Questions and Doubts

When we are children, we are told by our teachers and parents, "There is no such thing as a stupid question." As we grow older, when our questions become higher risk because they have implications far beyond ourselves, I think we stop asking questions. We want to look like we already know the answers, or we want to keep our world stable, safe, and unchanging. Whatever the reason, no one I know believes that there is "no such thing as a stupid question" anymore.

In his book Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell describes a Doubt Night he had with Mars Hill church. He explains that the Doubt Night was a time for the members of his congregation to ask their deepest questions about God and man.

He writes, "People were encouraged to write down whatever questions or doubts they had about God and Jesus and the Bible and faith and church. We had to get a large box to hold all of the scraps of paper. The first question was from a woman who had been raped and didn't press charges because she had been told that doing so "wasn't the Christian thing to do. The man then raped several other girls, and this woman wanted to know if God would still forgive her even if she hadn't forgiven the man who raped her."

He goes on to explain that the questions the church received consisted of "Heaven and hell and suicide and the devil and God and love and rape -- some very personal, some angry, some desperate, some very deep and philosophical."

In the past, I've felt that churches stifled my ability to ask certain questions. It is as though my theological curiosity is threatening to the Christian faith. It is as though because I don't understand everything there is to understand about God and because I am searching to find the truth about him by defending and refuting ideas, I have no place in the faith yet. I can belong when I learn to accept everything at face value without asking any questions about the unfathomable mysteries of the faith in order to know them more intimately. This is how I've felt about asking questions in the past -- like I'm a problem that the church isn't ready to deal with yet.

I'm going to take back the right to ask difficult questions, not in order to threaten anyone or to be bitter, cynical, and skeptical so that I can tear faith apart and replace it with my own ideas, but in order to learn and grow and change. I agree with Rob Bell when he says, "A question by its very nature acknowledges that the person asking the question does not have all the answers. And because the person does not have all the answers, they are looking outside themselves for guidence."

One of our goals over the course of this semester will be to generate geniune questions that we have about God and our human existence. We may not always be able to find the answers easily, but through study and conversation God will meet us. Ranier Maria Rilke explains a way of questioning patiently while waiting for answers that seems useful to me: "I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language." When we ask questions, we cannot demand fast and easy answers. We must ask with patience and wait for the answers which might be a long time in coming. We must have faith that the answers will come.

I believe that we can all grow by being honest and open with our doubts and questions for God. I'd like to make this blog post the beginning of our desire to learn more about God by asking him the deepest questions that are in our hearts right now.

Take some time after reading this post, and be quiet to see what questions you might have. Perhaps there's something you are curious about and would like to learn more about from God. Perhaps something has happened to you in the past, and you'd like to ask God why. If the questions that come to you are something that you'd like to share, leave them as comments on the blog. You can make them anonymous if you want.

Ask anything and everything.