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.