On the one hand, questioning is the voice of conscience and the absence of one is the death of the other. So Socrates, for example, questioned relentlessly the contemporary faith of his fellow-Athenians and died a martyr for his too-successful examinations.
On the other hand, the question might infer that only faith can be or should be questioned as if questioning were not a necessary component of life itself in all its aspects—including faith. I prefer, therefore, to formulate my response in a wider fashion.
As I have mentioned so often in this blog, my own sensibility is intensely dialectical—whether in terms of body and soul, faith and history, reason and revelation, or, as in the preceding blog question, salvation and works. That sensibility probably came from 19 years as a Roman Catholic monk in a thirteenth century semi-cloistered Roman Catholic religious order. And despite its many faults, I have always been fascinated by one aspect of that century.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, could study pagan philosophy all morning—and, in my unhumble opinion, he was much wiser than Augustine in using Aristotle rather than Plato—and write Christian theology based on him all afternoon. In that dialectic of reason and revelation, he never worried that one could contradict the other unless he had misunderstood either or both, since, as he held, both came from the same God.
My own thinking, therefore, does not so much question faith or revelation as play reason and revelation or faith and history—or any other of our favorite twosomes—against one another in the permanent dialectic of an intricate dance. That is a far more powerfully positive process of interaction than some one-sided “questioning of faith.” In that dialectic, each side questions the other one.
Let me conclude with my favorite example of that process. Take a coin in your hand. First, notice that you can easily distinguish the heads-side (obverse) from tails-side (reverse). You can distinguish them but you cannot separate them. And if you did separate them, you would simply end up with the mess of a ruined non-coin. Second, notice how easily you can look at the heads-side OR the tails-side. But now try and look directly at both sides simultaneously. You cannot. That is, in miniature model, the mystery of dialectic—that is, of twin aspects that can be distinguished but not separated and whose two-some-ness is directly un-see-able.
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