Questions Allowed?

I received this email last week from someone we'll call Paula. I present it here with some trepidation, knowing that it's quite an invitation to non-theists to jump all over us Christians about how we deal with questions. But to re-direct that metaphor, her email is a good jumping-off point for discussion on how we know what we think we know, and whether we handle questions the way we should. The author has given me her permission to use it here, with identifying information edited out.

"I've just found your blog, I looked quickly through most of your categories, but could easily have overlooked lots of stuff. What I'm looking for is about why we take the Bible as authoritative. When non-Christians complain that Christians don't think for themselves, it's usually something to do with Christians' belief in the Bible. Some Christians think a lot - no knowledgeable non-Christian would be able to deny this. I went to a Christian university, and found it reassuring that there were all these faculty members with doctorates who had no trouble believing the Bible. But it seems that what no Christians I know ask - at least publicly - is why we believe the Bible to begin with, except to provide reasons to back up that belief. We can think for ourselves all we want - as long as in the end we can reconcile our ideas with the Bible. I've looked through parts of McDowell's books, and find some parts more convincing than others. (All that stuff about fulfilled prophecies seems to be starting with what we know happened and finding prophecies that seem to point to those events, even where the people first hearing the prophecy would not have expected anything of the sort in terms of fulfillment.)

"My older sister and I are both Christians, have been since mid-70's, both used to attend fundamentalist churches but now attend evangelical churches because fundamentalists (those who proudly claim the term for themselves) seem to have very little tolerance for people who don't think and live the way they do. But we live in different parts of the country, and both of us tend to find ourselves feeling a bit 'out of place' in most churches we have gone to. The churches that encourage asking questions and thinking tend to be the liberal ones; the conservative evangelical churches claim to encourage thinking, but if you question any of the real 'basics' then people get pretty uncomfortable with you. I don't have a real problem with most of what I've been taught to believe, but what I have trouble answering for myself is how I can really be sure it's right. For most Christians I know, 'the Bible says so' is enough. As to why they believe the Bible, it's been confirmed by archeology and anyway, 'I just know it's true.' I thought for years I had convinced myself it was true but finally realized it was mostly just that I had come to trust people who believed it was true. Mostly that still works, but it would be nice to have more than that..."

This is not something to respond to in just one post, but I'll start with this. The question, "why we believe the Bible to begin with," is appropriately answered with "reasons to back up that belief." I'm pretty sure Paula would agree with that, so I'm supposing that what she's asking for is a next level of answer, or maybe some continuing dialogue on the topic. The Josh McDowell material she's referring to is good and helpful, but where does one go for more? And is it even okay to ask about it?

Let's recognize that the problem is not simply that churches are uncomfortable with questioning the faith; it's certainly not that churches generally expect their members to be mindless, unquestioning robots. It's partly that taking these questions to the next level requires more specialized knowledge than even most pastors have. Moreover, most church members are content with trusting the Bible without that kind of deep digging, so pastors and other leaders don't get called on to do that extra research.

That's not to say that nobody has answers. I'm currently reading Reinventing Jesus: What the DaVinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don't Tell You, by J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace. Josh McDowell has touched on questions of how the New Testament was developed and transmitted down the centuries; these authors dwell on it at length in a lay-friendly but highly researched format, specifically responding to charges made by Dan Brown, Bart Ehrman, and others.

I'm hardly an expert in Biblical historical and textual criticism, but this has been helpful to me. I'm also carrying around Bart Ehrman's contrary view, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, for reading as soon as I get the chance. Most of us will never be experts in these things, and it's asking too much even for most churches to have experts on hand. But we lay people can query the experts by reading books like these.

As to liberal churches being more open to questioning, that may indeed be the case. Some conservative churches are more wary of questions than they need to be. On the other hand, in some churches, all the value is placed the questions: it's wrong to suggest that one has answers. Such churches make it a virtue always to be very open-minded, except they are terribly closed-minded about the possibility that the questions have actual answers. Here's an example from the extreme left end of that continuum, courtesy of Stand to Reason, which also shows how this functions as that kind of example. And it is a continuum; we won't get anywhere stereotyping churches about this.

There's much more that could be said about all this; it's your turn now.

P.S. What about "fundamentalists"? I've been collecting information on that issue, and in my recent series on Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God I began writing about it. Let me just acknowledge for now that there are churches that really do discourage questioning of any kind, which is unfortunate, to say the least. Whether the "fundamentalist" label fits them is not the point, especially since the term is so deucedly hard to define. More on that another time.

Posted: Thu - September 28, 2006 at 12:30 PM |

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Questions Allowed?

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson