Questioning Well

I am reading a little book my Matthew Lee Anderson called The End of Our Exploring, a book that explores how we ask questions and our motive behind our inquiries. This is a timely book and a good rebuke to the tendency among younger evangelicals, such as myself, to question everything without really seeking out the answer. Think of Rob Bell as the example par excellence of this practice. Anderson’s broader point is that our questions can be answered if we ask them correctly and actually seek to find the answer. 

He made this lovely observation in the first chapter about how increasing in wisdom increases our ability to ask the right kind of question:

“But if the young question most, the wise question best. The art of questioning takes a lifetime to perfect, for the most interesting questions flow from a deep well of insights. The more we understand, the more fine-grained our awareness of the negative spaces will be. The more we learn about the world, the more we realize how much there is to know, if we will only remember our ignorance and continue noticing the negative spaces. Those who have learned best and longest will explore hidden nooks and corners that those of us starting out cannot begin to imagine. The wise have seen negative spaces that only well-trained eyes are strong enough to detect.”

What resonates with me in this passage is how it aligns with the Biblical view of wisdom: it is hard won and a mark of the elderly. This is why, for example, a freshman in college talking about war being unjust and Jesus being into peace does not carry for me the same weight as Stanley Hauerwas saying the same sorts of things. I might disagree with them both, but Hauerwas forces me to think; the freshman who only thinks she knows does not. It is also why I have come to despise these projects of asking 18 or 19 year old kids why they left the church and taking their pseudo-intellectual response at face value. In a culture that praises youth, Anderson’s effort to focus on the wisdom gained through experience and long-living is welcome and needs to be heard.

As someone who is slowly gaining both wisdom (hopefully) and age (certainly) it rings true. I have written before about how true wisdom does not make one arrogant, but profoundly humble, the depth and breadth of what we do not and will not know smacking into us at every turn. The college freshman is arrogant in his meager knowledge in a way that Hauerwas seems humble in the face of his much more profound wisdom. The Apostle Paul wrote that knowledge puffs up, and this is certainly nowhere more evident than with youthful knowledge.