The Sean McDowell Show - How to Question (and Doubt) Faith

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

What are good questions we should ask? Why does God communicate with questions? My guest today Matt Anderson wants people to understand that we do not need to fear questions. Faith is not the sort of thing that endures so long as our eyes are closed. The opposite is the case: Faith helps us see, and that means not shrinking from the ambiguities and the difficulties that provoke our most profound questions. READ: Called into Questions: Cultivating the Love of Learning Within the Life of Faith by Matthew Lee Anderson (https://a.co/d/2MLSMse) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Why does God communicate with us through questions? What's a good question? Jesus asked 339 questions in the gospel. We have record in Paul's letters of him asking 262 questions. After Adam and Eve sinned, God engaged them with four questions before he made a statement. What people want is good questions. The good questions that we should ask are the... Our guest today, Dr. Matt Anderson, has been a friend of mine for probably two decades since you came and taught in my class when you were at Wheatstone, probably two decades ago, right? That's amazing. I was trying to think when was the first time that we met and I had forgotten that it was that, but yes, I did. It's got to be close to two decades ago. Yeah, I think that's right. It makes you older, Sean. That's what

that means. Well, I will let that one go, but your book is called Called Into Questions. And Matt, I'm not just saying this because we're buddies. I'm not saying this because you went to Biola. I could not recommend a book more highly than this. Now, it doesn't mean my audience is going to resonate in the same way that I do with it, but what we're going to get into to me, there were so many things. I was reading this on vacation with my wife and I kept stopping going, hey, have you thought about this? Hey, and I was like, we're having a conversation about it. So I'm eager to jump in, but just tell me again, the book is called Called Into Questions. What's the story behind this book that motivated you to write it? Yeah, the story is, I mean, I don't know how interesting of a story it is. I was an undergrad

at Biola and went through an honors program that was all questions-based. It was all discussion-based and I spent a thousand hours as an undergraduate asking my peers questions, being asked questions by them, asking faculty questions. And over the course of that time, you just start thinking like, what are we doing here? What is this thing that we are using? And then you start teaching in a discussion class and you're the person who's responsible not only for asking your students questions, but for trying to create an environment where your students can ask questions, where they can bring their own questions to the surface. And then you start thinking about it slightly differently. You start thinking like, well, I really care about asking questions. How can I get my students to the point where they care

about asking questions? And, you know, so that that's the sort of narrative backdrop for it. But then, like, over the last few years, we've had lots of discussion about deconstruction, people leaving the faith, et cetera. And there was a time about a decade ago when doubt was really cool. We didn't talk about deconstruction. We talked about doubting. And it has always seemed to me in those sorts of contexts, like what people want is good questions. They want the freedom, the space where they can really genuinely put inquiries to the world, to God, to each other, without fear, without shame. And in certain respects, I think like retrieving a culture of healthy questioning is a really

strong antidote to a culture that would deconstruct. Like, I really want people to question well. And so it's that that was this sort of like immediate cause. People are talking about deconstruction. I thought, well, that's you could do that or you could just do this slightly other, I think, more constructive thing, which is ask questions, which I think is a slightly different image than deconstruction. OK, Matt, we've already established that I'm older than you and I have 50 knocking at the doorstep soon enough. And for me, I'm telling you, the older I get,

the more I value questions over answers. Questions unlock meaningful conversation with my wife or with a friend. Questions help me solve a problem. I watch people who ask good questions because I want to ask good questions in this very platform people are watching right now on YouTube. I love questions. And the more I'm okay living with unanswered questions and mystery, which raises a certain tension for an apologist. Now we're going to get into a lot

of that, but you started with the story. I've always wondered what your story was growing up in a Christian home, coming to faith. And it's not what I expected. It's this 30 hour weekend where you probe into Plato's symposium that convinces you Christianity is true. What was that like? What were some of the questions that you thought and still think Christianity best answers? Yeah. You know, I was raised in a Christian household and I think I was probably a Christian before coming to Biola. But I didn't have a deep settled conviction that it was true to such a degree that I would just live or die based on it, where it was just going to form the whole of my life. And as an undergraduate, my junior year, we spent 30 hours reading Plato's Symposium. And the questions that we wrestle with that come up there are, I think, some of the hardest questions you can ask as human beings.

You have bodies. What are bodies for? How do you integrate the body and the soul? How do you relate the one and the many? If you have the value of one person, are there situations where we would sacrifice the one for the good of the many? Or should we not do that? So you have these deep philosophical problems that come to the surface of the many, or should we not do that? So you have these deep philosophical problems that come to the surface in the symposium through Plato's questions. And I think he doesn't really know what the answers are. I think he really is just grasping for a way to respect the body, for instance, a way to honor the distinctness of individual human life, but he doesn't know how to

do this. And from my standpoint, at the end of that discussion, asking those questions, it seemed palpably evident to me that Christianity answered those questions and answered those questions in a very distinct way. I answered those questions in a way that opened up other questions. Like it's a, it's a funny thing, Christianity, because while we talk about it, answering our questions and you're an apologist, like you are, you are an apologist and the son of an apologist, right? This runs in the family line for you, you know, but like what's really peculiar about Christianity is it's so satisfying. But within that sense of satisfaction, it generates so many new questions. And we can see that through the course of church history.

Like you get the doctrine of the Trinity. That's great. We solve that. But how does that work? That means that Jesus is fully God and fully man. How does that work? That means that Jesus is fully God and fully man. How does that work? Like there's all these how questions that Christians ask where they're trying to work out what are the mechanics of this thing that we believe? How does this all work? And that's really exciting and liberating. It's a ton of fun. And so the sense of satisfaction that I felt as an undergraduate in that moment

was a very strange sense of satisfaction because the satisfaction that I felt as an undergraduate in that moment was a very strange sense of satisfaction because the satisfaction that was aligned with a desire to continue to ask a different set of questions. What I like about this is there's a confidence that Christianity is true and God is okay with our questions and questions actually draw us closer to Christ rather than away if we can ask the right questions with the right spirit in the right way. And that's some of what we're going to get into. But I'm curious, why do you think God communicates with us through questions? Because when I look at Jesus, he tells stories and he asks questions. Why? Okay, so full disclosure, Sean sent this question beforehand.

So I've been thinking about this question. And Sean, you talk about wanting to ask good questions. I think this is a really good question. And I say that because it's not... It puts something to me in a way that I haven't quite thought about directly. Like I haven't thought about questions in just this term, like why God wants to ask us questions. And I think there's, I mean, there's so many different things that we could say. If we think about what questions do to us right they draw us out they raise our interests

right like there's there's some sort of unknown that a question confronts us with where we have to find an answer we have to give some sort of response to it. So there's a sense of equality in asking a question. You know, you've expressed an interest in what I have to think, have to say about it. And that's dignifying to me that you would ask me a question because it invites me to answer, invites me to say something. But there's also this sense in which I have to come up with an answer. And that means I have to think about what I know, what I don't know. And it changes how I relate the world to think about the world in terms of a question. And I

think God wants us to answer his questions for both those reasons, because he dignifies us. He wants us to converse with him. He wants us to talk with him. He wants, in a sense, to be equals. Right. Which is a terrifying thing to say, but he really wants to converse with us. And he also wants us to recognize the limits of our knowledge. And in asking questions, it disturbs what we know. And it forces us to confront the unknown, I think,

in a way that's really, really challenging for us. You know, here's another question we probably can't probe into. I think you've got thoughts on this, Sean. I'd love to hear what you have to say. Oh, gosh. You know, one thing I'll say to people is the very God who made our brains engages us with questions. Maybe God knows something about how we're constructed, how we relate, how we respond. So I think you're right that there's a relational component to this. That's probably the biggest piece that I would move towards is, you know, eternal life is to know the one true God and relationship. And you look at the very first question in the Bible, where are you? It's like God knows, obviously, you know, did you eat the fruit?

He knows. And you point this out in your book. He's inviting a response. He's inviting an engagement. He's inviting an engagement. He's inviting a relationship with us. So I think that's at the root of it. But there's also something biologically I'd love to know, and I don't fully have it worked out in my own mind, why we respond to questions. By the way, you're modeling right here by asking me a question back what your book is

about, but I'm going to pull the reins back here because I'm leading this interview, Matt, before you get too far ahead of us. Let me ask you this. There's different kinds of questions. Actually, feel free to ask a question back. We're just having a conversation. There's different kinds of questions. I didn't send you this one, by the way. I want to know what you think makes a good question. What is a good question for somebody to ask? Does it depend on the context? Does it depend on the purpose? How would you respond to that general question? What makes a good question? Yeah. When I think about my students, I'm always anxious about answering this question. Because I don't want to communicate that people

shouldn't ask questions, unless they're good questions, right? That you have to, I don't want to, like induce anxiety about, oh, are my questions good questions? In a lot of cases, the good questions that we should ask are the questions that we have, that we feel very, very deeply. And we need to articulate those questions. And that's the good question is the question that you have. It's not about what questions you should ask. It's about the questions that you feel like you have to ask. And those are, those are the sort of questions I want to get students to. But I think, you know, there is still some discipline that you can cultivate over time as you learn to do this. And I think that context does matter. It's weird to,

you know, it'd be weird for you to ask me about my favorite NBA team in the middle of this conversation, right? We can have that conversation, but it doesn't fit the time. It doesn't fit the context of what we're talking about. Intention matters, I think, what we're trying to do with another person. If you're asking me a question to make me seem like an idiot, you can do that. It might be a good question, but it's asked for the wrong reasons. But then I think the form itself, like the way in which the question is composed matters. And lawyers, you know, lawyers have to learn this. Journalists learn this. I think it's not insignificant that many, like someone like GK Chesterton, who's a prominent Christian apologist, has a kind of journalistic training because journalists are trained to ask questions, right?

They have to get the form of the question right if they want to elicit the information that they're interested in hearing. And so, you know, like asking a question that I think a good question sounds a little strange. It can highlight something that the other person hasn't been attentive to before. It questions themselves shed light on a subject just by virtue of turning our attention in an area that we haven't turned it before. And that's what journalists do, right? They're trying to uncover, to help, you know, to uncover a story or doctors when they ask questions in, you know, a context where they're trying to help someone understand or identify where the pain is, right? Or what the problem is. They're going to ask a lot of questions. And as they ask questions, they're shifting people's attention to various aspects or dimensions of the story. And I think a good question turns our attention in unexpected

or surprising ways, right? How do you integrate the body and the soul like why do we have bodies if you're a christian why not just have souls i think that's a weird like it's weird that we have bodies and if you just ask why do we have bodies and you spend a lot of time thinking about that right like for a lot of human history there were movements that thought the body was just really bad that we shouldn't have bodies right gnostics were real you think like, why were people Gnostics? Why did they think that the body was bad? And if you think like, why do we have bodies? What's good? What's valuable about them? I don't know. It feels weird to me to ask a question at that sort of level. It draws our attention to this aspect of human life that's pervasive. And I think a good question does that. That's a long, rambly answer.

No, that's fine. I should stick to the questions. This is why... and I think a good question does that. That's a long, rambly answer. No, that's fine. I should stick to the questions. This is why, you know. No, that's fine. I think you're modeling for people thinking out loud, reflecting, giving response, inviting questions.

I do appreciate how you began that by saying, I don't want to discourage my students from asking questions. You've always heard people say, there's no such thing as a stupid question. Well, the reality is we need people to ask questions, but there are stupid questions. I mean, I had JP Moreland on a few weeks ago and somebody asked a question. We were doing live Q&A on the soul. And he said, let me help this person ask a better

question because they're confused. And there was a part of me that's like, wow, that's pretty bold. But on the other hand, I was like, he's right. This person doesn't even know what they're asking and he can help them ask a better answer and then give a better response. And there was a jarring tension that was there. Why do you think we don't cultivate better question asking within the church and within our society? Why don't we invite this? I think some of us, we just don't have the training to do it. We're not attentive to how questions work and how to ask good questions. I think it takes time to be with people who are asking questions and to draw out what their real questions are and then to sit with them with their questions. I think it just it takes it can take a lot of time. And by and large, we don't give time to the intellectual life within the church. I do think what you know, one of the things that I did badly in this book was communicate

the extent to which I think that an intellectual life can be had by anyone, regardless of who they are, regardless of their context. I think like, you know, there's there's one book by a Catholic called The Intellectual Life where he says something like an intellectual life can be had in two to three hours a day. If you and I think that's right, you know, like, but you have to approach your intellectual life as a kind of discipline and devote that time to it and devote time to reflecting on what it is you want, what it is you're thinking, such that you start to feel questions at a deep level. And then you practice articulating those questions with others and putting questions to others to help them articulate their questions. I think that it all just takes time.

And it's not clear to me that we have communities that value intellectual life to such a degree that they're willing to take time for questions or give time to questions, except in the sort of like guru context, Sean, right? Where we sort of put the person up on the stage and they ask the guru the question, the guru gives lots of answers, right? Like the question and answer format that happens, but we don't devote a lot of time to helping people articulate their own questions. Um, I don't, I don't think, I think you're right. I don't think we look at question asking as a skill in itself, let alone a skill that's worth developing. I don't ever remember in the church, somebody just really helping me

ask the right questions, formulate the right questions. It was more about answers and simplistic answers, which we're going to get to in cliches rather than asking good questions. Now I want to know, can you think of times in your life, the most significant questions somebody's asked you? Now, yesterday prepping for this, I phrased something on Twitter. I was like, what's the most significant or meaningful question anybody's asked you? And some people are like, will you marry me? I'm like, okay, I guess I invited that, but I met more like a, I totally did. Like I see that, but partly I'm like, what's a question that unlocks something for you and change the trajectory of your life. So for me, it's funny,

in grad school, I had Gary Deweese. This is the MA Philosophy Program at Talbot. And I asked him, because there's all this talk about postmodernism. I said, how do we know there's such a thing as truth if we don't have full confidence that we can discover it? And he just looked at me and said, Sean, is it possible you're confusing epistemology with metaphysics? And I paused and was like, wait a minute. It completely unlocked for me the difference between how we know something and what something is. Huge question. It was like eight words or whatever it was, unlocked that for me.

That question was a game changer for me in so many different ways. Are there any moments where people ask you questions that you can think of that just change your thinking, change your trajectory of your life that was a significant question? Yeah. I had a mentor who once put a number of questions to me. And one of them I continue to think about. He asked me very bluntly, at what level of material means will you be satisfied? At what level of material comfort are you going to be content? And no one had ever put the question that directly. And it's never, you sort of wonder, and I don't think most people ask that sort of question about their lifestyle, right? They just sort of want the next thing. And they don't reflect on how many things could we own that

would like where we would be content? Is there a level where that we would reach where we'd say, all right, I am done. And where should we put that level? Like it was it was a really haunting question. And, you know, for a lot of a lot of my life, not a question that mattered a whole lot because I didn't have enough material means to answer it meaningfully, you know, sort of scraping by as a college student and as a graduate student where you're trying to like pay rent and put food on the table. And that's if you're doing those two things, you're making it. But, you know, as you get farther along in life and as I've been blessed with more opportunities, like it's a question that continues to just get underneath my skin.

So not an intellectual question, a very practical question. But I think, you know, those sorts of practical questions. I do ethics. That's, you know, that's my discipline. I want people to live well. And so much of living well requires asking those sorts of questions about our lives that disturb us and haunt us and cause us to wonder whether we are actually living well, or whether we're just doing, we've just assimilated to what everyone else around us is doing. And so that's one question that still haunts me.

That's a great question. Now, my instinct is to say, well, Matt, what did you conclude? But that in some ways would be to betray the question. I think it's far more valuable to let that question sit with the audience and have it trouble them and them think it through rather than just say, well, I came to, once I make six figures, I'm happy. Well, wait a minute. Now we've short circuited the purpose that questions play in our life. That's why I don't want you to answer that. Although at some point I'd love to probe an entire conversation on how you've worked through that question in your own life. Well, I actually think, Sean, I mean, to your point, I'm not sure I have answered it.

It's also the sort of question that comes back perennially, right? Like I make a decision every day about some sort of material comfort that I want. Do I need to, you know, want to go to get Starbucks, a drink at Starbucks or not? And you're like, so it's a sort of question that continues to challenge me to be present in my decision making. Because you could come up with a sort of numerical answer,

but that's not really the force of the question, right? Like how much, how big of an effect do I want? The force of the question is, what are you going to be content with? And that's just, it haunts me daily. And by the way, that answer is going to look different if you live in Southern California, where I live versus Kansas and maybe 25 versus 65. So it's an ongoing life question. Okay. So one of the things that I've started probably really since I started interviewing people probably five years ago on this is I watch people who interview and who ask good questions so I think Colin cowherd in sports when he interviews people just asks fascinating questions I'm like how did he come up with that I think Megan Kelly in news asks

really insightful point to questions I think Jordan Peterson asks phenomenal questions are there certain people you follow in any venue who think, wow, they ask good questions? Because I'm always looking for people to follow to try to become a better question asker myself. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't have that sense about coward. I haven't listened to much okay to what i've listened to of sports talk radio i actually think doug gottlieb does a pretty good job okay um his questions are always very simple and pointed and direct and maybe i just like that like they're very short questions it's just sort of like this i'm gonna ask you a question and then he'll move on and ask a question about this and it's very simple and direct and i i kind of admire that um i'd have to i don't watch a lot

of contemporary news so i there's no one that i i would sort of model myself after. I think someone like Sheree Hurt at the Trinity Forum for Christian intellectual spaces does a great job of asking questions, does a really, really nice job of probing and prodding and getting people to answer things that don't fit the scripts as it were. She's good at getting people to go off script, which I like. Ah, gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, good. That's why I sent you a script ahead of time.

So you thought A was coming and then I take you to B. That's a part of my strategy here, Matt. I'm one step ahead. No, I wish I were. Okay, so talk to me about one of the things in your book that you go into that I've thought about a lot is how well we invite questions in the church. And I don't think we do. Like I cannot think of a single sermon I've ever heard where somebody taught through a passage and rather than ending with two or three ways to pray better,

ways to read your Bible better, ways to share your faith better, they just say, you know what? When I was reading this passage, it left me with a question and I'm not sure what to do with it. So I'm just going to leave you with this question. Let's pray. Like that would be jarring,

but that's not, we like things formulaic, I think. Why don't we do this well in the church? What is it? A lack of training, like you said earlier? Is it fear? Is it the effort to do so? Why don't we do this better? Because it seems to me if there's any faith that can invite questions, It's Christianity. We shouldn't have anything to be afraid of, but we just don't do it well. Yeah, that's interesting, your experience there. I'm thinking through whether or not I would want the sermon to end with questions.

I do that in my classroom. So basically every class discussion at the end of class, I'll say, and here's one more question to think about based on today's discussion. Also, we're out of time. Have fun, you know, and send my students on their way. And maybe, you know, one student a year thinks about one of those questions after class. That's not true.

I think some of my students think about them a lot. But I'm not sure the sermon is the right context for that i'd have to think through whether whether that's the right place to do that i do think there is a sense of fear about questions i mean you you wrote a book with john set adrift um where you really work through the tension between believing, like firm commitment, here's what we have to believe. And then here are the sort of spaces where we can have room for disagreement and real questions. And I think that there's a sense in which the space for disagreement or real questions has narrowed as anxiety about sort of Christians position in the world has gone up. So if you think about like the sort of fundamentalist movement of the early 20th century, the 1900s, which I'm actually kind of a fan of in some ways, right? Like we're Biola guys.

Biola was home for the fundamentals. Most people don't read the fundamentals. They've never read the fundamentals and they don't realize that the fundamentals are full of really interesting, really thoughtful engagements with the world and with intellectual life. Like they're really smart, actually.

But there is within that movement a sense in which like the Christian's position in society is somewhat in jeopardy, right? That there are these pressures and these challenges to the church. And the more people feel that anxiety, the more a church feels that anxiety the harder it's going to be to have room for real questions because those questions as people ask them people aren't going to be able to tell is this a real sincere question where they're trying to understand or is this like the secular society getting to this person. And this is going to be the start of an off ramp out of Christianity. So I,

I, I do think there that Christians aren't good necessarily at asking questions in part because our communities are very full of fear about our standing in the world. And we're, we're, yeah, I don't know.

Does that seem right? You, again, you must have thoughts here. It's interesting. I was actually talking with my dad this week about this because he managed within his generation to cross so many boundaries across denomination with Catholics, with Protestants, with different, you know, he just didn't die on any issues that now he said it's almost impossible to have that kind of statesman position because there's so many nuanced positions you have to

speak up on and you have to side with this person. And if you don't side with this person, then you're put in this camp and you're not invited here. And I'm kind of a big tent person who's like the gospel of the essentials, let's go. And some of that I think is brought on by social media. Everybody has a voice now. If you don't speak up on certain issues, you're actually pegged sexist or racist or whatever it is just for not speaking up. So I think it's really fragmented things within the church. So it does make it harder, but I don't know. I think if we went back 50 years and I asked my dad or someone's been around, were we better at asking questions then and allowing room for doubt? I don't know that I'd be convinced that we'd say, yes, before the internet came and the modern anxiety of deconstruction, we were just great with asking questions and doubting.

I don't know that we did. I think you're right that there is increased anxiety about it because there's so many stories that are being told and there's so many tools kind of at our fingertips. But I don't think we were any better at inviting questions and doubt then than we are now. Agree or disagree? Yeah, I don't know. You're probably right. And I do think that forming communities where questions are welcome, it has to begin at the top, right? So whether or not the pastor asks a question,

whether the sermon is the right context or not, pastors need to invite questions from their community as modes of accountability for their own preaching, for their own teaching, but also need to model the intellectual questioning life. And I don't think we have good ways of doing that besides in part, because we don't see our pastors on a day-to-day basis to the extent that a small church 50 years ago might have, right? We just don't have as much access to a lot of our pastors. So we don't see them in their study thinking,

surrounded by books, reading and thinking about things and asking questions. And so I think like partially we need better models of people who are questioning within our churches. And I don't know how we do that in a way that's genuine and real, and that's not performative, right. Where it's just another sort of social media, like I'm, I'm playing the questioning game. Um, because I do actually think that, that what happens on social media with respect to inquiry and questioning changes the whole, our relationship to our questions. Once we go public, once we, those sorts of venues, and we're

asking questions before lots of other people, I do think it changes how we relate to our questions in ways that are not always healthy. And so I don't know how we do this. I don't know if it's better or worse. I do know, you know, like, I tell a story in the book about a youth pastor who I'd asked a question of and who took that question amiss. Like he thought it was basically a challenge to his authority. And that level of anxiety about authority, I think that is a pretty pervasive human experience that makes questions inherently threatening right in a community where you have authorities that are set up who are meant to be the guardians the bastions the people who are entrusted with maintaining the norms of how the community thinks about the world if that's if that's your context questions are really difficult they're like it, it's really hard. It will cost a lot to ask them.

And that is in certain respects to the church. There are people who are tasked with maintaining boundaries around how the community thinks. And so it could be an intractable problem for Christians. Well, before I got a PhD, Doug Guyvitt said to me, he said, just so you know, if you get a PhD in apologetics, everyone's going to expect you to have the answers. You will become the guy. And so there's a certain tension with asking further questions, admitting mystery, things I'm in process with, when some people will literally place their confidence in me being able to give an answer or a book or in person, which can be a really, really interesting tension that's there. So let me jump on something you said. Do you think there's

any questions that are off limits or do we take questioning too far? And I ask this because one of the things I like doing with students is I do this atheist role play. I put on glasses, do my best to role play an atheist. And a lot of it is just asking questions back. Why does your God allow evil? How can he command genocide in the Old Testament? Why is God so silent? And I continue to do it because I think it's hugely valuable for students. But there's been a couple of times in the past 15 years, maybe twice, someone's been like that rocked my faith and set me on a course of questioning I wasn't doing beforehand. Now, there's reasons why I'm going to keep doing it.

I won't necessarily go into that. But my broader question is, are there certain questions that are off limits? Are there ways of questioning that we should avoid as leaders within the church that are just unhealthy? Yeah, it's very hard to say yes to the first one in the abstract. There is, you know, within the Christian tradition, there is a vice like curiosity. The English term comes out of a Latin term, curiositas, which is traditionally a vice. It's a vice of the intellect

for Augustine, for both, for both Augustine and Aquinas. They think there is a disordered way in which the intellect can work. And they named this curiositas. And curiositas isn't necessarily about content per se, what sort of questions are being asked. It's more about the manner of the mode in which we relate to our questions and in which we relate to the unknown. So if we're asking questions with a sense of where we're trying to possess, to make the unknown mind, to take ownership of it. I mean, it's actually like, if you think about

what a dissertation is in the modern academy, you're supposed to say something novel and your career depends upon you being the one who had this new insight that contributes to this, right? That's actually a pretty perfect distillation of the classic vice of curiositas, right? Where it's about you saying this new insight and you're the one who gets to say it. And your question is oriented towards you delighting in novelty and discovering new things for their own sake and for the sake of you being the one who gets to say it. So I think there are ways in which questioning can go awry. I think that's controversial. But I do think it's instructive that the first question in Scripture is a bad question. It's asked by the serpent to Adam and Eve.

It's asked with the serpent to adam and eve it's asked with the wrong intention it's asked uh it's a bad form it's a badly worded question it's a very deceptive question and i think you know as you pointed out right like god asked four questions and uh in response to adam and eve's sin So he's not anti-questions, but I think the first word about questioning is a cautionary word. And that's bracing for someone who really loves questions. So I do think, I mean, I do think there are ways in which

we can introduce deep questions too quickly to people who are not equipped to deal with them. I mean, there's the old story of Oedipus, right? Who discovers that his mother has had this illicit relationship, right? And it just wrecks him. And Oedipus learns the truth and the truth destroys Oedipus because he's not prepared for. And there's a sense in which if people are not, don't have a deep, really rich foundation

of what Christianity is and what it teaches and its fullness, you could reach a point where you ask a question. You're just not prepared for that question. And it does break you, right? Because you haven't spent time in the Psalms. If it's a problem of evil,

right? You haven't spent time in the Psalms praying with the Psalmists who are lamenting these evils, who are in one sense, putting the problem of evil to God, right? Like if you haven't made that a regular part of your Christian life and someone comes at you and hits you really hard with the

problem of evil, it might really disturb your understanding of Christianity. Whereas if someone has immersed themselves in the Psalms and has that as a part of their Christian formation, questions are going to hit very differently, right? And so what question is appropriate to ask of someone? A lot of it does depend upon what sort of formation they've experienced. What's the grounding that they have? And are they going to be prepared to deal with this sort of question well? It's a non-direct answer to your question, but this is hard. I've never thought about how the first question in the Bible asked to Adam and Eve is a bad one, and hence a cautionary tale. That's a novel thought to me because you see, interestingly,

both Jesus and Satan compared as a lion. Satan's a lion who prowls to attack, but Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah. They both ask questions. So it's almost like questions have deep power and deep significance, but be careful who and when and what you ask. There's a huge responsibility that comes with this. I'm not sure. That's something to think about even further now that you mentioned it. Now you have this section. This is one of the things I shared with my wife because I hadn't quite put it in these words, but it was something that always bothered me is Christian cliches. Things like let go and let God, love the sin, hate the sin, botch that one, or a phrase like God will work it out. And especially because I've done a lot in areas of sexuality. And sometimes people say, well,

love the sin or hate the sin. And that's always struck me as a cop-out from stepping into the messiness of what that looks like. And in reality, I get so many questions from parents that I'm like, I don't really know what to tell you how to navigate that. I know it's true. I know you want to love, but I don't know. There's a messiness here. And these cliches, it's almost like it's a stamp on this as well. Just let go, let God. That gets us off the hook of the difficulty of engaging people. Now, talk a little bit about how you see those.

Agree, would you expand on that? Because I love that section in your book. Yeah, thanks. That's very kind. I mean, I do really hate cliches. And you have to think like, what is a cliche? Like, what makes the cliche the cliche? And the reality is it's a cliche because there's some truth to it.

Maybe a lot of truth to it. Maybe a great deal of truth to it. But it's a truth that's uttered in such a way that it puts an end to thought and to conversation. Right? Like, the cliche becomes the cliche because it's the conclusion of a long trail of reasoning. It sums up, it's the tip of the iceberg, right? But if you don't have the iceberg beneath the cliche, then the cliche just sounds hollow and empty and, you know, unreal. You know, the love of the sinner sinner hate the sin thing lewis c.s lewis basically says this

i think it's in the four loves right like he's got this line almost identically augustine at many points will say this line almost to a t right like it's just it's there so this you know it's not new we aren't the first generation to take that sort of phrase and use it to try to account for these difficult problems. But in both Lewis and Augustine's case, it's embedded in a lot of different sort of teachings. It's not a sort of fragment of a thought or a fragment that's just said to solve the problem. It's embedded in a big context that recognizes all the different nuances and difficulties of these sorts of issues.

And as such, the line doesn't feel like a cliche when you read it in that context. And so I think there's a kind of decontextualization of Christian teaching, right? Again, it comes back to what sort of formation do Christians have? Do they have the deep formation such that when we say those sorts of things, they're coming out of a deep well of insight and wisdom and discernment and the application of Christian truth? Or do we have very thin formation? And so we're looking for bumper stickers, Instagram posts that are going to help us sort of navigate this situation in a way that just makes everyone feel better and okay, because that's really what we're going for. It's a kind of like therapeutic sort of approach.

I think that's great. In many ways, Jesus had bumper sticker responses, love God and love others. Well, that was profoundly embedded in his worldview, in his practice, in his relationships. So there's nothing wrong with simplistic statements that capture things, but I don't get the impression most people use them in that way. Usually it's a way of going, well, here's just a simple answer. You know, just trust God. It's like, well, I'm trying to, and I don't know what it looks like. Some of the biggest questions I get asked from people today are like, how do I navigate grace and truth? And part of my response has increasingly become,

if you're not living within that tension today, you're probably erring too far on one side versus the other. Expect to live in that tension because we're being pulled all over the place, not only in the church, but in the culture. I want to jump to something else. This intrigued me as an apologist, because you talked about how questioning is the best preparation for death. So how is questioning well and living with a level of mystery a good way, if not the best way to prepare somebody to face maybe evil and suffering and death well. Yeah. I appreciate you bringing that up. This is actually a new... I'd heard for years that the point of an education is to learn to die well. And I never really understood how that

worked. And as I was working through this book, it finally clicked for me. And I realized we don't know what happens after death. We just don't know. We will all die. And we'll die alone in one sense. No one can die for us. That's the thing that we're going to have to do that no one else can stand in our place for. And while you have lots of stories of people coming back and all that stuff is, it's nice, it's comforting, but we don't really know what's going to meet us on the far side of death. Now, as Christians, we affirm the resurrection, right? We think that Jesus died and rose again, and that there will be a resurrection, but there's still a kind of haziness, a sort of fog about what that means for us. Our friend, Fred Sanders, theologian at Biola, once had an essay that he wrote on Christian art and the resurrection and why Christian art almost never shows the resurrected body of Jesus.

Like, you know, he'll show like images of light, right? But it's very, and partly his point is that Christian art hasn't done that historically because there is a kind of question mark there. We don't really know what that's going to mean. And so it just seemed to me like death is a big question mark. And there's a kind of answer that Christianity gives, but, and it's a true answer, but there's still a question that I have to answer. What will it mean for me to die? What will it mean for me to go through that process? And that is unknown to me. And it's an important unknown, right? For generations, people thought that the final hours, your final words of life were more

important than almost anything else that you did in your life. So even within Western societies, for a time, there was a time when the last words before someone died were given more weight in a court of law than anything else that was said. And I think there's something to that, right? Like I want my final moments, like how we, how we begin things and how we end things matter a lot for who we are. And there's, there's, there's just a deep question of, for my life about how I'm going to end well. And if I am not comfortable with the unknown, I'm not going to go through that process well, because it's a moment, like death will be the moment where I move from everything that I know and is familiar and is comfortable to that, which is in one sense, deeply unknown to me, right.

Which is in my case, an unmediated vision of God, right. Where I have nothing else to protect me between me and God. And that can be terrifying and it can be good, but it's, it's just unknown. And so it seemed to me that,

that asking questions and like, insofar as they put us in touch with the unknown, they prepare us for that moment. Because if we're, if we're comfortable, if we're confident in the face of things that we don't know right now, if we're secure in ourselves if we really know who we are such that this unknown isn't going to threaten or disturb us then when we reach our death and we face that unknown we'll know a little bit of what that's like and we'll know even though i don't i don't really know what's about to happen to me i'm i'm okay because i've i've been in this sort of situation a lot in my life. And I think whether people are Christians or not, I think I want them to ask questions at that sort of level where they

really put themselves in touch with the unknown because they are going to have to die and they are going to have to go through that process. And how they do that matters. As a philosopher, you know, although there might be different terms for this, when we use the word know, there's like intellectual knowing facts. There's an experiential knowing, like knowing how to ride a bike. And then there's a relational knowing. When it comes to dying, we can have intellectual knowledge. We know there's a resurrection. We know there's a heaven, there's a relational knowing. When it comes to dying, we can have intellectual knowledge. We know there's a resurrection. We know there's a heaven, there's a hell, but that experiential

thing, you cannot know what it's like to experience it until you've been there. And of course, until you come back. But the more in this life we experience certain kinds of unknowns and live in it helps us to best prepare to experience what it's like to die in a way that's less jarring, so to speak. So that was helpful. Now you take it a step further and you say, lament itself is a pathway to a confident faith. I want you to flesh this out because this statement I thought was fascinating. You made this comparison and you said, the absence of lament will contribute more to doubt among church members than any French philosopher. In other words, let me take a step back and frame this for my audience. What you're saying is what contributes more to doubt is not poor apologetics. It's not some TikToker with some, you know, who's deconstructing their

faith or somebody of another faith. It's the lack of practicing lament in one's life is more significant. Now, of course, you're not saying apologetics is not valuable. I appreciate that balance in your book, but why is lament a pathway to have a confident faith, which is the very thing that motivates people to get into apologetics in the first place is to try to have a confident faith. Yeah. You know, like for many people, some, some sort of experience of suffering or evil is going to be what disturbs them. Right. And for many people people it's going to be the hardest part about being a Christian you know I we mentioned people who are deconstructing it seems to me that a lot of people are deconstructing have experienced real

trauma real pain real suffering and they don't quite know what to do with that and the types of church communities or intellectual systems that they have come out of having to equip them to resolve that suffering and that trauma. And in many cases, those church communities have been the ones who have inflicted the trauma and the suffering and the pain. And I think that if that's the case, then the only, the only thing we can do is return to the Psalms and cry out to God directly with our suffering and with our pain. I mean,

so much of the Psalms is putting questions to God of the sort. I think I say at one point where the Psalmist will invert God's questions that he puts to Job, right? When Job goes through all the suffering and God reveals himself to Job at the end, he'll say like, you know, were you there when I formed the stars, right? And the Psalmist effectively take that sort of question, but just invert stars, right? And the psalmists effectively take that sort of question, but just invert it, right? Will you be there when I go down to Sheol? When I go down to death,

are you going to be there? I'm in the midst of this suffering. Where are you? Great, you were there when you formed the heavens. That's nice. Great. I wasn't there. Sure. You win that one. I'm down here suffering. And where are you? Right. And the ability, the freedom to articulate that this isn't the first time that church has uh inflicted violence or pain or suffering on people um or that the people of god this isn't the first time that the people of god have have uh destroyed people like all that's all that's written into the fabric of scripture itself, right?

Such that on, you know, in some religious traditions on Good Friday, they'll read the whole gospel narrative and the whole crowd will, like the church people who are in the Good Friday servants, will read the parts of the crowd when we say to Jesus, crucify him, right? Because we are the ones who, by virtue of our guilt, are the ones who participate in the crucifixion of the Christ, right? Like that's what sin means is effectively to be themselves before God like nothing else can. If we aren't regularly participating in lament as a practice for ourselves, for those around us, it just seems like there's a whole book of the Bible that's called Lamentations. It's that important. Jeremiah is just like, I got a book here. It's a whole book and we're just going to lament. It's that central to the faith that we have received. And I think that's because it's just absolutely necessary for maintaining faith in a violent and troubling world.

I think the largest category of Psalms are lament Psalms. And of course, Psalms are songs, but rarely in church do we have a song that reflects the lament. I appreciate that you point out in Psalms, sometimes it's brought full circle, glory is given to God. Sometimes that lament is just left sitting within the Psalm itself, which is really interesting. I have a question for you. A certain tension I find myself living in. I have an evangelist heart. I'm an apologist. I'm a professor. I'm a teacher. So when I have conversation with people, like at the recording of this, I'm actually going to a mosque in two days to go have conversations with some Muslims.

I'll have atheists on my channel. And there's a part of me that expects them to be open to truth and the possibility of Christianity, which would imply out of fairness. And you say in your book, I need to be open to be persuaded if I were wrong. And that's on page 146 in your book. And then like four pages later, it's like standing up with a prophetic voice to culture and speaking truth not compromising on the essentials how is this just a tension that we live in but how do we maintain an openness to being persuaded and a boldness and a prophetic voice because i don't see like isaiah you look at certain prophets it's like they are speaking truth boldly, unequivocally. How do we live in that tension? Yeah. I'd be interested in hearing how you live in this tension because I think, and I love the fact that you're like, page 147 and four pages later, you said the opposite thing. So nice job. Nice job on the consistency, Anderson. I think one way to think about this is for Christians,

some of this is mediated by roles. So pastors have a certain type of responsibility to proclaim the word of God in a distinct sort of way. And church people have similar types of responsibilities, but they're different, right? What happens in the sermon as the announcement of the word of God to both the people of God and the world around us, what happens in the sermon, I think is really, really significant. The sermon seems like it's the time to boldly, unapologetically proclaim the full counsel of God and speak prophetically against the powers of this world that would blind people's

minds and hearts to seeing and hearing the truth of the power of God. What happens on Twitter is not what happens in a sermon. Those are very different contexts. And insofar as context governs or affects the nature of Christian speech, I think that Christian speech has to take a different form, right? Like what happens on Twitter is a kind of gamified communication. It's like a game, right? Where while there's a sort of, I can proclaim boldly the truth, there's an incentive structure there for doing so that's affected by things like

retweets and the algorithms. And that incentive structure is very hard to resist. It takes a heroic to them as we proclaim the truth. What am I like? In what way am I benefiting from this? In what way am I being harmed by this? And I think there's such a great emphasis put on proclaiming the truth in public. And I think for leaders, that's really, really important. But there's such a deep value for invisible speech, right? For speech that happens in contexts that are not sort of likely to be made famous via social media, right? The sort of, I'm sitting with someone in a mosque, talking with them, and no one's recording this conversation,

and we're not doing it for the sake of the clicks or the likes. Like, I think that that sort of communication is enormously valuable for forming us as thinkers and as Christians, and in giving us real confidence such that when we go into more public spaces like social media, we do have the freedom to speak the full truth, but in ways that will allow it to sound like good news because we aren't susceptible to the clicks and the likes in quite the same way. I don't know, but I'm serious. How do you navigate this? Because it seems very hard to me. I don't have it all figured out. It's another tension that I live in. I think there's context, like you said, Twitter versus a sermon.

I think there's also giftings that people have, and I think we need to lean into our giftings. There's prophetic voices today of people who are going to speak truth more boldly in almost any medium. And God has called them to do that. I'm not an activist. I don't look at myself as somebody with this just bold prophetic voice. I'm a professor. I'm curious, hopefully in a a good way not the vice way you talked about earlier i ask a lot of questions i'm not threatened by people who see the world differently that's my lane as a professor and sometimes people confuse what it means like to bring in somebody who has the views that i bring onto this youtube channel onto my youtube channel as a professor

in this medium is very different than who I would bring into a local church that has more of a pastoral protective kind of role. So I don't have that all figured out. I spend a lot of time thinking about not only what I communicate, but how I do it. And I just want to be motivated more by principle than I do by outcome. And even on this medium, if I spoke into politics, if I responded to everybody out there, I could get a bigger following. I could make more money. There's so many things I could do to build that platform. But to me, I'm asking myself, what is the end game? What's lost doing that? And are Christians playing the exact same way that other people in the world play? What really makes us different?

And I try not to judge other people who have a different lane as best as I can. I just try to live by the principle of what I think God has called me to. And so like things that I think about in my mind, like even on this platform, like what's appropriately provocative because I have to provoke somebody to watch and engage, but what does it mean to be appropriately provocative rather than inappropriately provocative? And I don't, I can't tell you perfectly how to do that, but I think it's just more principles that I live by. And I often look back and go, you know, I went too far. I didn't go far enough. And like you said, that question earlier about what material, you know, what amount of material

wealth will make you happy. I'm constantly asking myself, am I living by these principles? Was that gracious? And sometimes I'm like, I should have spoken truth more boldly. Other times I think, you know what? I could have been more gracious in that question. I just live in that tension. I don't know. But my audience, when it's all said and done, I mean, I can tell you honestly, Matt,

this is something I think about all the time. I asked Austin Guinness a question. I'd had a chance to interview him here. I said, what do you think your legacy will be? And he said, Sean, legacy is a secular idea. All that matters is God says, well done, my good and faithful servant. The older I get, I think more about faithfulness rather than results. And I think if we lead that way, it's going to help us navigate these things better. Although we're still going to make mistakes when you have a public platform and everybody will remind us of it because we have

a public platform. More could be said. That's the best way I try to navigate some of those things. Do you have any thoughts back or any challenges or additional ideas on that before we keep going? I think that's really helpful. I do worry about, I mean, I think you're right that there's some sort of vocational dimension here. I worry about people taking on the role of profit self-consciously. I agree. I just think that that's a really dangerous disposition to have, in part because what prophets do is they ask questions and they probe and they disturb. But they don't do that in perpetuity. They're not only trying to wake people up to the truth, but once the truth is revealed, prophecy comes to an end, right? To use 1 Corinthians 13, there's going to be a point where prophecy ends.

And the self-conscious, I'm going to prophetically denounce X. In this sort of environment, there's just too many perverse incentives for that to remain healthy for very long, it seems to me. I've seen very few people do that in ways that I think are constructive for them or for the church. I ask myself a lot, how much does the medium affect me in ways I might not even realize? Because if you want to build a platform, it's, so I'll give you an example. I've done two, two interviews with a friend of mine, Mark Ward on the Bible.

One is like seven bad translations. Don't read these seven good translations, read these. Well, the one about bad translations got 10 times as many views as the good translation because negative things. And I wouldn't frame that differently. I thought it was appropriate, but it's just a reminder that negativity, concern, provoking, attacking somebody else is going to get you such a huge following. That is constantly there because it's clicks and it's money. There's so many incentives that are built in. So I'm just constantly asking myself on any platform, is this affecting me? Is this affecting my character? Am I compromising to this? Do I have the conviction to walk away and change if so? I don't have a simple answer for that,

but I think we're all naive if we're not asking those tough questions and aware that it's affected all of us. So that's huge. Let me ask you this so we can keep going. Each one of these, I have so many more questions for you, but I thought it's fascinating at the end,

you have a section on deconstruction. But in fitting with your book, again, it's fascinating at the end, you have a section on deconstruction, but in fitting with your book, again, it's called called into questions. You don't preach at people who are deconstructing. You don't tell them what they're doing wrong. You ask them certain questions. And although we haven't gotten into this, what questions do is I love questions. They don't, They build bridges rather than barriers. They put the burden of proof upon somebody else. What are some of those questions you would ask to somebody who's deconstructing? And by deconstructing, it seems that you mean somebody who's questioning their faith. Some land up in a different church, you say. Some lead

towards deconversion. But it's this process of doubt and questioning. Maybe tell us some of the questions you would ask people going through that process. Yeah, the first question I would ask is just about the metaphor. Are you sure that deconstructing, if you're going to label that, how does that metaphor shape your relationship to the world? And how might it badly shape your relationship to the world and how might it badly shape your relationship to the world? It's interesting to me that we have labeled this process, like what,

what changes about the intellectual life where we approach it as a process and this sort of way, right? Like deconstruction is, as you point out in your books at a drift, right? Like it's a, it's a metaphor to an image that has a sort of construction type image, right? Like we think of

houses that are being deconstructed, they're being torn down. And there's something about sort of that image, turning it into a process that from my standpoint is not necessarily healthy in terms of the intellectual life, regardless of whether you're a Christian or not. I'm not sure that atheists should deconstruct if by that, what we mean is a sort of systematic taking of their beliefs and removing them or tearing them down one by one. Um, in part because it seems like the first mode or the, the, the appropriate role of the intellect is to understand, right. And trying to understand something is different than trying to discern whether it's true or false. Those are different questions that we would ask. And for a lot of people who are deconstructing,

who are engaging in this process, we presume that we understand what it is that we have experienced and what it is that we have experienced and what it is that we believe the set of beliefs that we've been given. I'm not sure many of us do, right? Like a lot of, I'll just say like a lot of undergraduates in the university that I teach, I think like if you were to go deconstruct your faith, I'd want to ask, are you sure you understood it in the first place? Are we sure that we understand what we're tearing down here? But if we don't understand what we're tearing down as much as we should, then maybe the first mode of our intellectual life should be, can I understand? How can I understand this thing better, deeply, more closely, and to allow the

changing of our beliefs, the swapping out of our beliefs to happen as a result of that? So that'd be the first question I'd put to someone. You seem more sympathetic with the notion of deconstruction than I am. Well, it depends on what's meant by deconstruction. And my co-author really, he used an illustration. He said, think about the angle that goes into a log that you cut it. That's going to shape the angle that comes out. So if somebody finds themselves saying, I don't know what I believe, I don't know why, it can be healthy to ask, what do I believe and why? Does it line up with scripture?

Like that's a process people don't always go looking for, but the attitude and approach going into it in many ways is going to shape what's on the other side. If it's motivated by hurt, if it's motivated by anger, if it's motivated in certain things, that's going to affect a different outcome as well. So I think that's a lot of, of what, what frames it to me is kind of our attitudes going in. Gosh, I just had to me. I mean, I would also say that deconstruction, one of the reasons why people like the label is because it creates a community, right? There's a, there's a group of people who are deconstructing and it allows people to have a sense of familiarity and kinship where, where there's a sort of recognition, ah, you're the people who

are going through this process. We're all going through this process together. And that sort of community and kinship is really wonderful. We all want that sort of recognition and that acknowledgement of our experiences and that fellowship of people who are going through similar sorts of things. I think the question I would ask is, again, to what extent does that community or that sense of recognition, is that distorting your own intellectual process and your own relationship to your own community? Are there ways in which how other people'sing how you're understanding your history, your experiences, and so on? I said earlier, I think there's something that changes when we air our questions in public. And I think that there's definitely something that changes with respect to our relationship to our questions and our experiences when we publish them on the internet, right? They become

permanent and fixed for us and for our identity in a way in which if we're just talking with friends offline and talking with loved ones offline, they're not fixed or permanent. And so I think digital community of deconstruction solidifies and hardens things in ways that wouldn't necessarily happen otherwise. And I really want people who are tempted to embrace deconstruction as a label and to enter into that community to think about that. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't. I think you're right to think about the medium in which it takes place. But what you said before, asking somebody who is deconstructing, do you really understand the faith that you are questioning and possibly

deconverting from? I'll tell you, Matt, I don't know if I could say the majority, but I see an awful lot of people asking certain questions they think are so deep on TikTok to encourage a kind of deconstruction. And I'm like, how is this the first time you've thought of this? And this question reveals to me, you don't understand the atonement. You don't understand what God's grace is. So they're rejecting a straw man. I mean, I had a young man say to me who had left his faith, he goes, well, we know substitutionary atonement is immoral.

And I said, we do? We know that? Have you read this, this, and this? The church has dealt with this for 2,000 years. Now you might read all of that and conclude it's immoral. But at 19, how do you possibly know that? So that one question, I think within itself, of course, you have more.

You have a great letter at the end of your book. I have let time get away from us, which often happens in a good conversation. You lose track of time. And so I've way kept you longer than I should have. But I just want to remind our folks, your book is called Called Into Questions. I thoroughly enjoyed it, Matt. Read it twice. It's all marked up. I've got yellow all the way going through it. I think it's excellent. And Christians or not Christians, you mentioned my book, Set Adrift, which I wrote for people who are deconstructing.

I would put this right up there and tell anybody. You're not going to preach at them, but if they're deconstructing their faith, I think you're going to help them ask the right questions and process this more like a guide. So I'd recommend it there. Before you click away, folks, make sure you hit subscribe.

We've got a lot of other conversations coming up on apologetics and worldview. And if you thought about studying apologetics, we have the top rated distance program. Would love to have you in class. I teach classes on the resurrection, problem of evil, biblical sexuality, information is below. Check it out and join me. Matt, thanks for coming on. We need to do this much sooner than later next time. Would love that. Thank you, Sean. Thanks, brother.