Can I Question God?
Behind every believer is a doubter. Whether we get caught up on intellectual objections to the Christian story or find the existence of a loving God hard to square with our own personal stories of suffering, we all have hard questions for God.
Lamentably, some people have been told that their questions about God and the Christian story are off-limits. Untold numbers of people have deconstructed or walked away from God largely because suppressed doubts tend to build up pressure until they finally erupt into volcanos of unbelief. Moreover, repressing honest questions has also spawned the devastating misconception that Christianity is a blind faith when nothing could be further from the truth.
God is not allergic to our doubts. Jesus even seemed relatively comfortable numbering doubters amongst his dearest friends. Matthew’s Gospel records how even after seeing Jesus resurrected from the dead, some of His closest followers doubted while others worshipped (Matthew 28:17), which is a strange admission if the intent of this Gospel was religious propaganda. On one occasion, Thomas, one of Jesus’ apostles, was peculiarly absent when Jesus first appeared to convince the others of His resurrection. Did Thomas believe their story upon his return? No. And John’s Gospel records that for a whole week Jesus left him to process his doubts (John 20:19–29). So it seems that far from suppressing doubts and demanding blind devotion, Jesus welcomed doubters and gave them the space and evidence necessary to inform their own convictions.
One of the remarkable features of the Christian story is that the same book that offers answers to life’s deepest questions also opens itself up for questioning. You may be surprised to find that many of the questions we have as contemporary readers were actually posed by ancient people recorded in the Bible. As the Bible presents these stories, no attempt is made to censor the raw challenge and deep emotional register from which these questions arise. Rather doubt seems to be a mega theme on the journey toward faith, and the questions the Bible raises not only give voice to and validate your own, but they invite you to dive deeper into questioning the story.
God is not afraid of your questions.
Why? Because if something is true, then any doubts, rather than subverting faith, should only serve as a doorway to a deeper faith. For the healthy response to any doubt is to launch an open investigation. Doubts should spark you to study the reasons for faith, and upon embarking on that journey, if your curious questions are met with credible answers, then you can emerge with a more fully-orbed trust that there is a substantial why behind the what of your beliefs. Serious space should always be made for questions and questioners to explore whether the Christian story can stand up to scrutiny. Such is the hallmark of any true story.
So you are invited to ask away at the Christian story. Some of our doubts are primarily cerebral, trying to piece together the coherence of our beliefs or find justifying reasons to hold them. The underlying question: Is Christianity true? To this variety of doubt the Bible prescribes a rigorous investigation: come and see! There are other doubts, though, that stem more from the heart. These are far more complex to navigate, where there the underlying question is posed in more relational terms: Can God be trusted? To these more entangled doubts, God offers something more than mere evidence and arguments: he offers himself!
Jesus stands as Heaven’s answer to our every heart cry.
One final word about questioning God and patiently exploring our doubts. As much as some of us are beholden to the notion that we are supremely rational creatures, the truth is that no human being is a logical calculator dispassionately weighing the evidence. We all possess what social psychologists call motivated reasoning. What this means is that while facts may not care about our feelings, our feelings tend to shape our care for the facts. Whether or not we give something a fair hearing often depends on what we want to be true. So if we want to undeceive ourselves and push beyond our own biased scales to get to the truth, then we may need to apply the same level of scrutiny to our doubts as we do to the arguments for belief.
Sometimes our doubts too need to be doubted.
So you are welcome to ask your questions about God and the Christian story. Truth invites questioning. Just be open to God saving the right of reply, for in addition to the Christian story offering substantive answers to our doubts, God has questions of His own that we all need to consider.
