“In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way … of ignorance” says Eliot in East Coker.
Commenting on this, Matthew Lee Anderson says,
“It is a truth that is easy to write, but difficult to live out. Yet we can only learn when we are free to not know.”
Called into Questions, 26.
Anderson argues that it’s the art of questioning that takes us from the known to the unknown and gives us the opportunity for understanding.
In one sense it’s not revolutionary to say that to learn something new requires us to first not know. It doesn’t sound difficult, we’re all pretty good at not knowing stuff.
Except, we aren’t philosophically or emotionally good at this.
Imagine the scene, and let’s make it a church one:
The church is considering a tendentious theological question. Perhaps there’s a push to change their opinion on the subject in question. Inevitably there will people in the room who would welcome a shift and people who wouldn’t. The group that’s discussing the question will include a number of people who’s livelihood is tied up with the church, giving them financial incentives to go along with whatever the final decision is.
Both ‘sides’ in the room are anticipating that if the position is the opposite, this might have profound financial implications for them. Most in the room will have deep emotional ties to the church even if there are no financial ones, they will be are aware that a decision that they are opposed to is going to give them difficult decisions about whether they ride it out or not.
There are other angles to this but suffice to say that most people in the room have skin in the game. It makes clear thinking difficult. Christian thinking doesn’t need to be dispassionate, but it is difficult to think something through with others when the decision can have burdensome effects on your life that you’re already considering. It prevents you from asking the questions that put everything out on the table and let you start thinking things through from each required angle.
In the church so many decisions can be like this, or feel like they are this even when they aren’t objectively. It makes the freedom of not knowing very hard.
Free inquiry requires spaces where we can be free to be ignorant on the way to understanding. This is not ‘ignorance is bliss’—Christians have drunk from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, after all—but it is to highlight that the environment of questioning requires this sort of freedom.
Dealing with corporate anxiety
Continuing with the church leadership setting, what needs to happen to help people be free to not know so you can actually discuss the question at hand together? Three things:
Firstly, naming it. Naming takes away the power of the anxiety everyone is feeling. It would be helpful for the skin that everyone has in the game to be named so that everyone knows it. This can sound like a distraction and could become one if the point is to not tread on sore spots. Emotional safety is important, but that’s not the only goal here. Chesterton said that ‘When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he’s a liar.’ Inquiry requires knowledge of ourselves, we need to name the ways we are likely to be thinking fuzzily.
Secondly, this organisational anxiety needs to be ‘cut through’ by leadership. This is the now famous ‘non-anxious presence.’ Whoever is leading these discussions needs to, while understanding the tension people feel, keep everything focused on the question at hand. This will inevitably require an agreement on theological method and the limits of the inquiry in question.
Thirdly, everyone needs to commit to the need for truth. If you find the truth together that is better, whatever the implications. I know that many vexed theological questions are contested and suggesting that you just ‘find the truth’ is not as easy as it sounds; but if this isn’t your goal then you won’t become free to inquire. If you aren’t seeking the truth you won’t find it.
Making friends with our questions
Our ignorance matters, especially in the questions where we haven’t freed ourselves to question. Our knowledge of God is limited, and acknowledging this is required in order to push further into God and the faith.
This can sound like valorising doubt, as though it’s ‘stunning and brave’ to doubt key truths of Christianity. It isn’t, and it’s not. Instead, we have to acknowledge the truth of what we do and don’t know—and what we surmise and suspect—before we can keep walking towards understanding.
Distinguishing between these is important, without doing so our churches will lose the ability to ask questions. Anderson would go as far as to say we should make friends with our questions and learn to love them.
In a particularly difficult discussion in the church this is hard. It’s vital work though. True certainties can stand our questions, and false certainties need to be torn down. It’s in the questions of others that we are invited to reimagine the world.
Seeking others’ questions
To return to this complex debate our hypothetical church are having—hopefully over something of more eternal weight than the colours of the coffee cups—there is also a deep challenge for everyone in the conversation to become interested in the questions of others until they come to see the world from their point of view.
This in and of itself doesn’t lead to unity of vision—I think we often assume it will and stop there—but it does lead to understanding. It will often expose the real debate, which is perhaps three layers down and about theological method in some fashion, and then you get to actually start to talk.
If we can learn to not know in order to know, we will find that there are deeper depths of the law of Christ for us to delve into. This cosmos is rich in mystery, there for us to plunder.
Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash
To subscribe and receive email notifications for future posts, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page.
Would you like to support my work? The best thing you can do is share this post with your friends. Why not consider also joining my Patreon to keep my writing free for everyone. You can see other ways to support me here.
nuakh 