The Question Game is played like this: One person asks a question, to which another person responds... with a question. And the response they get? Another question. And so it goes until one person says something that's not a question.
I feel like trying to learn the Christian faith in seminary is a lot like the question game. Every time I ask a question about something I'm hit with another question. Sometimes it's related, but often it's just another question. Then I'm playing the question game with 6 different people and it's a lot like spinning plates in the air - I'm anxious because I know they're up there, but I'm having trouble keeping them all going. And worst of all, when I get one down someone starts another one for me.
I found comfort in an unlikely place today: a theology book. Here's an excerpt from Migliore's Faith Seeking Understanding (italics mine):
Christian faith is at the bottom trust in and obedience to the free and gracious God made known in Jesus Christ. Christian theology is this same faith in the mode of asking questions and struggling to find at least provisional answers to these questions. Authentic faith is no sedative for world-weary souls, no satchel full of ready answers to the deepest questions of life. Instead, faith in God revealed in Jesus Christ sets an inquiry in motion, fights the inclination to accept things as they are, and continually calls in question unexamined assumptions about God, our world, and ourselves.Consequently, Christian faith has nothing in common with indifference to the search for truth, or fear of it, or the arrogant claim to possess it fully. True faith must be distinguished from fideism. Fideism says there comes a point where we must stop asking questions and must simply believe; faith keeps on seeking and asking.
There's a lot to unpack in all that. I love that it says "faith keeps on seeking and asking," because that's all I've been doing for 4 months. I've run into question after question, and usually I encounter not an answer, but a response. There really aren't too many answers. I love the same theologian's comment, "Christ is indeed the answer, but what was the question? And who is Christ?" This reflects the necessary seeking and asking that needs to be done in theology.
I'm also a huge fan of provisional answers. These are answers that will do for the time being, but with more learning will probably need to be rethought. That's a comfort in itself because in the past 5 years I've had to reprocess many systems in my theological framework.
All that to say, I'm glad it's okay to have as many questions as I do. And I'm glad I'm not going through it all alone. (Though sometimes it feels like it.)
