The Church isn’t in a hurry. Neither should Christians be.
You can apply this in so many directions in our hurried world, but I’d like to think about our questions (again!). Questions require time. Fast answers are usually trite ones. Some intellectual curiosities can be settled quickly by a swift Google, but real questions can’t be.
The very biggest questions—Why did they die? Why did I have to live through that? And so many more—can’t be answered by glib answers fired from the hip. Or, mores the pity, sometimes they are answered like that in the evangelical world; they mustn’t be.
The wrestling with these questions is an important part of our Christian pilgrimage. Coming to an ‘answer’ is something we need to do. I use the scare quotes advisedly. It’s my experience that the most truly awful of human suffering isn’t ‘answered’ so much as that we come to a place of trust in God despite that. The Lord’s answers to Job are answers but the argument wouldn’t pass muster in an academic environment: it’s not that sort of answer.
Because it’s not that sort of question.
Which means that we should take our time in helping people answer them. I don’t mean be deliberately obscurantist: “Nope! Too soon to tell you that! Keep crying!” Rather, I mean that we need to walk along with people, giving what we have and giving them time to sit in the question for a while.
Afterall, if we’re talking about suffering, the theodicies we can offer are helpful but they don’t work in the face of pain. Instead, you have to grapple with the reality of your disaster and God’s providence and wander in the wondering of it all. There are answers but we come by them through mourning, through death and resurrection.
The Church has to have time. Which is convenient, for she does: time belongs to her and she marks it for us (if you’ve got questions about that just reflect on the date for a bit). This is true for these questions of the heart but it’s also true for the knotty ones of the head too. Does God have passions? The faith says “No.” So we confess, “no,” but there are some passages of scripture that might complicate that for us.
Thankfully the Church down the ages has considered them carefully and we can think along with the masters who will teach us to master our minds.
The Church has time to ask and answer questions
Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions, 118
It’s vital that we foster inquiry about God’s revelation and about our own interpretations of it. It’s uncomfortable to be questioned on what you’ve taught, but we need to embrace it. To not do so is to assume that your interpretations are unchallengeable; setting yourself up as a petty Magisterium. This is exactly what our Roman Catholic friends accuse us of doing. Instead, the spirit of inquiry is what makes us truly Catholic.
Which is all really easy to say but on the ground in the average British evangelical church is harder than you think. I can say “ask me about that over coffee” all I like (and I often do in my preaching) but not a lot of people do. Except, some do. I must treat their questions with grace and as worthy of my time. I should put good resources in their hands and as best I can gift them the time to consider what God has said. Rushing people doesn’t help them think.
The typical question immediately after you’ve preached is a good starting point, it’s good that people have them, but the questions I really love are the ones that have nothing to do with what I was talking about. That means it’s sat with someone as they’ve thought about it over some time. Last Sunday (as I write) a young woman asked me a series of deep questions about reading the Bible that showed she’s been considering things carefully for a long time. In our short conversation I wasn’t able to do much more than give her a gentle steer and then offer her a lifeline of “here’s what to do if you want to look into this more.” Time will tell, but may the Lord bless her mind.
Time will tell. Because there’s no rush. Ok, we’ve only got maybe eight decades or so on the earth. Great. That feels like a long time until it doesn’t. It’s a lot longer than two weeks though. Your questions don’t need answering today, but don’t ignore them, sit in the tension of them and think. We also won’t get to the bottom of many things in those eight decades. That’s also OK, the church has been thinking about them for two thousand years already and may have many thousands more to think about them yet (I obviously have no idea, but that’s my best guess).
Better than that even, after you’ve died and risen in the Resurrection of the dead, you’ll have eons to consider them before the face of God. You will discover truth and beauty and goodness and that those three are never opposed.
We’ve got plenty of time.
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
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