In the eleventh century, the Christian theologian Anselm defined Christianity as faith seeking understanding. In so doing, he identified the central element of Christianity to be inquiry, a quest for the truth in the mode of questions.

To ask a question honestly presupposes that the answer is unsettled. One cannot truly question something unless the outcome is up in the air. For this reason alone questions are dangerous because one cannot expect to know how things will turn out. And if the outcome is open, then so is the security that we have in knowing.

Too many Christians are comfortable with hiding behind closed systems of dogma and doctrine, protected from the search for truth that bedevils so much of our society. Such Christians have set themselves up as the mouthpiece of God, which is a tremendous exercise in arrogance on their part. We cannot claim to know the truth of God fully. As the apostle Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”

Of course, this seems to open us up to moral relativism. If we cannot know the truth, then what makes my interpretation better than yours? For this reason all that we say and believe must be tempered by the person of Jesus Christ. Only in the person of Jesus Christ can we hope to “find a meaningful way between absolutist theocracy and unproductive tolerance,” as the theologian Jürgen Moltmann says. And this means that we must be willing to question not only others but also ourselves and our basic assumptions.

This sounds good and fine until we are forced to make this abstract idea tangible in our own questions. We must continually recast the important issues of our time in new light and reconsider them from other points of view: the church’s acceptance of homosexuals, the place of cooperation and salvation in a religiously plural society, the western church’s blind endorsement of democracy and capitalism, women in ministry and on and on goes the list. While our questions may not lead us away from where we started, at the very least we will have tried and tested ourselves against the standard of Jesus.

The Buddha told a story of six blind men who each placed a hand upon an elephant—though in different places on the elephant’s body—and offered differing opinions on what the elephant was.

In the same way we must be careful when we issue absolute statements, for we are often blind, never grasping the whole of the truth. Consequently, we should not rush into judgment or exclusivity, but we should seek the truth in humble discourse and in cooperative openness to the continued revelation of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

We cannot be afraid to ask questions, no matter how heretical they might be, no matter how much they might challenge the status quo, no matter how many people they might upset. My own search for answers has led me into places that many Christians are uncomfortable. Discomfort is the nature of our faith in the iconoclastic person of Jesus Christ, who always seems to be dismantling our faith in order to bring us into a purer union with himself and the world.