By Matthew Lee Anderson
Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Matthew Lee Anderson’s new book, Called Into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning within the Life of Faith (Moody, 2023). It’s a profound reflection on the role of questions in the spiritual life—and as such an insightful meditation for anyone involved in catechesis. Matt is an Assistant Professor at Baylor University’s Honors College, Associate Director of Baylor in Washington, and the host of the Mere Fidelity podcast. You can learn more about his speaking and writing on his personal website here.
** From now until September 1, those who sign up for a paid subscription to his excellent Substack newsletter, “The Path Before Us” can receive a copy of the book for free.
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Seeking wisdom can be wearisome; questioning is exhausting if there are no answers. With “much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,” the author of Ecclesiastes tells us.[30] God has set eternity in our hearts, and the desire to search it out on our own will invariably lead to frustration: “No one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”[31] Our effort to seek understanding in a world marked by sin is threatened on every side by vanity and barrenness.[32] Seeking understanding can be a heavy cross, which we are not strong enough to carry on our own.
Christianity sets questioning free by placing a mystery at the center of the cosmos: we worship “one God in trinity and the trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence, for the person of the Father is a distinct person, the person of the Son another, and that of the Holy Spirit still another. But the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their majesty coeternal.”[33] When Dante is granted the vision of God at the end of The Divine Comedy, his mind is “struck by a bolt.” The “high fantasy” of his poetry loses its power: he can no longer speak, for he has peered into a love that exceeds reason without contradicting it.[34] The mystery at the heart of God’s inner life also generates others that are similarly wonderful: God created; God became man; God died on the cross; His death in AD 33 covers my sins today; and so on.
The truth of Christianity is strange, even comic—but also satisfying. “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” G. K. Chesterton once asked. How can we preserve the romance at the heart of the world, that mixture of the “familiar and unfamiliar,” the “combination of something that is strange with something that is secure,” the ability to be “happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable” in it?[35] In other words: How can we have the confidence of living in the truth and enjoy the adventure of questioning? Chesterton’s answer was Christian orthodoxy. As I argued that the incarnation kept inquiry alive better than Plato on that early morning back in college, it became my answer as well. The paradoxes at the center of the faith answer the deepest questions about how the world works, while offering us an endless source of wonder.
In revealing Himself, God makes Himself known.[36] The mystery of God is not a blank slate against which we are free to project our own understanding. God has revealed Himself through sharply delineated lines and boundaries, which enable us to simultaneously really know Him as God and revere His essence as a mystery. We participate in God’s life through the Son, who taught us to pray to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are not free to trade these names for others, as though God were simply an abstract, infinite being—and so no different than the God Plato believed in. The difficulty is holding together the unknown with the known, the mystery with the revelation, the hidden with the gift. The strangeness of Christianity makes sense because Christianity makes sense of the world. Its paradoxes and mysteries are a strength, not a weakness. They allow for both resolution and tension, confidence and questions. We might not be able to explain the mysteries at the center of the cosmos, but those mysteries can explain us, answering the deepest puzzles that humanity knows. The immortal, invisible, only wise God “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see.”[37] Yet the true light has come into the world. While no one has ever seen God, God has made Himself known in Jesus Christ. If the cross is any indication, then Eliot is right: humankind cannot bear the reality of God’s love. The light that shines from the empty tomb on Easter makes reality tolerable, for darkness cannot overcome it.[38] God’s love in Jesus Christ is the open secret of the cosmos; it is the strange fact that secures the goodness of the world and enables us to venture into it in freedom and joy.
We need some kind of formation to get our explorations started, though. “Home is where one starts from,” T. S. Eliot wrote.[39] We do not enter life as though it were formless and void: we inherit a framework, an intellectual shelter from which we explore the world. Every child is indoctrinated in a way of seeing things. The only question is, which one? This is an unpopular thing to say in some quarters. The atheist Richard Dawkins once wondered whether it might be “a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about.”[40] The idea that every child must be free to make up their minds about their religion is a fantasy, though. We do not begin our lives by choosing our beliefs because we do not “possess” our beliefs at all. They are not pieces of clothing that we pull off the rack and replace with ease. Our beliefs possess us, establishing a pattern for our lives and shaping our desires and dispositions. We inhabit our beliefs like we do our homes, and changing them can often be extremely painful. The real worry that writers like Dawkins have is not with indoctrination, but with Christian doctrines.
Dr. Matthew Lee Anderson (Baylor University)
The irony is that the right form of indoctrination will better prepare people to explore the world than the slapdash, piecemeal education most of us receive these days. A thick intellectual inheritance gives us a sense of identity and belonging, which are crucial for confidently venturing forward into the unknown. Young people with stable intellectual homes will take more risks than those whose formation leaves them susceptible to every wind and wave of (social) media. As Luigi Giussani writes, the student “can be genuinely open and truly sympathetic only if he feels, even unconsciously, a sense of total security.”[41] The inheritance that shapes Christian learning is not only a set of doctrines or ideas, though, but the practices that incorporate those ideas into our lives.
First, worship forms the foundation for the Christian intellectual life, for in it we come face-to-face with the mystery of the gospel as it has been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Worship is our answer to God’s question; our grateful response to God echoes His grace to us. When we gather with His people on Sunday, we momentarily participate in the eternal Sabbath rest that God enjoys. God has liberated us from carrying the burden of finding answers by revealing to us the answer of His life. Th rough responding to the proclamation of the Word, our lives are incorporated into the answer that His life gives to God on our behalf. Worship revives our wonder at the mystery of the faith, and in offering us rest, revives us to go forth and question again.
Worship is incomplete, though, without the contemplation, prayer, and study of Scripture—a book that is as strange as the religion we practice and the world it interprets. By attentively reading the Bible, we ready ourselves for the questions God would put to us. There is no substitute for regular, close readings of Scripture if we wish to confidently explore Christianity and the world. Such reading involves attending to how the community of believers has heard Scripture, both past and present. Some members of that community are given to us as authoritative guides whose counsel can help illuminate the text’s meaning. “How can I [understand],” the Ethiopian eunuch asks Philip in Acts, “unless someone guides me?”[42] The Scripture had worked on the eunuch independently, giving him questions that he wanted to resolve. Yet he could not make progress alone.[43]
The Bible is complex, but the Christian community has distilled its key moments and basic themes into the creeds. The Bible is symphonic: despite its great variations in genre, setting, and author, it perpetually circles around God’s faithfulness to His people in Jesus Christ and the form our response should take. In saying “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,” we describe a foundational plank in our faith and answer how we will live in this world. “We believe” is our confirmation of the covenant that God fulfills in Jesus Christ. Our declaration of the creed is not an itemized checklist of our beliefs, but a confession that binds us to God and to all those who confess the faith with us. When that declaration happens in public worship, it is also a proclamation to the world of who we are as the people of God. Beliefs are identity-defining for a people: every community has a foundational story, a myth that gives them their distinct character. The creeds are our story.
While creeds name the fixed landmarks of the Christian faith, catechisms fill in the details. Catechesis is a practice that has often been used by Christians to form new believers so they have a stable grasp on the contents of Scripture. “What is your only comfort in life and death?” is how the Heidelberg Catechism opens, a question that runs straight to the center of the Christian life. The answer is meant to be memorized, which gives the “catechumen” a firm foundation from which they can ask their own questions: “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.” Catechesis is a formation in dialogue. By giving close attention to hard questions and complex answers, we learn better how to ask our own.
Christianity is a spacious intellectual home. God’s knowledge of the world means we need not fear anything as we venture out into it. The faith has its own feedback loop, even if it is a wide one. The experience of horrific evil keeps many people from God, but Christianity claims that God did not keep Himself away from horrendous evils on the cross. We believe that Christianity is true because the defeat and redemption of evil is built into its story—and because the story is not over yet. We only know in part, for now. Questioning the world from the standpoint of Christianity need not be vicious, provided we remain open to evidence that challenges our beliefs and do not quarantine ourselves with those who refuse to question for their fear of the unknown. Christianity has internal resources to help people question well, even if Christians in our day have neglected them. Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit will “guide you into all the truth” is given to the church and so cannot be claimed by any particular person.44 But none of us can escape Jesus’ exhortation in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”[45]
References
30. Ecclesiastes 1:18.
31. Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)
32. Which is why the preacher’s final word places the confirmation and direction of our labors in the hands of God: “Fear God and keep his commandments . . .” he writes, because God knows us: “For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Eccl. 12:13‒14).
33. This is the opening of the Athanasian Creed, perhaps the most robust and precise distillation of the center of Christian orthodoxy ever written
34. This is an amalgam of Robert Hollander’s translation and that of Barbara Reynolds’s.
35. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “Introduction in Defense of Everything Else,” in Heretics/Orthodoxy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 170‒71.
36. Fred Sanders’s discussion of mystery in both its general and specifically biblical senses in The Triune God, pages 42-44, is invaluable.
37. Timothy 6:16.
38. John 1:9, 18.
39. Eliot, Four Quartets, 34.
40. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 354.
41. Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny (New York: Crossroad Pub., 2001), 62.
42. Acts 8:31.
43. I owe this point to Oliver O’Donovan.
44. John 16:13.
45. Matthew 7:7.
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Excerpt from Matthew Lee Anderson, Called into Questions: Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith (Chicago: Moody Press, 2023), pp. 108–114.