#527: Against Better Questioning

+ FREE COPIES of CIQ FOR MEMBERS IN 2024 (US Only)

MLA: Alright, US Readers, it’s happening: become a member of this newsletter in 2024 for at least $20 annually and I will mail you a copy of Called into Questions. If you became a member at some point in the past three months, you can get a book as well. Most of my writing here is for members only, so this is a great opportunity to join a growing community of thinkers while also getting a book that is still batting a perfect 5.0 on Amazon Reviews.

Fill in the form here once you become a member. Books will be mailed monthly. (Sorry to my Canadian and international readers. I wish I could include you, but the book is not available internationally.) Now, on to it…

After three months of silence about Called into Questions, two reviews appeared in the span of forty-eight hours. Amy Mantravadi’s review graciously distills some of my central themes (excerpt below), in ways that make the book seem more approachable than I fear it actually is. The idea that the book is “not safe, but good” is a quip I wish I could put on the cover. 

And then Andrew Spencer gave a warm—though not precisely glowing—review of the book at The Gospel Coalition. Spencer commends the book as planting “the seeds of longing for a better posture toward the faith—one that asks healthy questions, which is at least a beginning.” That is as succinct a description of what I had hoped to do in the book as I have seen; if I managed only to do that much for a reader, then I will regard my time well spent. 

But Spencer notes some of the books limitations, as well. While he thinks the vision I offer for the intellectual life is “compelling,” he contends I offer “little in the way of practical help to ‘learn to live interrogatively.’” I did not offer enough “handholds,” he suggests, to those who are outside the academy to help them learn to question better and proposes that an “appendix with practical suggestions for how a group of friends could grow in their questioning ability would have enriched the volume.” 

Now, as critiques go this all rather mild stuff. And I am tempted to simply pass it all by out of gratitude for paying attention to the book at all. But we writers are generally a self-indulgent lot, and this is my first chance to interact with a real reader and critic. Think of my response here as demonstrating my debt of gratitude: if someone takes the time to register the faults of this book I think it only polite to honor them by attending to them. More fundamentally, Spencer’s critique gives me the chance to think again about what I was trying to do with the book. 

I am tempted to quip that Spencer’s critique bottoms out in the contention that I neglected the “application” part of the sermon—a point that amuses me and other long-time listeners to Mere Fidelity, who know that I am steadfastly, resolutely, and unapologetically opposed to the standard use of “application” in contemporary evangelical homiletics. I am inclined to think that distinguishing between the substance and the application does no one any good, as it artificially bifurcates the two modes of reasoning (theoretical and practical) and often over-determines peoples’ imaginations. In general, people do not need my imagination to convey what they ought to do in order to become better questioners: they need to immerse themselves in a vision of what the intellectual life looks and feels like and begin to conform their own lives accordingly. What that looks like will vary, considerably—and there is a real sense in which the best and most important ideas for how questioning well will bubble up from the lived experience of people faithfully attempting to create communities where such questioning happens. 

While Spencer is right that the book does a (very) poor job of articulating how an intellectual life might be embodied by, say, working mothers or the eldest sister of five children, I think he discounts the extent to which the book does in fact offer a practical shape for making a life of questioning well. I devote an entire chapter (my last real chapter, in fact) to articulating how the four cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and prudence might shape our inquiries. The virtues are not necessarily action-guiding: thinking about justice does not answer the question of what we owe to another in any particular situation, just as “temperance” does not answer or explain which desires are excessive and which ought to be fostered. Yet reflection about the virtues does help shape our imagination so that we approach practical contexts differently than we did before. And those sections do have a fair number of practical counsel, for what it is worth, like leaving behind the internet and reading books. 

At the same time, the broader media ecology within evangelicalism has made me deeply skeptical of the kinds of direct, practical counsel that Spencer seems to want more of. Pragmatism is a disease that has overrun evangelicalism and I confess I worried that if I gave too much quarter to it, everything else said would be lost. I will not name names, but I recently picked up a trade Christian book on a related subject by a writer I admire and was astounded by how little it managed to say. I think I might have sold more copies if I wrote a book with the appendix Spencer wanted—but I confess I am more concerned about whether I would also be selling my soul.

Evangelicals do not need books with thirty-seven helpful ways to become better questioners, which they can flip to and skip the (relatively!) hard exegetical work I do about doubt and lament in Chapter Three. It is a hard season of the church’s life and only the sober and serious are going to survive. We need a great deal less “application” in our churches and a great deal more willingness to leave people in a position where they have to do some hard work themselves to see how God is calling them to link up what they have read to their own lives and communities.  

Practical counsel about how to improve as questioners runs counter to what I try to do in the book in one other respect: I think we “question well” when we earnestly, honestly, and charitably ask—the questions we have. Or maybe I should say the questions that have us. I am probably a cynic, but I half suspect (a vice, I know) that many people who spend their days learning to perfect their questions have long forgotten what it feels like to be so gripped by an unknown that one cannot help but to pursue it. Anyone can ask a question—but I am not entirely convinced that, in doing so, that a person’s soul is being touched by the unknown in such a way that they yearn for resolution. That is the form of questioning which I think is animated by the love of God, and which is not reducible into the “better” or “worse” form of questioning that an “application” section of the book might convey. I will conclude this thought by luxuriantly quoting myself, from my treatment of “justice” and questioning: 

In thinking about the justice of our questions, then, we should embrace God’s justice on the cross and feel free to “inquire badly,” to modify Martin Luther’s famous dictum “sin boldly.” Justice for our neighbor is the love of God in its social form. We can count on God’s grace to remedy our unintentional imperfections. This is no license to be heedless in our questioning and trample each other as though nothing we do matters. Conscientiousness is the freedom of a clean and easy conscience, which empowers us to ask the questions we have—instead of the questions we anxiously perfect as Good Questions. No one is less self-conscious about their ignorance than a child, and no one learns as quickly about the world either.

One More Thing

It did not fit above, but Spencer suggests that my book “enables doubts but pushes readers to doubt their doubts.” I understand this sort of line, as it riffs on a theme that Tim Keller made popular. But I recoiled a little while reading it, as I definitely do not want to enable “doubt” so much as free Christians to embrace uncertainty. I remain deeply opposed to “doubt” in the sense that the Bible speaks of it—though to understand what that sense is, and how it differs from uncertainty, you might have to read the book.

Related: From Amy Mantravadi

How does this affect the way we think about doubt? Anderson sees the answer in Christ’s cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46, Mark 15:34) In that heartrending moment, Christ voices our doubts about God’s goodness, love, and even existence. “Doubt is the enemy of faith—but like all the enemies of God, it is a defeated enemy that has no power or hold on us. None other than God Himself has freed us to ask our question in a minor key, to raise our complaints to God until we have ‘grief without grievances’ and begin to find joy” [p. 55]

On the cross, Christ takes on the role of questioner, advocating on our behalf before the one who holds the answers. “Christ carries the burden of asking about God’s hiddenness for us, freeing us from our anxious demands that He show Himself. We may still ask where God is, and sometimes we must. But we need not fear that we will meet silence. For the question Christ asks has gone to God before us and the Word of God does not return void” (p. 57).

As they say, read the whole thing.

From the Newsletter: Pro et Contra

My sister who is not a Christian is engaged and is considering asking me to help officiate the part of the ceremony asking "who gives this man to this woman?" (Someone else will be officiating the main parts.) She has, for years, made comments about the lack of comfortability with having her own children. If they do ask me, would it seem fair to ask them if they are "open to considering children in their marriage" and accepting or rejecting participation in any kind of officiation that I would do for her? 

I offered two different “answers” in a previous issue. Pro et Contra is one of the best reasons to become a member, I think.

Around the Web

I do not think I am persuaded by Eve Tushnet’s reading of Fiducia Supplicans, which explained how Roman Catholic priests can bless same-sex couples. But it is one of the most generous and sympathetic such readings from a Catholic who affirms the traditional sexual ethic that I have seen.

I also liked this piece on Fiducia Supplicans by Robert George, John Finnis and Peter Ryan, though for very different reasons.

People’s names were changed at Ellis Island? Yeah, turns out that’s a myth.

What does it tell us about our own era that our villains can be thoroughly evil but our heroes can’t be thoroughly good? We’re weighed down by despair, and therefore prone to cynicism. We can recognize goodness when we see it, and we are attracted to it – this is why nearly all popular stories continue to make the good guys win – but we don’t really believe that the good is more powerful, more fundamental, than the bad. The bad is more basic, more real, than the good. So a villain need not be complicated by a tug toward the good (though plenty of villains are portrayed this way, appropriately so), but every hero must be conflicted.

From this wonderful essay on the differences between The Lord of the Rings books and Peter Jackson’s films, by my good friend Tom Ward.

The Penultimate Word

“Do not abandon me, O Lord my God, do not leave me alone (Ps 21:2(22:1)). Let us make this prayer in him, let us make it through him, for he intercedes for us; let us say, Do not abandon me, O Lord my God. Yet elsewhere he had prayed, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mt 27:46), and here he prays, O my God, do not leave me alone. If God does not abandon the body, is it conceivable that he abandoned its Head? Whose voice is this, then, if not that of the first human being? Christ proves that his flesh is true flesh inherited from Adam when he cries, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? But God had not forsaken him. If he does not forsake you when you believe in him, did the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one holy God, abandon Christ? No, but Christ had taken the identity of the first human being to himself. We know this from the apostle’s words, Our old humanity has been nailed to the cross with him (Rom 6:6). We should never have been rid of our old nature, had he not been crucified in weakness.’ He came for no other purpose than that we should be renewed in him, for it is by longing for him and imitating his passion that we are made new. It was the voice of weakness, our voice, that cried out, Why have you forsaken me? And the next words were, the tale of my sins, as though Christ were saying, “Those words were the words of a sinner, but I have transformed them into my own.” Do not leave me alone.” — Augustine