And God Created Questions Too

Shaking the Unshakable

Questions have always been essential to faith exploration.

After my freshman year of college at LSU, I served as a camp counselor at a summer camp for boys in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Several times a week after the campers were asleep, the counselors and staff would gather for prayer and Bible study. That summer wasn’t the first time I had encountered biblical literalism, and it certainly would not be the last. I had seen it before, and I had already learned better than to accept it wholesale.

I wasn’t primarily disturbed by biblical literalism itself. Rather, it was watching the faith I love so dearly become so fixed that it no longer had room to breathe.

Eventually, I reached the point where sitting idly by and accepting it without asking whether it could withstand the weight of the biblical witness was no longer possible. Thirty-five years later, I understand the moment was inevitable. After all, I was a Methodist spending the summer on a camp staff with several seminary students from a drastically different perspective.

My anxious curiosity drove me to test the water. I chose a question I already knew the answer to—not to win an argument, but because I believed honest faith could withstand an honest question. I also believed that a faith hardened into concrete rarely has a chance to breathe again without first developing a crack.

“Why,” I asked, “does Mark capture Jesus telling the disciples to take a staff and follow him while Matthew and Luke record him telling them to leave it behind?”

I am not sure what I expected. Memory makes me hope it was conversation. Yet the reaction was unlike anything I expected or could conceive. My small question visibly rattled the room. They checked and double-checked the text. They took stabs at explaining it away. They made a concerted effort to dismiss it and move on. But the crack had already started. Eventually, calls were made to seminary professors sincerely hoping for a satisfactory explanation. What no one disputed, however, was that a simple review of the Greek demonstrated the differences. This wasn’t simply a quirk of English translation. It is what the Gospels actually said. I had hoped to crack the concrete. Instead, I seemed to have pulverized it.

The room had been shaken in a way I had never witnessed before, and don’t remember witnessing since—and I hadn’t even begun my own seminary journey quite yet. If a question this small had the power to shake the room to its very foundation, perhaps the room had been standing on something far less solid, far more fragile than anyone anticipated.

On that night, I realized that it wasn’t Scripture that feared questions—it was people—and our response too often looked less like faith and more like the defense of the Alamo.

In retrospect, summer camp was not the first time I had witnessed this phenomenon.

Years earlier, while attending an independent Baptist high school, another student asked a question in class. His question wasn’t disrespectful. It wasn’t disruptive. He simply asked a question. The teacher responded by belittling him in front of the class. Before I had time to think, or consider my thoughts, I heard myself say, “You’re being mean.”

The teacher turned toward me without hesitation—and the belittling of my classmate was redirected. He took me to the principal’s office, paddled me himself, and sent me back to class. I hadn’t asked the question to crack the concrete. I had simply objected to the way another student was being treated for a genuine curiosity.

I have often wondered whether that moment stayed with me because of the paddling and the moral injury it inflicted or because of what it represented. The lesson seemed unmistakable: some questions were not to be asked, and those who defended them could expect consequences as well.

The details of the incidents were different. Their pattern was not. In one telling, a particular reading of Scripture seemed more important than allowing the text to speak for itself. In the other, authority mattered more than extending the same grace to an inquisitive student that Scripture itself repeatedly commends and frankly demands.

The Bible is filled with people asking questions of God with astonishing honesty. Abraham challenges God’s justice. The psalmists demand an answer to God’s absence. Thomas refuses to accept the truth of resurrection without seeing the physical wounds. Their questions are different, but God does not condemn any of them for asking. He engages Abraham, receives the psalmists’ lament, and meets Thomas in his doubt.

What is striking is not that these questions were answered; many were not. Some were only partially addressed. Some even received silence. Yet nowhere does God suggest that examining the truth of faith through questions was itself a failure of faith. Again and again, Scripture portrays honest questions as one of the primary ways we learn to trust the faith, not as an enemy of the faith we hold dear.

What has stayed with me was never the differing accounts in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. It was the visible anxiety on the faces of my fellow camp counselors. One small question had unsettled a room full of people who believed their faith was unshakable. I had hoped only to crack the concrete. Instead, I seemed to have pulverized it.