I Have Questions

And this is where my troubles started.

After you get to know a lot of people and hear a lot of people tell their stories and talk about life and share their opinions and share, what we used to call their “world view,” you realize that everyone doesn’t have the same relationship with questions that you do.

Some people go through life with no questions.

Some go through life asking as few questions as they feel the need to.

Some manage life by asking appropriate questions.

Some are engaged in a vocation that requires them to ask many questions.

And then there are some of us who have never outgrown our two-year-old larval stage of continuously asking, “why?” even when it is neither germane or appropriate.

To quote the great Taylor Swift, “It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me.”

Even when I’m not asking “why” out loud, my internal voice is probably shouting it, along with other words and phrases like…

According to…?

In what book did they actually say that?

Who told you that?

And you believed them why?

There’s nothing about that statement that makes sense…

What makes you think that’s true?

Do you have any documentation to back that up?

And you’re basing this on what?

It’s a filter that I’ve learned to ignore in polite company. It took me a while but I eventually came to understand that not everyone has the same relationship to information, facts, and data that I do.

But sometimes I forget.

I remember my first few years out of Bible College when I was engaged in ministry and no longer trying to simply survive and graduate. When I had space and time to begin processing the things I had been taught. When I could read books that weren’t on the required reading list. When I could ask my own questions instead of memorizing the answers that I was required to give back to the questions with which others were testing me. I can tell you exactly when my troubles began.

I was reading a book by another Metzger, Bruce Metzger, on the canon of the New Testament. And I ran right into an unexpected question. (Tangentially, I’m not related to Bruce in any way that’s meaningful but in some instances with some people in the little world I inhabit, the possibility that I might be related to Bruce has led to conversations with brilliant people who would have otherwise ignored me.)

So, I was reading Bruce and he was provoking me to ask questions that we weren’t asked to answer in Bible College. I was taught that the Scriptures were our final authority in all matters of faith. But Bruce was making me ask, “But if the New Testament didn’t fall out of the sky in a completed form, if church leaders argued among themselves for hundreds of years over which books belonged in the canon, if the New Testament doesn’t give us the official list, who decided which books would be our final authority in all matters of faith?”

In other words, I was asking, what final authority decided on the final authority of the New Testament canon if not the canon?

My Roman Catholic friends don’t have this struggle.

As a protestant though, I had to own that errant men (yes, gendered males because that’s how it used to be – and sadly hasn’t changed much) gave authority to the text by their decision that it was, in fact, authoritative. And in the same way, it was errant men who also disqualified many other texts from carrying authority for the people of God.

This was the string on which I pulled that started the whole proverbial sweater unravelling.

And I’m not saying these men were wrong or they made poor choices. I’m not arguing that the Gospel of Thomas deserves a place in the canon of the New Testament. What I am saying is that my basic Bible college education was based on a belief that the document we call the New Testament, inherently possessed authority, but the truth is more complicated than that. They may inherently possess authority (conversation for another time) but they only have authority in the lives of protestant followers of Jesus because various groups of men, over several hundreds of years of discussion and disagreement, endorsed them as authoritative and deserving of a place in the canon of the New Testament.

So errant men, we affirm every time we say the canon is authoritative, can make infallible decisions, at least one, that over time can become binding on all of us.

If we go on to include doctrines of the Church, like the Trinity, we also affirm that errant men can make authoritative decisions about what constitutes orthodox belief for protestant followers of Jesus that go beyond the clear or plain teaching of the New Testament.

I’m not telling you this because you don’t know it already. I’m telling you this because for me, it was the beginning of a long unlearning. I’m telling you this because it’s an example of the way questions have led me into trouble, but for me it’s been good trouble.

Questions get me into trouble when I’m listening to speakers and preachers who say things, especially definitive things, certain things. When those speakers and preachers tell stories about which something seems, to me, to be a little off. When I get emails telling me things that invite questions that lead me to the googler which reveal alternative narratives.

And those questions create internal tension (and sometimes external tension) when I look around the room and it seems, based on the reaction I’m observing, that I’m the only person with questions about what we’re being told. In those moments I have to remember that it’s normal for a lot of people not to have questions. It’s not that others have questions but won’t ask them or that others don’t need answers for their questions, it’s just that not everyone is having the same experience with life situations that I’m having.

And that’s o.k.

But if you are a questioner.

If you are the kind of person that doesn’t believe in easy answers.

If you are a person who has come to see life and people are more complicated than that good or bad, arguments more nuanced than right or wrong, topics more layered facts and lies, that’s o.k. too.

And the trouble is worth it. Ask your questions and keep asking them. The strength of any community is not found in its lack of questions, common answers or univocality but in its willingness to embrace the tension questions create without insisting on the resolution of a single answer. It is in wrestling together we are most likely to encounter a divine moment.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be introducing you to more of my questions and inviting you to wrestle with me. I’m also hoping to create space where you can feel free and brave to share your questions here too.