In the fifth of his six-part series on grace and truth, General Director Joel Edwards encourages us to discover curiosity…
Last time, you took the story in John 8 of the woman caught in adultery as a model of how to mix grace and truth. Can you expand on the issue of asking questions?
The point is that, after Jesus had offered anybody who was sinless the chance to cast the first stone, everybody skulked off. Then Jesus’ first interchange with this woman consisted of two questions: “Where did they all go? Hasn’t anybody condemned you?” Clearly He was not looking for answers. Here, and throughout the gospels, Jesus uses questions for larger purposes.
What kind of purposes?
I’ve talked previously about how truth always has to be relational. The modernist mindset is more comfortable with truth as proposition, as statement of fact. But this is simply not the only way Jesus chose to see it. He was always looking to engage people in relationship, and there is no better way to do this than by asking questions.
Why is that?
Because questions immediately create dialogue, not monologue. Dialogue confers respect on to another person. It communicates to them: “I am keen to understand your perspective on this situation. I want to engage you in a conversation.”
A lot of modernism is about monologue and dogma: “Here’s what I think and you had better listen to me, because I have the truth.” Jesus is nothing like that. He never lectured this woman, even though He, of all people, would have been most able and justified in doing so.
By asking questions we give dignity to somebody else’s experience. We say we’re taking them seriously. We say we want to be clear about their view. In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, American business guru Stephen Covey suggests that we should “seek first to understand, then to be understood”.
As evangelicals we need to be seen to be seeking to understand. A good doctor doesn’t just look at the symptoms of a disease, but rather tries to get a comprehensive understanding of a patient’s history, which involves questions and conversation. We simply have to understand properly before we pronounce our diagnosis.
Do these questions imply that we don’t have answers?
Not at all. As I mentioned last time, asking questions demonstrates a confidence in the truth. Dialogue requires courage. Those who are more uncertain tend to either say nothing at all or just keep talking in the hope that they’ll never get challenged. People who don’t ask questions aren’t confident in who they are.
Evangelicals who shaped modernity and are shaped by it are often more comfortable with propositional warfare from a distance than discourse at close range. I wonder if this is increasingly due to fear. We are afraid of the loss of biblical authority in our culture. We are afraid of the intrusion of other faiths into what used to be our exclusive domain. We feel powerless about the secular onslaught in the press and media, which position Christianity as something to be beaten down and discarded.
The result is that we feel we must shout in order to be heard. But 21st century evangelicals should take a leaf out of Jesus’ book: conversations are much more effective. Questions and curiosity are the hallmarks of a confident Church. Confident people give themselves permission not to know some things because they are certain of what they do know. Not only that, but questioning is the lingua franca of our culture. If we don’t learn it, then before long we will simply be incomprehensible.
Isn’t there a danger of just having a nice chat with those who don’t believe, without ever speaking the truth?
In the first three centuries of the Christian Church, dialogue with the pagan culture was one of the Church’s most valuable evangelistic tools. What I have been saying in these articles is that we cannot separate our truth from the way we tell it. As Marshall McLuhan famously put it, the medium is the message. We have a truth which says that each human being is made in the image of God, is unique and is loved by God. People are not simply a label: atheist, Muslim, homosexual.
If we want people to know the truth that they are loved by God as a unique human being, then we must get beyond labels. This demands conversation. And the very act of asking questions and seeking to understand them already communicates an important truth. The worst forms of fundamentalism are repellent because they give no room for alternative opinions. They therefore show no respect for the validity of human individuality.
Doesn’t this mean watering down the message in the name of tolerance?
I am not for one moment suggesting we should not, in the process of dialogue, share elements of the Christian story. In John 8, Jesus tells the woman to stop her adultery and get back to a better life. To converse is not to condone.
The challenge of our day is to get involved in the conversations of our times in order to bring godly perspectives to the debate. People still want to hear what Christians think about a host of contemporary issues, not least because our political leaders seem to have very few solutions.
All of this dialogue is of course hard work; it’s far easier to get on a soap box with a megaphone than to really seek to understand another viewpoint. But our preaching, teaching and witnessing need to become less complacent. We must stop telling people what we think they should hear and start conversationally discerning what it is they need to know.
Can you give a practical example?
That’s the next article. But I will set some homework: Jesus is teaching on a hillside. Suddenly in the crowd he spots Stewart Lee, the co-writer of Jerry Springer: The Opera. The Master of questions goes up to him and says, “Stewart, I want to ask you a question.” What might He ask? My mailbox is open for dialogue, info@eauk.org
