Fellow blogger and Best Okie Blog nominee Erudite Redneck has a post on the idea of "false teachers", considering 2 Peter 2:1-22. Synchronistically, Adam at Pomomusings (which I haven't had a chance to peruse recently, unfortunately) has a review of a recent book, Questions to All Your Answers by Baylor University theologian Roger Olson. Also, somewhat synchronistically, Neil at 4simpsons has recently written a post on the priority of answers over questions in the Christian life (I know I promised never to darken his doorway again, but I saw this one earlier, and had to go there to find the link). All of this has led me to wonder over the nature of teaching, whether in a Christian context or otherwise.
Part of any process of learning, of course, is being given all sorts of information - the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence; the multiplication tables; Newton's laws of motion - that are a part of what it means to be an educated person. Yet, if the sole purpose of education is pumping otherwise empty minds full of unconnected facts, it is a paltry thing indeed. Much more important, it seems to me, is teaching children the lifelong habit of thinking for themselves. I believe that the thread that binds these otherwise disparate posts to which I have linked is my own feeling that the most important, and most difficult, achievement of any teacher, is the gift of questioning. Was the Declaration of Independence actually signed on the 4th of July, or the 2nd of July? Was the Civil War fought over slavery or states' rights over and against the authority of the federal government? Did Descartes compose laws of inertia and motion before Newton?
Now, of course, these questions all have answers that are both readily available and, depending upon one's preference for digging, easy to understand. Much more difficult to inculcate and sustain is a desire to ask questions that have either no easy answer or at least no answer as easily available as those to the questions posed above. Is justice, equality, or freedom the primary public good? Is economic freedom the same thing as political freedom? The most basic question, at once both simple and unanswerable, is the root of all religion, science, and philosophy - Why is there something rather than nothing? Ultimately unanswerable, this question nevertheless encapsulates all the hopes, fears, dreams, delusions, and both the banality and profundity of existence. Just because we recognize that it can never be answered with anything like equanimity or a final conclusion does not mean it should be ignored. It is the question that leads to all others. Asking this question is the most basic human response to the wonder and terror of existence.
The same approach applies to the life of faith as much as any other area. It is both unsettling and liberating to realize that the answers one assumed at one time to be bedrock-solid have faded like mist in the noonday sun of further reflection and experience. The thoughtlessness and (as no other word is really appropriate) authoritarianism implicit in an approach the privileges answers over questions - especially questions for which there really isn't an answer - deprives human beings of their most precious gift from a loving God, a mind to contemplate the possibilities inherent in living a life that ends in silence. Resting comfortably either in one's childish preference for quick fixes or supine devotion to those who provide solutions for the insoluble are hardly recipes for serious grappling with the mystery of the Christian faith.
It is all well and good to offer examples of how to begin searching for clues, if not answers, to the ponderables of life through Bible study, etc. I believe, however, that surrendering the God-given gift of thought for the quick fixes of the divinely inspired purveyors of spiritual snake oil is a sin against God. I do not believe that answers are important in the Christian life, precisely because I believe that there are no answers. Life, Christian or not, is not a test. There is no crib sheet at the end that shows us whether we were right or wrong. All there is is doing the best we can as we go, satisfying ourselves perhaps for the moment that we have achieved some satisfactory response to all the conundrums of life, only to realize we were clueless after all.
Virtual Tin Cup
