Asking questions…
July 29, 2004
I’m at a family reunion in northern Illinois the rest of this week, and then I get to spend a few days with my buddy Tony. We’ll do some blogging while we’re hanging out, so be sure and check it out. Anyway, I got a wonderful email from the girl at camp who had been really honest about where she was with God that week. She had been beginning to read Genesis, and I just love some of the questions that these students come up with…stuff I wasn’t even thinking about at their age. [sidenote: she emailed me, and...well, she proved ME wrong. This is what she wrote: "Oh, and on your site you said 'I don't think she necessarily cared about the historicity of the Bible, or all the factual/archaeological evidence...' but that couldn't be farther from the truth!! That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, because evidence is fact and I totally have faith in facts!! So, I just thought I'd let you know that!!" Doh! I guess that's still important for some people...just goes to show you can't dismiss everything...]
- How did God happen? How did he appear?
- Adam and Eve had two sons…how did everybody else get here?….
- How do we know all of the stuff mentioned in the very beginning of Genesis? Like all of the stuff God said: “Let there be light” all of that.
- If God loves all of us so much, why did he drown us all in the story of Noah?
- What happens to animals when they die? Do they go to a seperate heaven? Do they just go to heaven with us? Or do they just cease to exist?
- Why did people live so long back then? And finally, why did he put the mortality limit on 120 years?
- Can you believe in God and Karma at the same time?
- What do you think defines being a good Christian?
- Genesis Chapter 19…what is with all the incest?!! The two daughters in the cave “Let’s get dad drunk and ‘lay’ next to him so we can have kids!!”….NASTY!! Oh, also why do the guys in the town want to have sex with the two (male) angels that come to town as apposed to the girls that the guy offers them?
- If God knows everything that’s going to happen to us then does that mean our life is predestined? Does it mean that we have no choice/control in our lives because it’s already been seen by God?
I love getting lists of questions like these. I have a few high schoolers from Idaho who will send me lists of 30+ questions at a time. I love it. And I end every email the same — keep the questions coming! Beautiful stuff.
Tags: Camping-Ministry, God, Questions, Theology, Youth Ministry
Posted in 
Adam Walker Cleaveland: 
July 29th, 2004 at 1:16 pm
Those are great questions! And, no doubt, they all have nice-and-tidy theological answers… But what about “real” answers for the real people that ask them? (I mean, once a theologian, whay ask, right?) :)
July 29th, 2004 at 3:39 pm
This reminds me of when I was pastoring. I was coming to the end of my association with fundamentalism, but I was associate of a fairly fundamentalist Pentecostal church. I’d love striking up conversations with some of our youth group about the big questions they were curious about, and the kinds of things you mention here were high on the list, especially some of those OT conundrums.
What was frustrating, though, was that these youngsters had been brought to faith in a fundamentalist environment that taught them to expect rigid, factual answers to all their questions, and quite often when I didn’t give them the black-and-white responses they were seeking, they’d go running to whatever Bible-bashing half-wit would feed them the crass answers they’d been led to expect.
I’m kinda glad these young folk have you to talk through some of these things with, Adam.
Maybe sometime you’ll fill us in on the major academic interests you’re most looking forward to pursuing at Princeton. I’d be interested to know. Or direct us to the relevant past entries.
July 29th, 2004 at 3:57 pm
Hi Adam, I really like your blog, well done! I especially like the ‘asking questions’ - as it’s by asking them that we ‘advance’. I know it’s emergent to live with mystery but, where possible I think it’s cool to study the Bible to get answers, where possble. And you having typed those ten question just grabbed my interest. I know, I should resist….LOL.
For instance, the answer to question 1 is found in Gen 21.33 (NIV), and the answer to question 2 is found in Gen 5:4 (NIV). I hope I don’t sound like a fundementalist in being too factual, but to remain quiet and appear non-fundementalist means that Bible knowledge is reduced and the answers were there all the time but for some reason were not ‘discovered’, and even in emergent circles I can’t see that as cool.
The other error is trying to solve imponderables where mystery exists and should exist until we get ‘there’. For instance, question 4 is unknowable. It doesn’t infer that open theism or process theology (a heresy) is correct, it just means that we’re fallible and our understanding is partial. I’m using ‘occams razor’ here, because it’s not necessary to resort to utilising or ‘believing’ in open theism…the ‘easiest’ answer is to say I don’t know (after researching the Bible ofcourse). LOL
Keep up the good work. Ciao
July 30th, 2004 at 12:48 am
Jonathan, thanks for your comments but those verses really don’t tell me much. Gen 21.33 tells me God is eternal (which only begs the next question: “what the heck is eternity?”) and Gen 5.4 simply says that Adam/Eve had more kids (which doesn’t explain the whole incest-situation that presents…
Yah, though I’m not saying that there can NEVER be answers to our questions. We just need to get much more comfortable than some of us are with having no answers…
July 30th, 2004 at 1:37 am
I remember going to “Church camp” for a couple of weeks one summer and not having really been exposed to the Christian Church much, #1 was the only question I could come up with for the pastor who sponsored us (Southern Baptist camp - wasn’t exactly the atmosphere where questioning was “appropriate”). He didn’t give a satisfactory answer. “Higher thinking” has driven me to my own conclusions, but I’d definitely be interested in what guys like you say to kids when they ask questions like that ;-)
July 30th, 2004 at 4:26 am
I think we’re saying the same thing. It’s cool. I agree with you if you’re saying that for every question answered there’s usually another one that follows that needs asking, which is why probably Jesus spoke in parables sometimes - we get closer to God by asking, and relying on Him. I only sought to show that sometimes, an ‘answer’ is there in the bible, we just need to look for it, rather than form our own opinions of what we think the answer is. No framework for an answer and what we get is pure opinion - the Atherius Society, a mile from where I live, will gladly tell you that Jesus is a Venusian Senator. Their opionon, they say, is as valid as mine. There has to be more.