Asking Questions for Christ’s Sake

Can you recall the first time that questions addressed to you began to bite? I can. I was a young, self-assured agnostic, intrigued by the Christian faith of two fraternity brothers, but certain that no scientific, thoughtful person could really hold to such superstition. Conversations with these friends led to their introducing me to a Christian professor, a young, distinguished metallurgist. I don’t know what I expected, but what I was confronted with was not a witness driven by naked faith, as I expected. I was faced with questions addressed to my confident agnosticism, questions that I had never been smart enough to frame to say nothing of answer. His questions bit into my self-assurance and arrogance. I left several of these conversations angry, an emotion that I doubtless expressed to my patient interlocutor. But, for me, those questions coming from this man of undeniable academic stature were the grit that presented the pearl of great price to me so that I could see the gospel treasure. His questions were powerful, a stimulus to my intellectual eagerness and integrity for fifty years.

Asking questions is at the heart of a vibrant intellectual life.¹ A few moments of thought about questions reveals why this is so. We can identify three ideal dimensions to a question: the acknowledgement of ignorance, the desire for an answer, and the community of seekers. First, the framing of a question requires the acknowledgement of ignorance. When the answer sought is relatively conventional and simple, this acknowledgement is relatively easy. But consider, for example, the stereotypical reluctance of men to ask for directions when they are driving to an unknown destination. Even that trivial question-asking can be a bitter pill to male expectations of ability and expertise. And, when the question is anything but trivial, when it represents a challenge to entrenched assumptions and recognized expertise, the acknowledgement of ignorance is a very big step. The acknowledgement of ignorance requires the intellectual virtue of humility. Without humility as a habit of mind and heart, questioning is silenced, not by external tyranny but by an unacknowledged character defect internal to the knowledge-seeker. And so, ignorance becomes invincible and intellectual life shrivels.

Second, framing a question expresses a desire for an answer. Desire, in all of its forms, arises from a love for something or someone that is absent. When that desire is sufficiently intense, it draws into a quest for the beloved. So, when we love the truth, the framing of questions directs us into a quest for knowledge. “Quest” and “question” share much more than a common linguistic root. Well-framed questions direct us into the quest for knowledge and truth. At the deepest level, this desire itself arises from the love of knowledge, another, and perhaps the most basic, of the intellectual virtues. Without a love of knowledge as a habit of mind and heart, ignorance becomes acceptable and the intellectual life becomes detached from its source of power and zest.²

Aristotle long ago observed that all people desire to know. The quest is, as it were, hardwired into our humanity. Or, to say this in our most accurate and fruitful terms, the desire to know is a glorious dimension of the image of God, which is ours as human beings solely on account of God’s gracious act of creation. But it is also worth asking, “What typically awakens this desire?” Three experiences are most often found at the root of our desire to know: wonder, pain, and perplexity. These three experiences sometimes come together and sometimes we face them separately. The order of their occurrence is not significant. Perhaps the answer to our most important and interesting questions involves us in all three experiences in ways that are extremely difficult to distinguish analytically.

The experience of wonder often awakens the desire to know in us. We are confronted with a fellow creature or a created process that evokes a response of “Wow! I must become more intimate with this.” The best researchers are fascinated with the things they study. They find them beautiful in and of themselves and seek to understand them more deeply; not so much to see how they might be used but because of what they are. Perhaps just a bit of this connection between “Wow!” and questions is observable in the verbal connection between “wonder” and “wondering.” We say, “I was just wondering; why did you draw that conclusion? I just can’t see it.” To this fascination a faithful Christian researcher adds the even deeper conviction that this thing is a fellow creature, a gift of the Maker of all things to be received with loving gratitude. With fascination arises doxology, wonder directs the believing heart to “Hallelujah.” So it is that “the fear (filial, awe-filled adoration) of the LORD is the first principle of wisdom.”

The experience of pain also gives rise to a desire for knowledge. Pain draws a person to knowledge through need. We endure pain or see the pain of others and are drawn to the quest to overcome it. That overcoming demands understanding of causes and the discovery of cures. A great deal of science, medicine, political theory, jurisprudence and theology is a response to the perception of need. We all have profound reasons to be thankful for this intellectual response to the experience of pain. We are indebted to researchers whose work has produced understanding and technologies of cure amelioration, and to the research universities that have provided the infrastructure and support for much of their intellectual labors.

One interesting outcome of the desire to understand and alleviate need and pain is the way it has often produced knowledge that is suffused with wonder. We observed that pain draws us to knowledge through need, while wonder draws us to knowledge through awe and love. These are contrasting experiences that motivate inquiry in different ways. But we also need to pause to reflect on the ways pain-motivated inquiry has produced wonder-provoking knowledge. For example, our understanding of DNA finds its roots in the desire to find cures for various genetic diseases. It was driven by the desire to heal. But what a wonder-provoking discovery is this complex, elegant, information-bearing molecule. We ask, in amazement, how a mere chemical structure common to all living beings can contain “information.” Yes, many are quite hostile to this question, ruling it out of court for science. But that response, an attempted veto of the quest, is manifestly irrational. Even if it is not a scientific question, it is an irreducibly human question.

Perplexity in the quest for coherence also activates our desire for knowledge. The things we think we know somehow do not fall easily into a coherent pattern. Sometimes we are confronted by flat out contradiction among our beliefs, and love of knowledge compels us to recognize that this is not an acceptable state of affairs. Contradiction does not indicate a grasp of reality. At other times we find our beliefs are not so much formally contradictory as they are incompatible and hard to bring together. Love of knowledge compels us to desire a satisfying intellectual relationship among our beliefs. We are drawn into the quest for coherence among our beliefs because we desire knowledge at present not available to us.

Now, this experience requires the humility we thought about earlier. We must acknowledge the incoherence and the lack of knowledge it suggests. But sometimes we resist the acknowledgment because of the tensions it creates. “Certainly,” we think, “this incoherence is only apparent.” Or, perhaps people whom we deeply respect have insisted that this is no case of incoherence. It is easier and often more convenient to just walk away from this sort of challenge than to face it squarely and deeply. Rationalizations are easy; humility is always difficult.

Similarly, in our most profound questions, wonder and incoherence are often found side by side, or intertwined with one another. Perhaps we catch a glimmer of this intertwining when we are attempting to master a difficult physical task and a trainer gives us instructions that seem counter-intuitive. For example, some years ago I had the opportunity to learn how to repel down the shear face of a mountain during a visit to Bear Trap Ranch, InterVarsity’s conference and training center in the Rocky Mountains. Like most new students of repelling, I stared down the face of a large cliff and worked hard to choke down my feeling of terror. I reminded myself that I was safely tethered and my teacher would never allow me to fall. So, I moved to the edge and with agonizing slowness, turned around, and placed myself to begin my way down the rock face. We had been instructed earlier that we needed to “lean back,” away from the face of the cliff. Otherwise we would dangle next to the rock face and be unable to repel. But, in that moment, never has instruction seemed more counter-intuitive. Every instinct made me want to hug the face of the mountain, and when I collapsed into my instincts, I dangled, was unable to proceed, and had to be dragged back to the summit and forcefully reminded of those instructions. I fully understood the physics that made these instructions a necessity, but in my nervousness and terror it was amazingly hard to act appropriately. On my second attempt, the teacher kept insisting, “lean back, lean away from the cliff, lean back, lean back.” In terms of our analysis in this article, it just seemed both wonderful to watch my fellow learners zip down the mountainside (I wanted to so badly) and incoherent and dangerous to do the very thing that made it possible. It was probably shame that ultimately triumphed; I obeyed, and I enjoyed the exhilaration of bouncing off the rock face all the way down to the bottom. For me, in any event, wonder (both terror and exhilaration) and incoherence were deeply wrapped around one another in my learning to repel.

Another example of this potent combination from the history of science is the quest for a workable model for light in physics. That light exhibited both the properties of particles (for example, it actually causes a very small but measurable pressure on the objects it strikes) and waves (light is reflected and refracted like wave phenomena) made it conceptually difficult to propose a coherent model for light. Resolution of the conundrum required not the denial of part of the data, but the creation of an alternative conceptuality, densely mathematical and expressed in the language of “photons,” particle-like bundles of waves. The same might be said of the Einsteinian revolution in physics, or the mind-boggling predictions and experimental verifications of quantum mechanics. Even the most basic of scientific disciplines frames its most important questions in the intertwined quest for coherence and wonder.

Understanding God presents us with perhaps the most limiting case in this regard. In seeking to know God, we are pressed against the limits of our capacity to know. The “Wow“ of confronting our Creator both draws us toward intimacy and leaves us with truths that are hard, if not impossible, to draw together into a perfectly coherent pattern. We are driven to acknowledge both our lack of inherent capacity to understand the unmade Maker of all things and the challenge of holding together the various things we know about Him, including the things given us in His revelation to us in Scripture. In this case, both humility and love of knowledge require us to acknowledge the presence of irreducible “mystery.” Indeed, our questions about coherence in our knowledge of God frequently find their resolution in the kind of “Wow“ we desire and experience in confronting and rejoicing in God.

So it is that the life of the mind cannot be severed from emotion and desire. We have frequently fallen prey to the notion that the mind is only heartless calculation and the heart only mindless feeling. But this divorce leaves both mind and heart impoverished. It carries us away from the wisdom of the Biblical tradition in which men and women think with their “hearts” and where we are called to love God with our minds. The asking of real questions sets us on the quest for knowledge and renews our love of knowledge. It draws upon and draws together our cognitive and affective powers. Asking questions with humility and a desire for an answer is, therefore, a central, irreplaceable practice in a vibrant intellectual life.

Third, we direct our questions to others. Real questions seek the community of other seekers in the quest for knowledge. Learning and the life of the mind are inherently social, even when the greater part of the “community” is with teachers long dead. And this is so, especially when we find ourselves unable even to determine where to begin our quest. What is more, all of us have been formed in a tradition of inquiry and reflection. We owe much of our ability to frame the questions that mean the most to us to teachers who drew us into that tradition. Indeed, it is the virtue of generosity in those teachers and in our fellow learners that gives us some of our most significant questions and encouragement in developing our most creative answers.

We sometimes address a question only to ourselves and engage the quest for knowledge internally and privately. Indeed, it is often critically important for us to do so. For example, some of our most searching questions are or should be about ourselves as questioners and knowers. “Have I dismissed this question because of arrogance or to defend my own position in the academic hierarchy I inhabit? Have I been adequately generous in my response to the challenges of my colleague? Have I functionally dropped out of the quest because I am so busy about my research program and the progress of my graduate students? When was the last time I was bowled over by the beauty of the things I seek to understand? Have I honestly faced the incoherence between what I believe theologically and what I affirm as I pursue my discipline?” As long as the life of the mind and the practice of asking questions is rooted in the moral and spiritual habits we call virtues, we will need to be vigilant in asking these kinds of questions of ourselves. We will need to be rigorous in insisting of ourselves that we take off our rose colored glasses that conceal what we are, deep down, as people.

But even here, this inward gaze will need to be complemented by the feedback and counsel of others. For example, none of us inhabits the virtues of the intellectual life with anything like perfection. We said earlier that the love of knowledge finds its source in the “Wow“ of our response to God’s good creation. There are also, in the life of the mind, honestly practiced, “Woe is me” moments as well. What we need then is repentance and forgiveness and the assurance of forgiveness, for sin and evil has devastating force in our minds as well as our bodies. If we face imperfections with unvarnished honesty we would all be led to despair. But (“Is not “but” among the loveliest words in Holy Scripture?”) the Lord’s provision of grace is sufficient, even for the mentally wayward, when we can say “Woe is me.” Wonderfully, “Woe is me” marks the path to Hallelujah. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ includes the generosity of forgiveness from others and the extending of forgiveness to others. A loving community of encouragement, a community that insistently asks and faces the most searching of questions and simultaneously lives in the grace of forgiveness is a critical resource for intellectual renewal and the long, arduous journey toward intellectual integrity.

In Part 2, we will consider how questions serve the quest. Coming in the February 2012 Lamp Post.

¹ This essay is dependent throughout on the analysis of questions in Leon Kass, “The Aims of Liberal Education,” The Aims of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 81-106. I have extended Kass’ analysis in several directions, from which he would no doubt dissent. The errors here are doubtless mine. I would offer every encouragement to read Kass’ article. You will also find a reflection guide in this edition of the Lamp Post that brings Kass’ article into dialogue with a passage of Scripture and seeks to offer some corrections and amendments to his views. Enjoy! But be sobered as well. This lecture was addressed to entering freshmen at the University of Chicago. It is clearly not just recruitment fluff for novices. There is plenty of challenge for seasoned academic veterans.

² For a profound analysis of the intellectual virtues and their place in quest for knowledge see Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Their chapter on the love of knowledge (pp. 153-182) makes the case for the foundational place of this virtue in the constellation of the intellectual virtues.

³ For Reno’s entire essay, click here.

⁴ See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton University Press, 2007) for reflections on these sorts of questions as an example of how we might proceed here.

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