Jeffrey F. Keuss - Live the Questions: How Searching Shapes Our Convictions and Commitments

J ust give us the answer.

That was the response from one of my students in an evaluation of an undergraduate theology course I had just finished teaching.

The question: What was something you had hoped for in this class that you feel will help improve the course next time?

Ive been asking a version of this question for over thirty years as a way to gain input from each new generation of students. I like to take some of the more esoteric theological concepts involved in my courses and ground them in things that my students see as pertinent and immediate in the real lives they live every day. So at the end of each course, I ask them to tell me how I might make theology come alive for them. Most of the responses over the years havent been quite as succinct as this students one-line request, but some version of just give us the answer comes out at least once in almost every course I teach.

And who can blame my students? I get it. Many times I have sat in a lecture, a sermon, or watched a movie just like my students and wanted to fast-forward to the bullet points of conclusion, get to the plot twist, and then save myself the time of waiting so I can get on to the things that really matter to me and break my heart and the heart of others. Getting to the answer is often another way of saying get to the point that matters or why does this matter at all? Our world is a confusing, overwhelming place, perhaps now more than ever before, and our instant access to the pain and suffering around town and around the globe can become emotionally paralyzing.

This search for somethinganythingthat relieves the tension and despair of our age makes sense. This drive for answers is natural. Much of this book will address the form and reason by which we seek the answers in our life. In the search for answers to lifes difficulties and challenges, we can find ourselves turning to dogmatism, fundamentalism, and numerous other isms that close off further discovery, deep understanding, humility, and the connection with others that is the real source of much of our search for answers in the first place.

This is why faith is not merely certainty and conviction in a belief statement, although certainty and conviction do have a place in deep faith. To find the answers our heart and soul and body seek in this life will require more than objective answers. True answers that will sustain us for lifes journey require some messiness, mystery, wonder, and at times even uncertainty found in relationships with others and with God. The drive to separate answers from ongoing relationships with othersas if we can have meaning through mere conviction apart from faith that requires relationships and humilityis actually an ageless pursuit that fails time and time again.

In her masterpiece novel of the Victorian era titled Middlemarch, George Eliot introduces us to Rev. Dr. Edward Casaubon, a vicar of a small village in England who, rather than attend to the needs of his community, is driven to find what he terms is the Key to All Mythologies. This scholarly search is a quest to find the one great answer to lifes meaning and purpose, which he believes is located in the dusty books of antiquity. Focusing exclusively on the books before him, and not lifting his eyes and heart to see and hear the people God has given him to serve, is a metaphor for what George Eliot saw taking hold of society and church life throughout the nineteenth century.

As the Industrial Revolution was bringing with it the high value of speed, efficiency, and wealth as the mark of a healthy society, Eliot lamented the loss of what she called the mystery beneath the processesthe wonder, hope, passion, and humanity found underneath the fixed and certain objectivity that comes from rational answers devoid of relationships and humility. Casaubon was an extreme example of this quest for disembodied answers to the neglect of the flesh-and-bone life around him. Over the course of the novel he becomes fixated on his quest for the ultimate answers found in isolation and rationality to the point that he is left alone.