Anyone who has spent much time with young children knows what it means to be overwhelmed by questions. Beyond the annoying “Are we there yet?” there’s the often delightful, but sometimes wearying, patter of queries: “Where did Mommy go?” “How does the oven get hot?” “Why can’t I smear peanut butter on the cat?”
The most exhausting aspect of a child’s questions is often that we—the adults who are supposed to understand the world—don’t know the answers. Sometimes we get annoyed because the asker’s curiosity reveals ways we’ve ignored the wonder of the world. Other times, the issue is that the question isn’t a good one. “What do numbers smell like?” reveals a category error that can be difficult to untangle.
Asking good questions is an art. It requires proficiency, tenacity, and humility. There’s an imaginative aspect of question asking that requires stepping outside your experience to ponder the world from a different perspective. It can be a dangerous process that upends our world in uncomfortable ways.
Matthew Lee Anderson’s book Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith is about asking questions. More specifically, it’s about developing a general posture toward that world that makes honest inquiry possible for faithful, orthodox Christians.
Dangerous Questions
Questions aren’t always neutral. Loaded questions, for example, carry implications beyond the words themselves. They’re traps meant to accuse someone of wrongdoing or lead someone down the wrong path. Satan’s question to Eve in Eden was intended to incite rebellion, and it worked. “It is a dangerous thing to question,” Anderson notes, “as we might end up contemplating falsehoods so attractive they lull us to sleep” (46).
Bad questions often distort reality. In contrast, good questions lead toward truth. They often do so through doubt, which can be unnerving for the questioner who feels like the foundations of a cherished belief are being shaken by considering it from a new perspective. Fear of those doubts can be nerve-racking to parents watching children explore their faith.
Bad questions often distort reality. In contrast, good questions lead toward truth. They often do so through doubt.
One natural response is to shut down challenging questions for fear faith’s foundations will crack. But forbidding questions is unhealthier than wrestling with honest doubts. Squashing legitimate questions can lead to rebellion. Many of those deconstructing their faith complain that their questions were ineffectively answered. Some complain they simply weren’t allowed to ask questions when they didn’t understand.
Belief entails some level of understanding. While there are still mysteries within Christianity, faith isn’t irrational, and there’s much about Christianity that can be studied and explained. “God said it; I believe it; that settles it” fits well on a bumper sticker, but it fails as a theological method. As Anderson observes, “No confidence that is commanded can be genuine” (55). If Christianity is true, then it can provide honest answers to honest questions. It must.
Doctrinal Doubts
Anderson wrote Called into Questions to encourage Christians to become better questioners. This requires inculcating a love for the truth that won’t accept easy answers. “If people are not formed to love the truth for its own sake,” he writes, “they will eventually turn against it for the sake of convenience, comfort, or respectability” (90).
This explains why so many young believers leave the church when they leave their homes. It’s why a 2022 survey on the state of theology shows self-professed evangelicals abandoning orthodox Christian doctrine and ethics at an alarming rate. Truth has been treated like a weapon or something that must be protected from scrutiny.
Orthodoxy is fierce and electric. Far from protecting it, we should be examining it, pushing on it, and allowing it to push back on us. Anderson is provocative on this point: “There is not much point to keeping orthodoxy alive for its own sake. The more pressing problem is how our orthodoxy can animate our life as Christians by enabling us to creatively embody the teachings that have been delivered to the church once and for all” (124).
Orthodoxy is fierce and electric. Far from protecting it, we should be examining it, pushing on it, and allowing it to push back on us.
Truth is meaningless unless it’s embodied. Ideas do have consequences, and good ideas should result in right living. But we have to understand the ideas first, and that entails asking good questions.
Though questions can be dangerous, they sharpen our faith. When listeners ask questions about a sermon, it turns our attention from the preacher to the text itself. A community that can openly ask questions builds trust and undermines abusive behavior. It requires pastors and other church leaders to justify their teaching and their actions from the text of Scripture.
Pursue Virtue
Becoming a better questioner involves becoming a better person—someone more interested in things outside yourself. In a world where self-confidence is often seen as a supreme virtue, Anderson contends, “The most courageous form of questioning happens when we question ourselves” (171).
This is what differentiates Anderson’s questioning from the acid of skepticism. He enables doubts but pushes readers to doubt their doubts. Furthermore, he pushes against the mode of perpetually questioning without seeking an answer. The purpose of questioning is the pursuit of truth with a resolution in a final understanding. “Sometimes,” Anderson argues, “that means sharp lines, sharp critiques, sharp disagreements, and sharp questions” (150).
The vision offered in this book is compelling, but Anderson offers little in the way of practical help to “learn to live interrogatively” (18). Called into Questions is a significant revision of his earlier book The End of Our Exploring. There’s a clear genetic connection between the two books, but there are also obvious signs of growth and deepening. I had hoped the newer version would provide more handholds for readers—especially those outside formal academic communities—to learn to question better. It doesn’t. As anyone who has attempted to write a Socratic dialogue knows (except, perhaps, Peter Kreeft), it’s a hard thing to put together a series of cogent questions that move toward a real answer. Anderson acknowledges the difficulty of questioning well and lays a solid foundation for those who want to do so, but an appendix with practical suggestions for how a group of friends could grow in their questioning ability would have enriched the volume.
Though this book doesn’t provide all the answers, Anderson plants the seeds of longing for a better posture toward the faith—one that asks healthy questions, which is at least a beginning. And don’t you think that’s a good thing?
The Gospel Coalition