Monthly Reflection

January 2012

The students started classes on Monday. In chapel that day, I asked them to consider their “theology/philosophy of questions and answers.” While I believe that everyone has such a construct, I also know it is not something one usually thinks about first thing on a Monday morning. Nevertheless, I proceeded boldly forward because I strongly believe that one’s “theology/philosophy of questions and answers” shapes to a large extent the nature and quality of our learning and growth, whether we are in college or farther along the way in our pilgrimage. I wanted our students to start the semester with that concern and invite you into our reflection as well.

While I have always cared intensely about questions and answers, the notion of a ‘theology of questions and answers’ came to me as my husband and I recently began reading through the book of Job this January. We marvel daily that a text written so long ago could speak compellingly to our lives today. It reminds us of things that we do not often speak of, even as Christian believers. First of all, life will bring us hard questions—questions that we cannot readily answer from our current categories. Sometimes these come from a book, sometimes from another person, sometimes they accompany a painful or unexpected loss of a job or key person in our life, sometimes they come when we enter a new and unfamiliar situation; but they will come. Like Job, we will not be able to see ‘backstage’ - all we will know is that our cool, calm and collected life has come to a standstill. When the questions come, we have a choice—to pretend that they are not there, to try to make the questions smaller or neater to fit into our current answer categories, or to despair. 

Job reminds us of another option. God takes questions. No matter how hard our struggle, we are invited to bring that very struggle to the Lord of the universe. The complexity of this is captured best in the 23rd chapter where Job says: “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.”

Job also reminds us that God is not pleased with simplistic answers (see chapter 42) or with those who try to speak for Him in ways that do not reckon with reality. God affirms Job’s honest wrestling - not those who are trying to silence that with their theories.

But the story is not over for God also gets to ask a few questions (see chapter 38-39). As in our own journey, sometimes when we most want answers, what God gives us is a new set of questions. He trades questions, as it were, usually to get our minds off ourselves and our own situations - to draw us into a larger vision of the world, of others, and, most of all, of God Himself.

Finally, and particularly important for a college community, the book of Job reminds us that God wants to do more than give us answers or even larger questions. God intends to bring us to Himself. As important as the questioning and answering processes are, they only matter in the end if they bring us to the heart of reality and into the community of the trinity itself – where we are invited to share the fellowship that has existed before the foundation of the world with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

I encourage you to put the book of Job on your reading list for 2012 and to begin working on your own theology of questions and answers!

Blessings on you in this new year.


Shirley A. Mullen '76
President