I remember clearly where I was sitting when someone asked me a question that would change the entire direction and purpose of my life.
Ringed in the sunlight pouring through the bay windows overlooking High Street in Oxford, we sat in two chairs tucked into a dorm room in Oriel College. Across the street sat St. Mary’s Church, one of the oldest churches in all of England, resplendent in her architecture. Below, despite the hustle and bustle of traffic and pedestrians on the busy street, time seemed to stand still. The question hung in the air, like the scent of myrrh in a tomb.
You should never underestimate the power of a good question.
Question has at its root the word quest, and indeed, to pose a question is to invite someone into a journey. To answer a question is to embark on an adventure.
I grew up more than a little put off by the Christian faith. Any Christians I knew (or presumed I knew) seemed to be so offensively sure of themselves that I had to battle the urge to roll my eyes whenever one came near. They pronounced and announced. They professed and confessed. They judged and sniffed. They said things like, “here endeth” and “blessed assurance.” You could hear the echo long after turning off the television or leaving the church.
So I was completely blown away when, as an avowed agnostic myself (not quite an atheist, since I couldn’t disprove God), someone I actually admired and thought of as “cool” asked me a question I had never, in my quarter of a century of life, been asked.
He asked, quite simply, “What’s your take on God?”
As someone accustomed to the rush of a North American student life, I felt like a hummingbird that had just hit the glass hard; I was stunned. I had never been invited into a genuine discussion about God. I answered my friend. And the more I answered, the more he asked. (One day, he would ask me another very big question, but that’s another article.)
What amazed me was how sincerely he asked. Not rhetorical questions. Not snide ones. But genuine questions reflecting genuine interest in what I thought. He asked questions like invitations. As Sir Francis Bacon said, “A sudden, bold, and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man, and lay him open.”
Jesus, of course, was a great questioner. Pastor Eric von Atzigen identifies 135 questions Jesus asks in the New Testament. They all strike at the heart of who we are, what we believe, and how we order our loves. Consider the Gospel of Matthew alone, and the progression of the interrogative order:
“Why are you so afraid?” (8:26)
“Do you believe?” (9:28)
“Why did you doubt?” (14:31)
“Who do you say I am?” (16:15)
Where are you? Jesus continues to ask us on our Father’s behalf—echoing God’s first question to mankind in Eden. And we are given the dignity of our own response to the Good News. He knocks and leaves us to open the door.
A question is a hook, a fisher of men and women. How would I answer to this God of questions?
We are asking fewer and fewer questions as we read and learn today. Or perhaps we don’t know what questions to ask. We satiate our minds with so much filler that they seem to no longer hunger for the real thing.
In her preface to The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers writes:
The education that we have so far succeeded in giving to the bulk of our citizens has produced a generation of mental slatterns. … Particularly in the matter of Christian doctrine, a great part of the nation subsists in an ignorance more barbarous than that of the dark ages, owing to this slatternly habit of illiterate reading.
Illiterate reading for Sayers occurs when “words are understood in a wholly mistaken sense,” when “statements of fact and opinion are misread and distorted in repetition.” The result, particularly when it comes to understanding the Christian faith, is the popular mind’s transformation of it into a “confused jumble of mythological and pathological absurdity.”
Sayers’s concept of illiterate reading caught my attention on many fronts. First and foremost, it struck me as a (hopefully) thoughtful Christian, since Christians cannot help but be the most essential of all bibliophiles, with the Holy Bible as the foundational “word in stone” of our existence. Secondly, after three decades of teaching, I have to agree with Sayers’s observation that “it is common knowledge among school-teachers that a high percentage of examination failures results from ‘not reading the question.’”
As a constant pedagogical refrain, I find I must not only remind adult students how to pay careful attention to the question being asked but also how to respond to that specific question. Upon initial attempts, they either simply regurgitate all the “knowledge” they have crammed into their recent memory in the hope of making a minimum grade, or they respond as though they have not understood what was being asked of them in the first place.
Sayers continues to state how “teachers further complain that they have to spend a great deal of time and energy in teaching University students what questions to ask.” From pure need, I have taught entire courses dedicated to the art of asking a good question. A truly good question. The kind, as Francis Bacon says, that “lays a man open,” or that Jesus employs to turn us back on ourselves, rhetorically, facilitating a conversation between ourselves and our very own soul.
During my time studying at Oxford, I continued to be surprised by questions. Most learning at Oxford takes place in tutorials, where students gather in small groups to discuss readings and assignments with their professor in an intimate setting. Rather than gathering in a large, anonymous amphitheater or sitting framed in muted squares online, real-life tutorials provide a place for intense discussion.
In such a group, one is required to take full responsibility for one’s own thoughts or positions. There is no tossing a paper on a random pile that the professor will not even read. In a tutorial, a student is laid bare: If you haven’t done the reading preparation, you are woefully exposed. If you haven’t thought through your argument, your views are vulnerable to being dismantled.
Yet beneath this incredibly intimidating and even frightening experience runs the electric current of an even greater one: the exhilaration of an earnest pursuit of truth. When we are met with questions and moved to ask questions ourselves, something profound takes place: a shift from pride to humility, from heedlessness to alertness, from indifference to engagement.
The crux of the tutorial system is the ancient art of asking questions. The Socratic method, named for the famous teacher of Plato, involves the teacher leading the student, question by artful question, further up and further in to the heart of a matter—Socrates’s key to examining life and making it worth living.
This is the model I’ve continued to use in my own teaching pedagogy, and which I see flourishing at the North American campus of New College Franklin, where I now teach. At this small Christian classical school, students are deliberately unplugged during class. Away from devices and dependent solely on their own brains, they engage with their instructor and their peers by asking questions to seek out truth through the inductive and deductive processes. The entire curriculum is based on this intimate, personal method of truth-seeking together.
I have met self-proclaimed irreligious people who have not asked—or refused to ask—questions about doubting wisely, let alone questions about believing wisely. The plague is all the same: a lack of genuine curiosity, a lack of humility at the heart of true truth-seeking. And I have met believers who are afraid to ask questions of their faith—afraid that somehow their faith will be shaken or that they will be judged even for asking.
Yet we see how Jesus himself did not fear such questions. In fact, his refrain “Do not be afraid” would seem to apply to questions—perhaps more than anything. He honors the asking and points us toward the places where the asking leads.
I find myself agreeing yet further with Sayers as she claims, “A third distressing phenomenon is the extreme unwillingness of the average questioner to listen to the answer.” We all know the type of person—the one who listens to something you are vulnerably sharing, but who is only waiting for you to finish your sentence so he can jump in with the sound of his own voice.
Can we enact holy listening instead? The Bible gives us the answer to every conceivable question, yet often, we do not want to hear. The more we develop a robust relationship with God, the more we hearken to his voice in our hearts and trust his work in our lives.
In their choice to turn away from God, Adam and Eve did not respond to the true question being asked of them—they did not practice holy listening. They took the Serpent at his most literal; they took his word over God’s Word. And ever since, the consequent misapprehension has sent generation upon generation tumbling into suffering and, most of all, into fear.
Once I left Oxford to study in the “larger world,” it was now my turn to be surprised not by the questions but by the lack of them. As I taught or interacted at various other campuses, I found myself agreeing with Sayers: We are a culture of complacent readers, even accidental or haphazard readers. We take in information but do not ask for what purpose we are reading. We gloss over, but we do not listen to what the text has to say.
Our reading must model our faith. As followers of Christ, how can we become literate readers? How can we be emboldened to ask the questions that matter and yet also be willing to listen to the answer?
To return once more to Sayers here, she writes, “In the creeds of Christendom, we are confronted with a set of documents which purport to be, not expressions of opinion but statements of fact.” How does this shape our purpose in reading?
How does asking and answering questions lead us back to God’s Word, its reading and comprehension, and then its application—not as ambiguous maundering but with absolute and teleological purpose? And finally, how can such inquisitive reading be applied to the texts of our own lives?
It is through reading itself that we can come to better know the Father through the written word of the Son by continuously asking how we can know the way: by remaining hungry and thirsty, in mind and spirit, for questions of truth and the wisdom of God.
Carolyn Weber is a professor at New College Franklin and the author of Surprised by Oxford. She lives in the Tennessee countryside with her family and animal menagerie.
