“Are you still beating your dog?” Or why there is such a thing as a ‘bad question.’

[This is my first post on sermon 1 “Where are you?” from my Advent Series “The Questions of God.” You can find the mp3 of this sermon at the Redeemer Memphis website or as a podcast via iTunes.]

We’re taught from childhood that ‘there’s no such thing as a bad question.’

We hear it from teachers trying to coax shy students into revealing where they need help. More generally, our culture’s embrace of all questions and questioning stems in part from the triumph of the Enlightenment, which used 'rational' questions as a tool for subverting the authorities of tradition, religion, and oppressive political regimes.

To us, it’s unquestionable that all questions are good, and all questioning innocent.

But this is too simple.

Yes, questions are an indispensable tool for gaining knowledge. True - the Christian church had to learn the hard lesson of what happens when legitimate questions (particularly from its youth) are ignored, dismissed, or too hastily answered.

However, despite all this, there are such things as bad questions – questions based on false assumptions, questions that presuppose their own answer, questions asked out of false motives, questions that don’t fit their object, etc.

In the quote below, theologian Thomas F. Torrance helps us see the difference between good and bad questions:

What, then, is the nature of true questioning? A genuine question is one properly open to the object of inquiry, but a question cannot be open to the object of inquiry if it is foreclosed from behind [before-hand]. Hence to be genuine, a question must allow itself to be called in question; it must be ready for reconstruction in light of what the inquiry reveals.

What Torrance is saying is that when you ask a question, you do so because, presumably, you do not yet know the answer! And if that’s true, then authentic questions require 1) that we be truly open to receiving new information or knowledge, and 2) that we allow such new knowledge potentially to challenge or revise our original question and previous assumptions.

The open nature of a true question is especially important when the ‘object of inquiry’ is God. For “the more ultimate” the question, “the more completely” the questioner must let “himself and all his prior understanding be called into question.”

(Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Questioning in Christ,’ in Theology in Reconstruction, 123-124).

This is one of the points I was trying to make in the first Advent sermon yesterday in which we looked at the most fundamental question we can ask God - the question of his reality or existence.

Of course, it’s vitally important to call people to ask such questions when (not if) they have them. As Francis Schaeffer put it, the “donkey of devotion” can only bear so many unanswered questions before it lies down and dies. In Scripture, God’s people are always voicing their questions about God to God; just read Job or the Psalms. God’s people today must exercise the same freedom within their Christian communities.

But we also have to be aware of the opposite problem, of how our questioning of God can become unhelpful. That’s what I tried to address some yesterday.

We should ask our questions honestly; and with the kind of genuine openness and humility Torrance recommends above.