Is it really okay to question God?

Many well-meaning Christian philosophers have pushed students to question their faith too hard without ever teaching students how to question well. This can result in the student walking away from his or her faith in confusion. I want us to ask the deep and difficult questions but I am definitely not here aiming at confusion. Rather I’m aiming at genuinely knowing God more fully through pursuing him intellectually.

Let’s look at 3 examples that illustrate how to appropriately pursue God with intellectual curiosity.

Childlike Faith

Let’s talk about children and childlike faith as, I think, children are a great example for us. It is important to note that the call to childlike faith is not to a call to childish faith. In fact, the writer of Hebrews challenges us to leave the childish thinking about God, the milk, and dine in maturity on solids (Heb. 6:1-2). But there is a quality of being childlike that Jesus pointed us to on more than one occasion in the gospels (e.g., Matt. 18:2). It seems to me that children have an almost undying trust and faith in the adults in their lives.

Now it’s true that children are very trusting but they are also VERY curious and many children beautifully strike the balance between trusting and being curious. They ask questions, questions and more questions. One of my children is especially given to curiosity. She asks questions about EVERYTHING! I sometimes have to cut her off, giving her the “okay sweetie, last question” because if I don’t I won’t make it to work on time. However, in all of these questions, I have never once felt that she didn’t trust me. In fact, she was coming to me with questions precisely because she trusts me and loves me. When children ask questions, their attitude is rarely skeptical or cynical (that comes in the teen years, or so I hear). Generally speaking, they are not trying to usurp or unseat the authority of the father or mother. They are just simply and intensely curious. My daughter may ask me how does a car make us go so fast because they are filled with wonder and awe at moving down the highway. Notice she didn’t even hesitate to get in the car with me and is not any way cynical about it. She is simply voicing a puzzle to someone who is to her an authority, an authority whom she loves.

Lovers

Another example is of those who are newly and wildly in love. It is possible for these lovers to gaze into each other’s eyes and simply study each other. In a fresh new love we want to know everything there is to know about our significant other. We want to know how she thinks and are intrigued by (what may seem to us outsiders to be) minor details of response. This is not because we don’t trust our new love. In fact, we probably trust him or her to a fault but have an insatiable curiosity. Those in love in such a manner would never be satisfied with say “she says it, I believe it, that settles it” but, out of a deep loving curiosity, we want to know why she says it.

Allow me a final illustration that I and many students have found useful. I routinely fly on airplanes and many of you reading this do too. We literally entrust our lives, indeed, place our faith in these airplanes quite regularly. However, I know very little about flight. Somehow a craft composed primarily of steel weighing in at around 1 million pounds can lift off the ground and ascend to 30,000 feet in the sky and get us to our destination. If we let this sink in, it is wondrously amazing. It is very natural for us to have a question (or thirty) out of curiosity for how this is even possible.

Questioning at 30,000 feet

But notice we can have these questions but we still make our flight to Chicago or LA. That is, we can maintain our questions and most likely have many of them go unanswered regarding how a million pounds of mostly steel can soar through the air 6 miles up, and all the while continue to trust the airplane. In fact, we can even have a friendly conversation about aeronautics while in the air if we had the good fortune to sit next someone who knows about these things. I may not understand a lick of it but we could finish our conversation and go on our merry way once the plane touches down. Notice we need not be skeptical and doubters to be curious about an object of wonder. We can question something in genuine curiosity while still placing my faith in the very object of my curiosity.

When it comes to God, the call here is to pursue him with curiosity simply as a matter of our love and devotion to him. We can maintain our faith in God while asking deep and difficult questions about our faith, where the questioning comes from a deep and abiding love for God and desire to know God more deeply.

Walking Away

But don’t we still risk folks walking away from the faith? Of course we do! There’s always this risk in making one’s faith their own. You could always try sheltering, brain washing and even threatening people to stay faithful. But besides the blatant moral problems with this approach, this risk, it seems to me, does not go away in the slightest and in fact is perhaps greater.

Christian Apologists, you should be aware of Mark Lanier.

Mark is an “Attorney, Author, Teacher, Pastor and Expert Story Teller.” We are so excited to host him at the Stand Firm Apologetics conference (4/15-16 at Southwestern Seminary in Fort worth, Texas) where he will be giving a plenary talk. Let me tell you just a bit about him.

As an attorney, Mark and his team have won a variety of landmark cases with verdicts or settlements netting hundreds of millions of dollars for their clients, with a recent verdict against a large Pharmaceutical company amounting to 9 billion dollars! So he’s sort of successful.

Despite this “worldly” success (whatever that amounts to), Mark is a vocal Christian and makes his mark (sorry!) in the local church and academics, as well as a speaker and writer.

One thing worth mentioning that makes a weekend trip to Houston worth it for me, is that Mark built a 5th century Byzantine chapel and theological library in his front yard. You mean you don’t have a 5th century Byzantine chapel in your front yard?! The Lanier Theological Library has over 70,000 volumes and, among other things, houses one the best CS Lewis collections in the US.

Mark also teaches a very popular Sunday School class (700+) at his church and has a love of and expertise in Biblical languages.

He fits our Stand Firm conference given that he is the author of Christianity on Trial.  This is a nicely done and provocative book, framed, as the title suggests, as Christianity’s trial. It begins with an opening statement, there is the defense, and finalizes with closing statement. The following is a presentation (at the Lanier Library, by the way) of the major contours of his project.

I’m always excited to see someone who is an expert in a particular field and bringing those particular talents to bear on issues of faith. Just think of the contributions of guys like Lee Strobel (journalist) and Jim Wallace (Cold Case detective) and many more still. They oftentimes get an audience philosophers will never get.

Check out Mark Lanier and tell me what you think:

…but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence. (1 Peter 3:15)

1 Peter 3:15 is often the “go to” passage for many apologetics textbooks and presentations but, unfortunately, the context of the passage is rarely highlighted. If we fail to consider the context, we risk missing what Peter is saying. The overall context of the passage is that Peter is describing how to do relationships Christianly. He begins chapter 3 talking directly to husbands and wives and then more broadly to how we are to relate to others. And then he says:

To sum up, all of you be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit; not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead (1 Peter 3:8-9)

As we see in this passage, it is thoroughly Christian to work for harmony and peace. However, the reality is that it is not always going to work. Sometimes folks will persecute us precisely for doing good and for being Christians. When this sort of suffering occurs, Peter tells us that we should not fear the intimidation and should not be troubled (v. 14). Instead, and here it comes, with Christ as Lord in our hearts, we are to be ready to make an intellectual defense (an apologia) of the hope, namely, the gospel, that is within us (v. 15).

So the context of this passage is that Peter is detailing how Christians should relate to others and live in the world. The interesting thing is that he links having Christ sanctified in our hearts with being ready to make a defense.

There are many things we see in this passage. I will mention four observations.

First observation The term Peter uses here, from which we get the name Apologetics, is apologia. This is a legal term that would bear at least a resemblance with what a contemporary lawyer does in a court room. The lawyer does not only respond to objections but will assert positive theses about his or her client and will defend these theses. In short, the lawyer provides reasons for thinking a certain thesis is true. Similarly, the disciple of Jesus Christ is called to be prepared to provide reasons for thinking that Christianity is true.

Second observation We should notice that Peter is not only addressing pastors and church leaders. He is characterizing Christians in general. He begins v. 8 with “all of you.” Being ready to defend is not optional. It is for every Christian everywhere, no matter one’s vocation. It is as relevant to the plumber as it is to the pastor.

Third observation Peter provides us with only one tone in which these sorts of conversation should take place. We should, when we have opportunity to provide someone the reasons for the hope within, do it with gentleness and respect. There will be times in which we can rhetorically win an argument but lose the battle of winning a soul. This seems to seriously miss the point, to say the least. When we genuinely respect someone as a person and a seeker and gently but firmly make a case for Christianity and gently but firmly point out problems with one’s view, then there will be a far greater impact.

Fourth Observation The thrust of the passage is to be prepared to do Apologetics as a result of our sanctified hearts. It is not here a command to go out and accost the nearest atheist. The call here is not so much to a ministry to others as much as an attitude of the heart and a condition of the mind, to be a certain kind of person first.

This is not to say that apologetics has nothing to do with ministering to others. We are all called to make disciples (Matt. 28:19-20) and this will often involve making a defense of various aspects of the faith. But we often look at apologetics as primarily a ministry to atheists and unbelievers. We may sign up for a study in Christian apologetics to know what to say to our colleague who is vocally hostile to any religious faith or the family member that gives everyone a problem at holidays. This is undoubtedly part of the apologetic enterprise but it seems to skip to answering the questions of others before we have genuinely asked the questions for ourselves. If someone asked you to give an account for the hope that is in you, what would you say in defense of this position? I find that many people in the church have not thought through what reasons they do in fact have. I want to suggest that apologetics should begin with working out this account for ourselves first as the proper source for doing outreach to others.

Please save the date for our 2016 Stand Firm Conference! The dates are 4/15-16 (starts Friday evening to Saturday afternoon) and will be held at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth Texas. Registration will be opened in the coming weeks.

Keynote speaker: JP Moreland

Other speakers include Mark Lanier (also giving a plenary talk) Justin Bass, Corey Miller, Steve Lee, Paul Gould, Ross Inman, Keith Loftin, Mike Keas and Travis Dickinson.

We are so excited to have JP come to campus. He has played an important role in my life as well as the rest of the philosophy/apologetics faculty.

Here’s his bio:

J. P. Moreland is Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University in La Mirada, California where he has taught for 25 years.He has authored, edited, or contributed papers to ninety-five books, including Does God Exist? (Prometheus), Universals (McGill-Queen’s), Consciousness and the Existence of God (Routledge) and Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell).He has also published over 85 articles in journals such as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, American Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, MetaPhilosophy, Philosophia Christi, Religious Studies, and Faith and Philosophy.He has also published 120 articles in magazines and newspapers.

Here is his talk on “Loving God with all your mind”