14th September, 2007

MICAH TILLMAN

I begin with frustration. Why doesn’t Scripture explicitly answer the questions which divide the church? It would have been so simple. Predestination, war, life’s beginning, the creation story’s genre, homosexuality’s cause, the ordination of women and so on are all things on which God must have an opinion. God could have made church unity much easier if He had given the writers of Scripture answers that were definitive and clear - or rather, answers that were definitive and clear enough to end our debates.

PICTURE: Cíntia Martins (www.sxc.hu)   "If Scripture is God’s Word, the questions it answers can’t be valuable just because they allow us to ask other questions. Instead, if God was going to stop answering questions through Scripture at some point (that is, the last book of the Bible), God would need to make sure the questions answered were the most vital. And the more questions those answers allow us to ask, the more fundamental their original questions become."

People sometimes tell me that the Bible doesn’t answer our questions because they are only relevant to our time. But issues like, ‘how many copies of our CDs is it moral to make?’ are not the ones that divide the church. And it’s hard for me to imagine that most of the questions which do divide the church were ever not relevant.

After a long time of wondering and annoyance, however, I think I’ve discovered why Scripture doesn’t answer all our questions. And I’ve realised that asking scripture our questions may actually be dangerous. Allow me to explain.

Why Scripture doesn’t answer all our questions
Each time we find an answer, a new question appears. Not having to worry about the first question allows us to start wondering about others. In fact, we never could have asked the new questions until we had answered the old ones.

It wasn’t until women’s suffrage was no longer an issue, for example, that civil rights for ethnic minorities in the US was handled. I don’t think this was an accident. The country either could not take the one question seriously until they had finished fighting over the other, or it wasn’t until the fight over the one had finished that the other began to occur to the population at large. And now that people generally see ‘should ethnic minorities have the same rights as ethnic majorities?’ as a rhetorical question, everyone has started wondering about sexual minorities.

Even questions that are legitimate at all points in time may not be askable until others have been answered. In a sense, therefore, the questions which get answered earlier are more fundamental. Not only are they important in themselves, but they become doubly so since asking and answering later questions depends on asking and answering them first.

I think the same is true of Scripture, its writers, and readers. The Bible doesn’t answer our questions because other questions had to be answered first. And it had to stop somewhere.

The questions Scripture actually does answer
After I realised the sequential way in which questions must be asked, I saw that earlier questions become more fundamental as new questions arise. But then I understood something else: if we believe that Scripture is inspired, we must believe that God answered the questions which were not only most important because they had to be asked first, but were most important, period. And this means there must be something in Scripture that is more fundamental, if we do not find explicit answers to our questions there.

There may be some areas of life where the questions we have to answer first are not so important in and of themselves. ‘What am I going to eat for breakfast?’, for example, is not that big of a question. But it becomes important because I have to answer it before I can go to work and deal with more important issues there.

But if Scripture is God’s Word, the questions it answers can’t be valuable just because they allow us to ask other questions. Instead, if God was going to stop answering questions through Scripture at some point (that is, the last book of the Bible), God would need to make sure the questions answered were the most vital. And the more questions those answers allow us to ask, the more fundamental their original questions become.

So not only must the questions that Scripture answers be important, they must grow more important all the time. It is only because they are answered that we can ask what appear to be the fundamental questions of our day. And the greater the number of ‘fundamental’ questions that can be asked because they were answered, the more fundamental they grow.

We can say, then, that our questions depend on Scripture’s answers. Scripture may not answer them, but we could not ask them if Scripture hadn’t answered the questions it does.

Why it’s dangerous to spend all our time asking Scripture our questions
If we spend all our time asking Scripture our questions, we may miss the questions it actually answers. And if we miss the questions and answers that Scripture provides, we have missed what is most fundamental.

Take, for example, the issue of ordaining women. You won’t find a position in Scripture that can’t be argued against using Scripture. If we spend all our time searching for a verse to finally put an end to the debate, however, we’ll miss what Scripture has to say about a more fundamental question: how should we treat women in general? No church could ask whether women should be ordained if Scripture hadn’t been relatively clear on the equality of women. We’ll miss this fact, however, if we take our question to be the most important.

There may even be cases where we cannot find the answer to our question because we have not yet fully understood a more fundamental answer that the Bible does provide. It could be that our ability to ask a question depends on an earlier answer, and that that answer can show us the solution to our problem. This is how some churches decided the question of ordaining women: they appealed to the more fundamental question of women’s equality.

We must, therefore, always ask questions of Scripture in pairs: each of ours must be accompanied by - ‘And what questions does Scripture itself ask’. Focusing only on the questions we think are important can blind us to what is truly at stake.

Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and has written artiles on a range of issues including philosophy, religion, and politics. Links to his articles, as well as a list of his upcoming titles, can be found at http://micahtillman.blogspot.com/.

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