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.