Recently I had the responsibility of sitting in on a counseling session after a talk that was given for my church’s youth meeting; I have generally enjoyed these times because it offers what I think to be, a prime opportunity for young people to explore the buzzing questions that often gnaw at them, they may not often get the opportunity to ask.
During this session, I was asked a few questions that were profound, but it made me stop and spend quite a bit of time to share with the young man I was counseling the nature of answers. I recall this session vividly because I took some time after the session to muse upon the same thing I told this young man, it is the same thing I want to share with you.
I understand curiosity and the desire to know that prompts the questions with the eager expectation of being satisfied with not just an answer but a good one. This has been the case for centuries; as a matter of a fact, schools of philosophy were founded to address the big questions that people ask and to explore the answers that men gave; the very word philosophy derived from the greek meant effectively love for wisdom.
Socrates himself had a method of asking questions to investigate and come to some sense of truth, as he rightly says to Euthyphro “as it is, the lover of inquiry must follow his beloved wherever it may lead him”.
Even with Paul at the Aeropagus, questions abounded with the statement “may we know what this teaching is that you are presenting?” and even Solomon in Ecclesiastes, known by many along with Proverbs as the book of Wisdom, with Rhetorical questions, an appropriate tool, to draw the reader in Vicariously as if they themselves asked the question.
Questions and dialogues
Yes questions have existed for as long as dialogue and enquiry existed. But bigger than questions is the hope that you seek from the exercise, answers. The scriptures anticipate that answers exist even in the midst of questions, for example Peter says in his first letter “...always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you…”
It calls on us to always be prepared to make an ‘apologia’ a reasoned defense; effectively be prepared to give answers. During Jesus’s time on earth he was confronted with many people with various questions and he gave various answers or better yet he always responded. It is my hope to share with you a few thoughts on this topic that I do hope will serve you well as we think about this topic.
Firstly before we get to questions we must consider the people who ask and the context or circumstances in which the questions are asked. One Christian Apologist always rather wisely advised his hearers that “whenever you answer a question, please never forget you are answering a questioner as well”.
A man is never really fully untethered from his circumstance; meaning he never really asks from the position of a blank slate. We are a sum total of our environment, maybe not totally, but surely it is a contributing factor when we ask questions.
My point is this, when a man is impacted by his environment, he begins to think and process and he turns inwardly to ask himself these questions to make sense of life and ultimately he turns outwardly to people and to God to do the very same thing, his questions therefore are not purely ideological or theoretical they are an expression of his experiences, that he seeks to make sense out of-hopefully.
It is a duty then to engage with such a person with the above understanding in mind. Essentially because a man articulates his thoughts in the frame of a question, we can often miss all that has led him to the very point of asking and therefore fail to serve him well.
One question
Secondly, information is limited in two senses, firstly, oftentimes when one asks questions, one must be reminded of how finite we are, and therefore our ability to know is an extension of this fact.
What we have to be careful about concluding is that because we can’t know 100% details about something then we cannot truly know anything, and so we espouse a sort of skepticism; seeking for a kind of certitude. I would argue that what we look for rather is ‘philosophic confidence’ rather than certitude, Greg Gilbert puts it quite well in his book ‘Why Trust the Bible?’
He says “...we’re not looking here for mathematical certainty but rather for historical confidence…” he continues the thought to show how it applies to the present point by saying “...historical confidence provides sufficient grounds for action. Occasionally I’ve run into people who assert that they’re not going to act on anything without first hand experience of it. If they didn’t see it or experience it, they say, then there’s just too much doubt to act on it in any way..the fact is we all put confidence in-and act on- things of which we ourselves have no direct knowledge or experience all the time”.
The above quote is helpful in clarifying our expectations. Another helpful point is Josh Mcdowell’s classic example of a chair, where we put so much faith and trust in this object to hold us up and yet we do not know with 100% certainty if the chair will break or simply not do what it is designed to do.
Now just because that is a reality does not mean we slip into skepticism because we can’t know with certainty what we do rely on is-as stated above- is a confidence, that what we have come to know can be believed.
Information is also limited not because the fullness of it does not exist, but because information exists for a purpose, for example in Deutoronomy 29 verse 29 Moses writes “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law”. The passage shows that the information is limited because what is given to us demands a response and an action and also because not all information is for us to know.
Part 2 continues 31 December.