engaging questions...discovering resurrection

O LORD, … It’s hard to admit, even to myself, that there are no easy answers to life’s hard questions. Help me to see things as you see them. In wrestling with you, my imperfect faith is made stronger. In wrestling with you, I discover a deeper truth: that my questions usher me right back to you.

- Missy Buchanan
Talking with God in Old Age: Meditations and Psalms

Just re-reading Brian McLaren's ; A New Kind of Christianity. It's ironic that Jesus asked far more questions, than he did give out pat answers...

Instead, Jesus asks questions, good questions, unnerving questions, re-aligning questions, transforming questions.  He leads us into liminal, and therefore transformative space, much more than taking us into any moral high ground of immediate certitude or ego superiority. He subverts up front the cultural or theological assumptions that we are eventually going to have to face anyway.  He leaves us betwixt and between, where God and grace can get at us, and where we are not at all in control. It probably does not work for a large majority of people, at least in my experience.  They merely ignore you or fight you.  Maybe this is why we have paid so little attention to Jesus questions and emphasized instead his seeming answers. They give us more a feeling of success and closure. We made of Jesus a systematic theologian, who walked around teaching dogmas, instead of a peripatetic and engaging transformer of the soul.  Easy answers instead of hard questions allow us to try to change others instead of allowing God to change us.  At least, I know that is true in my life. ( Richard Rohr; the Questions of Jesus )

We fear questions, especially questions that draw us out into the wilderness, beyond the fortified cities of theological certitude. It's as if, without our dogma, doctrines and creeds that Jesus would cease to exist. He is only as real, as our theological constructs. This, the same God who wore human flesh, raised himself from the dead...we fear, can not live outside of our theology. Which is it, we really worship?

We live in a time of profound questions. Questions well beyond some of our theological buildings. To fully engage the questions of today, and the future will require us to deconstruct, or even more scandalous...leave some building altogether.

Paradigms and dogma can be defended and enforced with guns and prisons, bullets and bonfires, threats and humiliation, fatwas and excommunications. But paradigms and dogma remain profoundly vulnerable when anomalies are present. They can be undone by something as simple as a question... A New Kind of Christianity( page 16 ).

The profound questions of today are undoing Christianity. The most profound question is...will Christianity enter into the questions to resurrect itself.

Comments

[Al]

I am willing enough to ask questions--but I still tend to expect answers. My mind still reverts to a 'if not this, then it must be that' kind of mentality. I must learn to be content with the questions, with the searching, even if there is no easy answer, even if the searching never ends.

[ron cole]

I think so too Al, in a culture of drive through mentality we will expect the same for questions. How much discomfort are we will to accept to live in some of these deep questions.And what really bothers me is the fear, that if we deconstruct some theological thinking to live in, to mysteriously answer the question...that Jesus won't exist, or can't live in that space.