To Question Is to Be Jewish: A Healthy Example for Christians

If we want to focus on perhaps the most intrinsic difference between Christianity and Judaism in terms of spiritual temperament, it is that Jews freely put the beliefs and stories of their faith to questions, while Christians tend to be timid, even when they are feeling internal doubts. Whence the cause of inhibition among Christians, when their parent faith, Judaism, is unafraid to pose questions to the claims and will of God, holy scripture and religious authorities?

In the Hebrew Testament (Tanakh), there are actual mythic (I mean this adjective in its original sense) precedents for the right of human beings to petition resolutions or to demand explanations for the justification of supposedly moral acts of dubious nature: in Genesis, Abraham questions God about whether all the people of Sodom deserve to be destroyed, or whether the innocent should die alongside the wicked, just because the latter prevail, and God honors Abraham's plea that the innocent be given warning that they might flee before its destruction; in the Book of Job, the central figure of Job questions God about his numerous and prolonged sufferings, despite the virtuous life he has unfailingly endeavored to live, and though he is chastised for presuming he can understand the motives of a Supreme Being, God nevertheless does not punish Job for plaintively asking, even if, God, in this tale, feels it is practically impossible to make a mere mortal understand the complex designs of the divine cosmos. In the Gospel of Matthew of the Christian Testament (the most Judaic of the Gospels), Jesus himself asks God why He has forsaken him while he is dying an undeserved death, and earlier, whether he must "drink" from such a fatal "cup", when he contemplates the imminent threat of crucifixion by the Romans. We must remember that Jesus was a Jew, and so he felt no disinclination to ask questions of God. Jews would go on to affirm the act of the question as a virtual sacrament in the rabbinic tradition of Midrashic debate, which stretched from Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages and to this very day (though admittedly the philosopher Spinoza, when he questioned the very existence of God, was excommunicated in the Seventeenth Century by his own community of Dutch Jews, thus showing there could be limits to this principle in some Jewish congregations).

However, very soon after the establishment of Christianity, one branch, that of the Apostle Paul, resolved that if questions were to be asked, they should be asked not of God, but of authoritative religious figures such as Paul himself. The congregations who asked questions of Paul as an arbiter of orthodoxy, were expected to be satisfied with his answers, which admittedly were for the most part well thought out, if not always without personal prejudices (which later proved problematic for a balanced development of Christian spirituality). Other scholars who joined the Christian faith followed Paul in assuming they could tie up any doubts, as though doubt itself were an inherent threat to the viability of the faith. By the time the orthodox writer Augustine had completed his City of God, the form of Christianity that would eventually win out over others was pretty much bottled up in terms of whether or not there could be any more "open" questions.

This is in contradistinction to a parallel form of Christianity embraced by the Apostle Thomas, for which asking questions was a sacred and protected right of any Christian: this was Gnostic Christianity. The fact that Gnostic Christianity was effectively demonized by the Church Father, Iranaeus in the Second Century and finally implicitly outlawed by the Council of Nicaea in the Fourth Century, does not mean its spirit did not live on through the Middle Ages and into the Reformation. Perforce of social frustrations and real unmet spiritual needs among people from all walks of life (but especially the disenfranchised), Christian heretics reopened the questions that upholders of orthodoxy had assumed their tradition had sealed. Those branded as heretics were able to ask these questions long enough at different times for the reigning Church to register them in defamatory records, and then suppress the questioners through various forms of intimidation. And to make extra certain that none of the Church's own ostensibly loyal clergy had become contaminated by these outbreaks of heresy, great thinkers serving the Church were recruited to work out new arguments that would further solidify (or plug the leaks) in the inflexible doctrinal positions established hitherto by the Church Fathers.

Later internal corruption had created such dry-rot in an institution grown weak by over-protection, that Martin Luther's originally intended call for a scholarly debate set off the spark of a revolution (which we today call the Reformation) among a spiritually alienated populace. At this time in the Sixteenth Century, the questions were reopened, and the secular powers at last stepped in to protect those questions. Unfortunately, secular and reformist religious authorities imposed a limit on how many questions these liberated Christians could ask. Thus the Protestants themselves persecuted some of their own fellow revolutionaries as heretics: the Lutherans disavowed the Anabaptists; the Calvinists disavowed the Anti-Trinitarians; the Anglican Church under King Henry VIII disavowed the de facto Neo-Lollardism of William Tyndale and his followers; the French humanists came to disavow the Huguenots; the Puritans disavowed the Quakers. So Protestantism (no less than Catholicism) showed itself resistant to the natural human desire to question spiritual and religious assumptions.

Today, we Christians should consciously embrace from our Judaic heritage (if nothing else) at least the sense that God grants us the right to ask questions and question acts made in His name. No soul can grow without asking questions of this world, and it is no less true of religious faith. There are eternal truths that do carry over from age to age and culture to culture. However, the world and knowledge of the universe is ever changing, and the human mind itself is rapidly evolving. Under these circumstances, for any faith tradition to survive and remain relevant, it must welcome the questioning mind and not condemn it.