the uterus in a particular cycle. And it sometimes forces medically necessary but ethically disturbing considerations later in a pregnancy about aborting one or more fetuses for the sake of the others’ and/or the mother’s health.

Of all the most recent discussions of these issues, surely the most volatile is the one set off by thenow infamous clinic whose doctors transferred six embryos into a California woman who had already proved her fertility six times over and who subsequently gave birth to octuplets from the transfer. (Two of the six implanted embryos subsequently split into identical twins.) Hopefully, the needs of the innocent newborn in this fiasco will not soon be forgotten in the rush to judgment on their mother and on the physicians and clinic staff members who aided and abetted what surely is egregious medical malpractice.

In the meantime, the rest of us might make good use of our reflection time to weigh some of the complicated moral issues that surround, sometimes oppressively, the practice of IVF. The situation begins with a couple unable to conceive a child by what is supposedly God’s own preferred way of doing it, and suffering no small amount of anguish over the all too evident absence of divine intervention to make their love-making “fruitful.” Into the situation enters an angelic host with medical degrees, offering a technological solution to their spiritual problem. For some observers, the only relevant moral issue is whether the couple will muster the courage to say “No” to the proposed intervention. For others, it is whether the couple will have enough hope to say “Bring it on,” with the more embryos successfully transmitted the better. Those who take either position will probably be more comfortable logging off of this website now, for in fact we have only begun to approach what is at stake morally with respect to the recent Nadya Suleman controversy.

Given a typical picture of multiple miscarriages and limited financial resources, most couples who make use of IVF would not be content with the transfer of a single embryo. (Currently, less than 10% of IVF procedures involve such.) Prevailing guidelines in the medical profession seem more reasonable, permitting in “usual” circumstances the transfer of up to two embryos to a uterus in any cycle. Transferring more increases the risks of neonatal deaths and of developmental disabilities over the survivors’ ensuing lifetimes. The problems begin when these guidelines are overlooked, along with the fact that transferred embryos many times yield twins (in a third of cases or more), or even triplets or more (between 4 and 5%). From both a medical and an ethical standpoint, is further intervention in these latter instances necessary?

Responsible physicians answer in the affirmative, at least in the sense that having the option to intervene medically is a necessary condition of responsible medical practice. What kind of intervention in specific? Basically, “selective reduction” of the multiples: in essence, abortion, on the basis of genetic testing, of observations via sonograms up to three months into the pregnancy, and sometimes of the parents’ gender preference.

Responsible ethicists have to weigh in on answering this question with other considerations in mind, also. One is the distressing possibility of selective reduction’s serving the purpose of engineering “designer babies” rather than just healthy ones. Another is having to wait a relatively long time in the pregnancy to learn enough about the relative chances of survival and thriving of each of the “higher-order multiples.” At three months, a fetus encounters us as much more like an actual human being than an embryo does at three days. But the right to life extends to all the embryos, and it is the very existence of them all that may be at risk precisely because “all” encompasses such an unhealthily large number.

One thing that seems clear from the Suleman case is that too many physicians out there are playing fast and loose with their Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Transferring fewer embryos at the outset of an IVF procedure will go a long way toward allowing couples to be fruitful and multiply responsibly, and toward freeing the rest of us from moral dilemmas that might be avoided in the first place.

Talking About Faith

Along with everything else that we are facing in these troubled times, many people are also struggling with unanswered questions about faith. Some turn to spiritual guides who offer only the kind of answers that discourage further exploration. Others, myself included, believe that a healthy respect for questions and doubts is what makes for a trustworthy guide on matters of faith.

There is nothing inherently wrong with providing well thought out answers to any number of faith-questions, as long as it serves the purpose of clearing up relatively minor matters --- e.g., whether any of Jesus' followers saw his crucifixion directly (yes) --- for the sake of focusing more intently on major ones --- e.g., whether it would make a difference to faith if his bodily remains were someday discovered in a previously unknown burial chamber (perhaps, perhaps not). With respect to the latter kind of question in particular, the Christian tradition represents a wider range of opinion than most believers may realize. Because this is so, helping people with questions about its beliefs and practices should be less a matter of giving definitive answers (e.g.: If you are the Christian you say you are, then you will believe/do…) than of encouraging attention to as many possibilities for interpretation as possible.

Not every believer, it must be said, understands the Christian faith this way. Some have told me in no uncertain words, for example, that there can be no uncertainty for a true Christian. A questioning spirit is an unfaithful spirit, of which one must repent. A less extreme version of this point of view insists that questions about the faith of the church should be referred immediately to religious authorities who alone can provide timely, credible, and approved answers to them. I respect the integrity with which many clergy and lay colleagues in ministry have defended this way of looking at things. Nevertheless, I must continue to disagree with them. As does a very good friend of mine, who puts his own objection to their outlook this way: God gave us minds, and he expects us to use them. To this wonderfully pithy statement I have only one thing to add: when we put our minds to the task of resolving our own questions and doubts about faith, it helps to have a caring Christian friend or pastor who knows how to listen, how to encourage us in our struggle, and how to refrain from imposing answers that could get in the way of our finding our own.

One very able faith-guide I know agonized over how to help a single mother of two think through whether she could in good conscience abort a fetus conceived as a result of rape. Because her upbringing included the teaching that human life begins at conception, this young woman had all of a sudden and through no fault of her own found herself without options and desperately looking to her caregiver for some. The question she asked, and the informed answer her caregiver gave her, opened up new possibilities for deeper exploration: Hasn't the church has always taught that human life begins at conception? The historically accurate answer to this question is "no." Her caregiver knew it, and immediately gave it, with the aim of encouraging her care receiver to look at her concern from every angle. After weighing all the options, she chose to carry her baby to term, even though she knew that her decision would have enormous impact on her life and the lives of the children she already had. Her caregiver put the outcome in what for me is exactly the right perspective: It's not what she decided to do that matters the most; truthfully, I would have made a different decision than she did. What matters is that as a Christian she realized that she needed to make a choice consistent with everything else that she believed.

Listening, encouraging, and holding back from sharing one's own convictions too soon and/or too confidently do not come naturally. Even trained professionals, the clergy included, sometimes forget that in fulfilling their respective callings to apply their knowledge skillfully for others' benefit, they can overwhelm people with answers to questions that their hearers are not really asking, and in terms that their hearers cannot really understand. Even though they do not come naturally, however, these skills can and do come with learning and practice. As does the passion to help people find answers to questions about their faith, or their lack of it, that their own life situations and circumstances compel them to ask.

You know, I ought to write a book about this someday. But wait: I just did. More from it later.