Some time ago, a ladies bible study at the congregation I serve invited me to come and spend time with them because they had some questions and hoped I had some answers. I disabused them of that notion rather quickly in part because the questions they had didn’t have clear cut answers. Why? Because they were open questions about life in the world. While that invitation was extended some time ago, I am still spending time with them weekly, listening to their questions about life in the world and offering up some sort of guidance where possible but always reminding them of whose they are as they enter into the world with the questions it presents them. That’s the point, not that we have the answers to all the questions, but that we have the identity that sends us into a world full of questions, a world that ask questions of us and causes us to ask questions of it. 

It seems to me, though, that asking questions can be because we want an answer or because we want to give an answer. I’m not sure we always recognize the difference between the two. Yesterday, as I met with this group of seasoned believers, some of whom vote on different sides of the aisle and have different takes on all sorts of things political and synodical, I was glad to know that they felt free to ask the questions, to expose their own bias, and to be willing to hear the pushback that should come across the board, that no one, myself included, is above or beyond. 

Asking questions is healthy, even though we don’t always agree with the answers given. The unhealthy thing is not being able to ask questions, especially when we are not able to ask questions of leadership. I would never suggest that questions shouldn’t be be asked. But, to repeat, that doesn’t mean we are asking them because we legitimately or actually want to find an answer or because we want to be affirmed in the answer we have already generated in ourselves. The thing we don’t want to face is that we may be wrong, that the question we ask may not given an answer we agree with or want to hear. Why? Because if that happens maybe it may mean we have to change, that we may be wrong, either in what we believe or in how we believe it. Being right is never enough for the Christian; we need to be right in the right way. The scriptural witness and witness of the church throughout the ages holds us to nothing less.

Being right in the right way allows us to ask questions and give answers and realize that we need to meet the moment in front of us and not the one that came yesterday. We do so, we ask questions, we give answers, we meet the moment, knowing whose we are and the truth of who he is. This point was made long before me by someone who puts it better than I ever could. 

For us as Diasporites, as members of the twelve tribes in the Dispersion, heredity (our birth from God) is everything and environment nothing. For us, every accepted value of this world is under perpetual and ever-renewed question. The philosophic presuppositions and axioms of any age are under question. We are forced, as men of hope, to put our questions always in conspectu Dei, that is, in the sight of the God in motion, the God who has drawn near in grace and mercy, the God drawing nigh to consummate in judgment and renewal what He has begun. In His presence nothing that is of this age is per se a given, acceptable magnitude: the Western tradition, the American way of life, standards of living, human rights, the self-evident truths of this age or any age, everything that lives from man to man- we are Diasporites over against them all. The church and the Christian who have lost their power to question their environment have ceased to be Christian and church. Our study, endeavors, and work in the field of human relations must, in other words, be specifically and peculiarly, New Testamentally Christian if we are to justify their existence.

The second point is a corollary of the first: If our endeavors in this or any field are to be specifically Christian, they must be eschatological; that is, they must be done in the tension of expectancy. For only so can we really be guided by the New Testament. The New Testament is, as a codebook of ethics, a great disappointment; it is sparse in making distinctions and lacking in detail; it offers no cleanly and clearly articulated program, appears almost desultory in its selection of examples – for example, it legislates no rites, sets no times or seasons, prescribes no organization, offers only the most general hints on Christian education. It is something far better and greater: It is an inspired book; that is, the Spirit of God, the Beginning and the Guarantee of the New World of God, is at work in it and through it, as He was its Author; the New Testament translates us, if we will not resist it, into a new situation and therefore has a certain high nonchalance about the spiritually obvious. After all, you needn’t tell a mountain climber not to take along a small anvil (handy for cracking nuts along the way) or a skier in mid-career not to look back to take snapshots of where he has been, or a swimmer not to wear long underwear, or a berrypicker not to wear boxing gloves. The detachment and involvement given with our hope “legislate” with the force of the obvious and imminent fact. And so we must also ask ourselves: Dare we consider any phase of Christian life and action noneschatologically, without finding its place in God’s last chapter, that chapter which began with the Incarnation and shall end in glory with the return of our Lord? Maranatha!

Martin Hans Franzmann, “The Christian Church and Our Fellow Man (Part II)” CTM 26, no. 11 (November 1955): 840–841.