Hard Questions: Learning to Live with the Questions

This is the last article in the series, and it is not going to resolve anything. That is not a failure of nerve. It is the point.

Nineteen articles. Doubt. Suffering. Anger at God. Divine gender. Biblical violence. Miracles. Salvation. Hell. Death. Church harm. Church division. The Holy Spirit. Unanswered prayer. Each one opened a question that has occupied serious thinkers for centuries, and none of them closed with a clean answer — because clean answers to these questions don't exist, and anyone who offers them is either not paying attention or selling something.

The series tried to take the questions seriously, map the tradition's actual range of responses, and resist both the pressure to pretend certainty that isn't there and the pressure to pretend the questions don't matter. Both of those pressures are real. The church has often applied the first one. The culture increasingly applies the second. Neither is honest.

In 1903, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a nineteen-year-old military cadet named Franz Kappus, who had sent him his poems and asked for guidance. Rilke wrote back about the questions:

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Rilke was not a systematic theologian. He was a poet writing to a younger poet about the life of the interior. But what he named, the tradition has always known and rarely said clearly: the questions are not an obstacle to the life of faith. They are part of it. You don't have to have the answers to begin. You don't have to have the answers to stay. What you need is the patience to live inside the uncertainty without collapsing it into false resolution or walking away from it out of frustration.

The Christian mystical tradition has a name for the way of unknowing: the via negativa, the apophatic path. It is the approach to God that proceeds not by piling up correct statements about what God is, but by stripping away everything God is not — recognizing that God exceeds every category, every image, every theological framework we bring to bear. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, Pseudo-Dionysius in the sixth, Meister Eckhart in the fourteenth, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing in the same century — all of them worked in this tradition. All of them insisted that the deepest encounter with God happens not when we arrive at certainty but when our certainties fail us and we are left with what cannot be named.

This is not agnosticism. The apophatic tradition did not abandon Christian belief; it deepened it. It recognized that the God attested in Scripture and tradition infinitely exceeds the human mind's capacity to contain, define, or fully comprehend — and that this excess is not a problem to be solved but the very ground of worship. You cannot fully explain what you fully understand. Worship requires that the object of worship be larger than the worshiper.

The hard questions, held honestly, push us toward this. Every time we try to tidy God into a framework small enough to manage — a God who only heals if you believe hard enough, a God who condemns everyone outside the visible church, a God who approves of everything your tribe already does — the questions push back. The God who emerges from honest engagement with doubt and suffering and unanswered prayer is always larger, stranger, and harder to domesticate than the God we started with. That is a feature, not a bug.

What does it actually look like to live with the questions?

Continuing to show up — not because you have it figured out, but because the practice of showing up to the liturgy, to the community, to the Scripture, to the silence is itself the work. The tradition does not require certainty before participation. It invites participation as the means by which faith develops, questions deepen, and something that cannot quite be named becomes real in the living of it.

Holding the tension without forcing resolution. There are questions in this series — about hell, about salvation, about the violence of the Old Testament, about unanswered prayer — where the tradition offers not a single answer but a range of faithful positions, each with something to commend it and none of them fully satisfying. The Anglican tradition in particular has always understood comprehensiveness not as the absence of conviction but as the refusal to let any single human formulation become the last word about a God who exceeds all formulations.

Staying in the room with people who answer the questions differently. It would be easier to find the congregation where everyone already agrees, to settle into a community that never unsettles. But the body of Christ, as Paul describes it, is not a collection of people who think alike. It is an organism that requires difference to function — that needs the doubter and the mystic and the activist and the traditionalist and the grief-stricken and the newly converted all in the same room, learning from each other what none of them could learn alone.

At the end of the book of Job, after thirty-nine chapters of Job demanding answers, after God speaks from the whirlwind in language of overwhelming power and mystery, Job says: "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (42:5). He does not say: now I understand. He does not say: now I have the answer to why this happened. He says: now I see you. The encounter with the mystery did not resolve the question. It changed the one asking it.

The life of faith does not answer all the questions — it changes you in the asking of them. It does not resolve the tension between what we know and what we don't — it teaches you to live inside that tension with something other than despair. Not certainty — but presence. Not resolution — but company. Not answers — but a God who, if the tradition is right, is in the questions with you, and has been all along.

Where are you with this today? Maybe you came to this series with specific questions and left with more than you arrived with. That is not failure. That is what honest engagement with the tradition produces. The questions don't close — they open. What the tradition offers is not a way out of them but a way through them, in the company of everyone who has walked this way before you and left their questions in the text. You are not the first person to sit with this. You will not be the last. And the God you are asking about has been asked these questions in every language, in every century, by people in every conceivable condition of faith and doubt and grief and joy. That God has not run out of patience yet. Neither should you.

Sources and further reading: Job 42:5 (NRSV). Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Four (1903; trans. M.D. Herter Norton, W.W. Norton, 1934). Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (c. 390 AD). Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology (c. 500 AD). Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing (c. 1375). Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings (trans. Oliver Davies, Penguin Classics, 1994). Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne, 2014). Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (Harper & Row, 1973).