Answers and Questions

Every nerd knows that “42” is the ultimate answer, which makes it ironic that Episode #42 of Back To Work is all about the importance of good questions and a heavy dose of skepticism about answers.

This has been a topic that I have been thinking about for the past few years. The working title of my doctoral thesis is “Answers and Questions” and I reversed the usual order of those words because of my belief that the idea of “Questions and Answers” only works for a very select number of topics in life. “What time is it?” is a question that I can answer fairly simply. “What should I do with the time I have on earth?” is a much trickier question.

Once people move beyond basic questions, they often find that answers are elusive. That doesn’t mean that we don’t want answers, part of us craves them, but we also know that they don’t often come. Even when we do get answers, they often just trigger more questions.

“Please explain evil. Show your work.”

When I was preparing to move to my first church after seminary, part of the process is that you are “interviewed” by other elders and pastors. I was preparing to move to Gainesville, Florida which is part of the Presbytery of Saint Augustine¹. During that process I was forewarned that there was a pastor in the presbytery who always asked the same question to every fresh-out-of-seminary candidate who appeared before them for ordination: “What is the nature and purpose of evil?”

That is a question without a clear answer. It’s a question that the human race has struggled with for millennia, from the Book of Job (and, no doubt, earlier) to When Bad Things Happen to Good People to today. Even in Christian circles, there are different answers. Some believe that God simply cannot stop evil. Some believe that God could stop evil, but does not. Choosing either one of those options, however, leaves you with a God who either is not omnipotent or not benevolent.

More recently, other Christian theologians like Stanley Hauerwas have offered a “third way” which says “I don’t know why evil exists. I don’t know if God can’t stop it or if God chooses not to stop it or if there’s just some other explanation. But I believe that God exists, and that God has given us each other to help us through the times when evil touches our lives.”²

I was prepared to answer, or at least to respond to the question about the nature and purpose of evil. On the day of the meeting, the guy who always asked the question wasn’t at the meeting. When they opened the floor for questions, everyone looked around, waiting for this guy to come up, but he wasn’t there.

I feigned disappointment, saying “Aw shucks, and I was all ready to answer the question and everything.” At which point someone shouted out, “OK, let’s hear it.”

(The moral of that story is that when someone lets you off the hook, don’t put yourself back on it.)

So I gave my answer. Now, this was 1998, so my memory may be a bit foggy, but my recollection is that I said that I knew both of the usual answers (God can’t/God won’t) but I didn’t like either answer. I didn’t know of any answer good enough to give to a family when they were grieving the loss of a loved one.

Which is to say that my prepared answer was “I don’t know.”

“Answers Considered Harmful”

I am reminded of a story from seminary when a professor (and former pastor) told us that if we get called out in the middle of the night to be with a family who has had a sudden and unexpected death, then we should go, sit down beside them, put our arms around them while they cry, and offer nothing more than “I’m sorry” and a willingness to listen.

Another student protested, raising his hand he asked, “But don’t we have something to say about our belief in the resurrection, and that death isn’t really the end of life, and —”

The professor gently put up his hand to stop him.

“Yes,” he said, “we believe all of those things. And those are important things to say. At the funeral. But when the family is in the midst of fresh suffering, the last thing they need or want is answers. All they need in that moment is someone to grieve with them.”

In the years since, I’ve also come to believe that most of those clichés that people say about a death come from their own discomfort with uncertainty. We say them to make ourselves feel better.

I believe that the Christian church has the unique distinction of having been both too willing to give answers and too reluctant to allow questions. George Carlin used to have a routine about how the Catholic church of his youth answered every question about God with “It’s a mystery!”³

Other churches seem all too happy to claim they have all the answers.

The Secret, The Prayer of Jabez, and other Snake Oil Salesmen

Around the 52 minute mark, Dan and Merlin talk about The Secret which is a book I hate so much I won’t even link to it for fear someone might actually buy it. You don’t need to buy it, because it was so popular for awhile that you probably already got the gist of it, which is that if you put out positive energy and let the universe know what you need, you’ll get it.

That comes just a few minutes after a segment on “magical thinking” where Merlin specifically calls out prayer (or, at least, a certain kind of prayer) as “magical thinking.” These are the kind of prayers that people make when their idea of God is a mixture of Santa Claus and a vending machine. “God, I want…” and then you tell God what you want, whether that’s for Grandma to get better or to get a job or to find a parking space.

Yes, in the span of three examples I went from praying for a dying grandmother to a parking space. My fourth example was going to be about praying that you might get to have sex with a particular person that you really like. But I thought that might be in bad taste, so I decided to leave it out, which feels like the right decision.

The Christian church has had plenty of its own versions of The Secret. The most recent and most well-known was The Prayer of Jabez which was an obscure line from an obscure character in a book of the Bible that most people skip.

Essentially this was a prayer asking God to bless you, to make you successful and powerful and rich. About 10 years ago this prayer was the very popular, and this was the “promise” that went with it.

I challenge you to make the Jabez prayer for blessing part of the daily fabric of your life. To do that, I encourage you to follow unwaveringly the plan outlined here for the next thirty days. By the end of that time, you’ll be noticing significant changes in your life, and the prayer will be on its way to becoming a treasured, lifelong habit.

There’s your quintessential “magical thinking” prayer. Just pray this prayer every day and your life will get better. Gee, it’s too bad Jesus didn’t know about that book, maybe He could have been spared a horribly painful death on a cross.

Of course, the Prayer of Jabez had nothing to do with Jesus, or anything that Jesus taught. It had to do with the desire of Americans to be rich and powerful. Despite the popularity of the Prayer of Jabez, somehow it didn’t stop terrorists from flying planes into buildings a year later. I wonder if the author would say that we just didn’t pray hard enough, or maybe we were supposed to specifically mention that we didn’t want to suffer a terrorist attack.

That hasn’t stopped this same idea from continuing. Now there’s an even more insidious idea in Christianity, it’s called “The Prosperity Gospel” and here are some of the things that it teaches:

Prosperity theology promotes a positive view of the spirit and body and teaches that people are entitled to happiness and material prosperity. Physical and spiritual realities are both seen as one united reality that cannot be separated. Prosperity theology teaches that all Bible-believing Christians are entitled to physical health and economic prosperity. They view the Atonement as a removal of sickness and economic lack as well as spiritual corruption.

Does that sound like the teachings of Jesus? At all?

No, that is “the American dream” twisted into sounding like a religious principle instead of a capitalist ideal. It has nothing to do with Jesus.

Nothing.

Still, Joel Osteen and company have no problem finding people who are attracted to this idea of “Christianity” because it lets them baptize their greed. I suspect the only people who are getting rich are the people who are selling the books and the workshops and the conferences teaching people the “secret” of the prosperity gospel.

Around minute 48 of the podcast, Merlin talked about the difficulties in getting published in the world of social psychology. He referenced something he called the “file-drawer effect” which he described this way:

you have a certain idea in mind that you’d like to be able to publish, and you just keep doing stuff until you get the result that you’d like to publish and then you throw everything else away.

There is a similar thing that happens in the church. You have an idea that you already believe, and then you go to the Bible looking for support for it. There’s even a fancy term for it eisegesis (pronounced ICE-eh-gee-sus). It comes from the Greek word for “into” and means “reading into the text.” (The opposite is called exegesis where you try to go to the text without preconceived ideas about what it is supposed to mean.)

What are some examples of eisegesis in American history? Well, here’s one little one… during the early years of America when slavery was practiced, white Christian preachers in white Christian churches often preached on the messages of “slaves, obey your masters” which is found in two places in the New Testament (Colossians 3:22 and Ephesians 6:5) in two books of the Bible which many Christians probably couldn’t find without flipping through the Bible or checking the index.

Meanwhile, those same white preachers in white churches completely ignored the entire book of Exodus which is all about God’s people being set free from slavery. That is the central story of the Old Testament, and is referenced time and time again as the defining event of God’s relationship with Israel.

All of that set aside by two verses in Paul’s letters.

The same Paul also wrote “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” but I’m guessing that didn’t get preached on much either.

They didn’t believe that slavery was OK because the Bible told them so. They believed that slavery was OK and then went looking for confirmation of what they already believed.

Check that link for “The Prosperity Gospel” and read the citations they give for the verses that are used to “defend” the prosperity gospel and ask yourself how they mesh with the life and teachings of Jesus.

Selective blindness in reading the Bible today

I would also suggest that a similar thing is going on right now in many Christian churches over the “issue” of homosexuality. People who dislike gays and lesbians have gone to the Bible to pick out a few obscure passages that may or may not have anything to do with homosexuality as we understand it today. But mostly they don’t care. They find the idea of [male] gay sex to be repulsive, and so they believe that it must be wrong. Then they go to the Bible for proof. That’s why they have no problem pulling out one verse from Leviticus but are willing to completely ignore other things that Leviticus says about how we ought to live.

Here’s a fun game to play: next time someone mentions Leviticus to you, tell them that you agree and that you think that America as a “Christian nation” ought to start practicing the Jubilee Year).

When they ask you “What is the Jubilee year?” (because they’ve only read the part of Leviticus that talks about gay people), tell them that it was the plan to keep the power and wealth out of the hands of just a few, and that the plan called for the forgiveness of debts, and the return of land from the banks to the people who originally owned it.

If Christian churches started to preach that message, there’d be a crackdown that would make the police brutality we’ve seen in Occupy Wall Street look like a playground scuffle.

If Jesus came back to America today, I bet He’d be much more interested in how we treat the poor and the powerless. I bet He’d keep telling us about how hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God (Luke 18:24).

And I bet the political powers would crucify Him just like they did 2,000 years ago.

The Jefferson Bible

Did you know that one of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, had his own version of the Bible? It’s called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth but most people refer to it as The Jefferson Bible. You can find it online or download a PDF of it or even buy a copy from Amazon.

What makes the Jefferson Bible unique is that Jefferson went through and took out all the parts of the Bible that he didn’t like. There’s an old saying (variously attributed to Voltaire, Pascal, and, of course, Mark Twain) that “God created Man in His image, and Man returned the favor.” Jefferson’s version of the Bible, Jefferson’s interpretation of Jesus, was a reflection of what Jefferson thought Jesus was really like and what Jesus really taught. Anything that didn’t fit, Jefferson just threw away.

How’s that for a “file-drawer effect”?

I have to give Jefferson credit for one thing, however.

At least he was honest about it.

I bet there are a lot of people who walk around carrying Bibles that haven’t been cut up and pasted together to hold only their favorite parts. But I bet that’s how a lot of people read their Bibles.

So… now what?

You’ve read (or at least skimmed) all of this, and now maybe you’re expecting me to tell you what the solution is.

I don’t know.

But I know this: the church’s desire for “answers” has not served it well. Whether that was the church insisting that Galileo recant his position that the earth was not the center of the universe or whether it’s trying to come up with easy ways for Americans to not have to think critically about how we live and consume and participate in the capitalist society which is willing to let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The church doesn’t work well when we think we have all the answers.

That doesn’t mean that people don’t want churches that claim to have the answers. Conservative churches — the ones which tend to see the world in black & white, good & evil, and the ones which are most ready to tell people what they should believe — those are the churches that are growing.

A church in my area put up signs a few years ago inviting people to come join them. They described themselves as “A Church With Answers.” I was grateful they didn’t call themselves the church with answers (a decision I hope was intentional), but I realized that no one would ever try to “market” the Presbyterian church as “A church with answers.” Nor would I want them to… but there are plenty of people who have been drawn to those mega-churches which tend to be very socially and theologically conservative. Those churches are (again, generally speaking) fighting against equal rights for gay and lesbian people. They are fighting to overturn Roe V. Wade. They want Creationism (or its more friendly title “Intelligent Design”) taught in schools. They are happy to support political candidates who are on their side when it comes to those issues, but they never seem to ask where candidates stand on issues of peace and justice. They never seem to make the connection between the experience of Jesus being unfairly arrested, tortured, and executed with the idea that perhaps we should make sure that we — if we are to be a “Christian nation” — should not be unfairly arresting and torturing others.

As you can tell, that is not my understanding of what it means to be a Christian. That is not my reading of the Bible or the lessons that I have learned from what I know of Jesus’ life and ministry. Most of the things that I hear “religious people” talk about on television (especially when it comes to political issues) are not issues that Jesus said anything about.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I certainly wish more people knew that there was a question.

(This article should be considered a “working draft.” Obviously I’m pulling together a variety of different topics and ideas here, and the end result isn’t “finished” but is a “work in progress.” I could have said both more and less, there are some things which I left out, and possibly some things which I should have left out. Also, let me be clear that all conservative Christians are not the same, although I may have painted with too-broad strokes, I believe that what I have said is true on the average. The biggest thing I felt was left unsaid was about the discomfort that most people feel about ambiguity, and how we prefer answers — even “bad” ones — to no answer. It should also be understood that these opinions and perspectives are mine, and not necessarily representative of anyone else: employers, friends, even some [most?] of my family members.)

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Footnotes

1. A “presbytery” in the Presbyterian church is a regional governing body, similar to a “diocese” in the Catholic church, or a “district” in the Methodist church. All you really need to know for the purposes of this article is that it’s made up of a bunch of churches in a certain geographical area. St. Augustine Presbytery is centered in Jacksonville, Florida but extends down as far as Gainesville and Ocala, but not as far as Orlando. ↩

2. That “quote” is paraphrase of the position that I first heard articulated by someone who attributed it to Hauerwas. I need to find a citation for it, but I believe that it is in line with other things that he has said/written.↩

3. Numerous links online, including NPR’s report on Carlin’s death and Carlin’s own book Last Words. ↩