One idea people have about religion is that it means hanging your brain up at the door, and just accepting a certain set of dogmas unquestioningly. Even some Christians view questions with suspicion as something dangerous and insubordinate. On a recent discussion on Ship of Fools, one person argued that:

making this concept of supernatural revelation central to thinking about God in fact ensures faith must always rely on a less than honest commitment to truth. It has to adhere to a tradition that has been passed down. You cannot question the messenger, no matter how unsure or tired or simply downright unbelievable he appears without being ready to let go of that faith.

One of the talks I listened to on my MP3 player while in China was the L’Abri lecture by Ellis Potter entitled The Importance of Asking Questions. He had strong words for those who don’t ask questions when they have them – if you don’t understand or know something, but by not asking a question pretend that you do, then you are lying, to the person you haven’t asked the question of, to yourself and to God. Asking questions is fundamental to learning and to being human. Some people try and use Jesus’ instruction to come to him “like little children” as an argument against asking questions. But Potter puts a different spin on it: children are asking questions all the time! Why this? Why that? It shouldn’t at all mean that we don’t question things.

What follows is what I said on the Ship arguing that in fact, if you take the concept of revelation seriously, you are obligated to “question the messenger”, to check out whether they are reliable and whether what they are saying is true…

To be fair, some Christians try and use “revelation” as a magic epistemological wand in a very crude and question-destroying way. I came across one blog that seemed to be saying that to use our reason to try and ascertain whether God’s revelation is true is to set ourselves up above God, and so is sinful – instead we should just accept God’s revelation! Which rather begs the question of “which revelation”, because you’ve got plenty of competing claims for the title of God’s Revelation.

But it isn’t rebellious to seek to establish which is the genuine revelation of God. Here’s an analogy: if I am a soldier on a battlefield trying to receive orders from my headquarters, but I’m receiving conflicting messages from different sources, it is not rebellious to question each one to try and establish which are genuine. On the contrary, it is my duty and responsibility to question if I am to respect the authority I am supposed to be subject to. Questioning shows that you value the truth and respect the true authority enough to go to the trouble of understanding it properly and making sure you have what is genuine.

There is also a prideful form of questioning, where you question to undermine and challenge truth and authority. Like every good thing, questions can be abused. But to ask a genuine question, that is, one where you are trying to discover something you are ignorant of, (such as whether a supposed revelation can be trusted) is something that requires a great deal of humility and shows respect to who you are asking for answers.

So a strong concept of revelation should produce a high understanding of the importance of asking questions. That’s not to say it always does in practice, but it should.