Pursuing God intellectually: Being honest about our questions

In my last post, I gave an invitation to pursue God intellectually.

Jesus identified the greatest commandment as loving God with our all of who we are, and Jesus specifically included loving God with our minds. But what does this mean? I suggested that we understand this as pursuing God intellectually in a way that is consonant with other relational pursuits. When we love someone, we want to know things. We are intellectually curious about what makes them tick.

Now this was only intended as an analogy and all analogies break down somewhere. When it comes to God, we are not simply in the sort of love relationship as we are in, say, a marriage. Pursuing God intellectually has its own shape, its own approach.

What does this approach look like?

The first thing I want to suggest is that we be honest about where we are at intellectually on matters of faith. What I mean by this is that, we tend to act as if we have perfect confidence in all matters. Suppose you were asked, “when it comes to faith, what questions do you have?’ If there are not a ready handful of things that you are thinking about, then I want to suggest you are not intellectually pursuing God.

There are a lot of things about God, the gospel, Scripture and Jesus that are really straightforward. However, beyond these things, there seems to be no end to interesting and knotty issues that are worth thinking about. Again, they are not necessary for a basic understanding of Christian, but the pursuit of them makes for a mature faith.

Now this doesn’t have to mean that everyone is always deeply struggling with some aspect of faith. You may be a person who has found Christianity to be completely reasonable and deeply satisfying as a worldview. There may not be deep seated doubt that is causing existential angst. But you too should be exploring deep and difficult questions that you have about your faith, if for no other reason, because you love God and are pursuing him with intellectual curiosity. It may just be wondering about some aspect of theology or an interpretation of some text. Or it may be wondering about the historical evidence for events in the Bible.

I very definitely have found Christianity to be reasonable and deeply satisfying as a worldview. Though I have had times of deep struggle, I don’t typically *deeply struggle* with doubts anymore. But there are some doubts I think about quite a lot.  These are things about which I don’t know the answer and it bothers me a bit from time to time.

For example, I do not know why God is not more obvious than he is. It seems to me that there are people who would be open to God’s showing up. Don’t get me wrong. Many people who say they are open to God making himself obvious are not genuinely open to it. And many people who say they are not hostile to the idea of Christianity or angry at God, seem to have a whole lot of emotion that fills their responses. But there seem to be some people for whom this would make a great difference in their life.

Now I can work this all out philosophically to my satisfaction such that the challenge doesn’t in anyway defeat my Christian beliefs. Like I said, I don’t deeply struggle with whether I should believe in the existence of God given his so-called hiddenness. I’m satisfied by the idea that it is God’s prerogative to be as obvious as he deems appropriate to his plans and his purposes (see here for a discussion). I believe that and find that this blocks the objection from hiddenness. I don’t think he has to be more obvious than he is. I just wonder why he’s not.

In addition to this, I wonder about the right reading of Genesis 1 and 2. To what degree is it metaphor and to what degree is it literal history (everyone in my context admits some anthropomorphisms, such as God’s walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and literal history, such as a literal Adam and Eve)? I wonder why God worked through a single nation for a couple of millennia setting the stage for the coming Messiah. Why, for example, didn’t Jesus come in the days of King David? I’m unsure why the Synoptics don’t include the story of Lazarus’s being raised from the dead. Why is it only John that includes that account? I wonder how to understand the dual natures of Jesus. Does Jesus, for example, lack knowledge in his humanity? Is there some sort of separation in his cognition where his human cognition is non-identical from his divine cognition in being fully God and fully man? I have the same sort thing when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity. I also have A LOT about eschatology about which I’m unsure, including why eschatology is so divisive despite specific views being so underdetermined by the biblical evidence (i.e., why don’t we hold these a bit more tentatively given how much interpretation has to happen?).

These are just a few off the top of my head. There’s certainly more. I should add, I’m not without answers for many of these. I’m also convinced of orthodoxy and traditional understandings of these things. But I guess I’m just not completely settled on some of the finer nuances in these discussions.The point is that it is in this wrestling that I come to a better knowledge of God in my pursuit of him.

What questions do you wrestle with?

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