This PSP Saturday we’re thinking about the quality of questions we ask and how to ask excellent questions. Every day at some point I browse Notes to look for excellent questions and find mostly the tired, worn out questions we’ve been asking for the past 200 years. It inspired me to write a brief note about the importance of good questions that is now this post.
This is a paid subscriber post, and as much as I think everyone should be asking excellent questions, perhaps those who desire to do it along with me would be so kind as to support Not My People’s Publication through a Paid Subscription of $5 per month, $30 per year or any donation via BuyMeACoffee
A for Affort
On Asking Excellent Questions | Paid Subscriber Post
Asking excellent questions is really hard. Excellent questions stump us for good reason. Via the question we are considering as many factors as possible that inform our understanding of whatever it is we are asking about. Somewhat paradoxically, an excellent question is one which by its complexity and good standing in logic make it impossible to give an immediate answer but, its pursuit results in a deep wisdom and understanding of the question at hand and everything it touches—if not eventually satisfactory answers. For this reason, an easily answered question is an insult to the wise.
—What do you need with freedom?
—Right to Choice or Right to Life?
—Does God care about what we do in the body?
These types of questions are, as the BIPOC community tell us, the due diligence that must be undertaken by the individual asking. The wise will not do our homework for us. We must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. They are non-starter questions looking for easy answers rather than understanding.
—Is the Bible the Word of God?
—Is the Bible everything we need for life and godliness?
—Is Jesus God?
These all have relatively simple yes or no answers that tell us nothing.
—Is God One?
Yes? Good job—even the demons know the answer to that one. No points for you.
Somewhat self-servingly I will give an example of an excellent question.
—How do we live as one with God and one another as God is one with Godself?
This question and the topics it touches has occupied my mind for the last decade and I daresay will occupy my mind for at least another 10 years if not the rest of my life.
Asking a good question starts with recognising that the questions we are asking are rotten, self serving questions that are usually about other people and not ourselves. Remember that the goal of spiritual formation is to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling resulting in repentance and submission to God. God wants to will and work in us for God’s good pleasure. Don’t get side-tracked by trying to work out a situation you have not been given the grace to live through nor understand all that well.
For instance I find that those working on what to do about LGBTQ+ are rarely a part of that community nor even remotely related or informed. They have to work out their own salvation—how God meets them where they are and the journey they are on towards maturity in Christ. A bad question conforms the questioned and questioner to the same aspects of the flesh which are of no help in answering truly excellent questions. We are not the military, we do not abuse people down to their raw elements in order to build them up into bigger, faster, stronger, better human beings. This is the work of Angry God1 not the God of the Bible.
Rather, an excellent question strips us of our forms and functions and institutional answering machines. A whole field of excellence is in seeking after questions like the one above about LGBTQ+, or Women or Men or Jews or Gentiles—the wise know that we are all one in Christ but those who are still learning and growing treat one another like meat sacrificed to idols. We are all one in God but as much as possible we must keep away from scandal if we can help it so as not to cause our weaker siblings to stumble. In this way, those who fall under a certain category of the flesh must work out how God meets someone from their background on their level and raises them up to full maturity in Christ. The starting point is the realisation that nothing in the flesh can keep us from the love of God. The action point, as those who are mature, is to ensure that none of God’s children keep any of God’s children from realising the full love of God because of anything according to the flesh and cause them to stumble in the way.
3 Suggested Applications
Examine the questions you are asking yourself or the Word. Are they about you or someone else? Make a list of questions that have to do with you and another list for someone else. Which is longer? Which is populated with the harder questions?
Formulating good questions about our own selves in relation to the Word can be difficult—we can start to think that Jesus Ruins Everything or that we aren’t going to go down that road because it will stir up too much attention towards us from our family or church family—my advice is Paul’s advice to Timothy: be the example, obedience always draws with it negative attention from those who were never going to change unless they saw someone they love and trust change.
Be the Bridge—once you start to discern excellent questions that pertain to you, invite others into the conversation so that they can consider these excellent questions and form new questions that pertain to the whole body. Doing so with wake people up from their spiritual sleep to start growing again in the Spirit.