The Truth Shall Set You Free - Part I

The whole thing starts with a faulty premise, of which there are many in our world, including within the House of Faith. But the faulty premise I begin with today is not in theology. It has to do with science. The faulty premise is this: Probing questions destroy truth. No, probing questions liberate truth.

True theology and true science are alike in that they both start with questions, meaning that what brings me to them and what opens them to me are questions. Lots and lots of questions, each one leading to seven more with no end of the querying in sight.

Questions do not destroy truth. On the contrary, they open up truth so that we may experience and understand it in all its reality. When we shut down inquiry in the name of science (or faith or whatever), we betray science (or faith or whatever) in the process.

This is an age of sound bites and, to be frank, I refuse to bite, whether the issue be socialism or democracy or homosexuality or global warming or health care. God is too big to fit into most of our sound bites and all these issues (and more) involve God, which means God is not inclined to address these concerns in sound bite drivel, especially when sound bites are intended as a means of cutting off further questioning. We think God does not like questions, when it is fallen humanity that abhors them. God loves questions and He created the human mind with an unlimited capacity to doubt the previously understood, formulate inquiries and ask away.

People of faith are often heard to say "God said it and that settles it for me," assuming that such a sound bite is a sign of faith. But a true man or woman of faith is a hungry person, hungry with an insatiable desire to know more and more of God and His creation. Not just what He said or did, but all the whys and wherefores we can muster. So, too, if science is a part of God's Truth, then we should never respond with a "that settles it for me," when what we really mean is "Don't bring it up any more."

When we first went to China in the mid-90s, we found that our mere presence was a scientific and philosophical intrusion into a closed system - a system that allowed no doubt or questions when it came to politics, sociology, religion, or the natural sciences. But we, as outsiders (Westerners) and in some cases people of faith, did not fit into that closed system. And yet we had been invited in by the very core that sustained it - the State. Moreover, we were invited in as authorities by that State. Maybe we weren't welcomed as authorities on anything that might question the system itself - such as theology, sociology, politics or even, say, biology. Our venue was limited to English, foreign culture and international business after all. But we were invited in as teachers and scholars nonetheless.

The State had taught our students from birth that there was only one way to think and that to raise any questions about the State's System of Thought was both ludicrous and something not to be tolerated. But we, who apparently did ask questions, who did think outside of the acceptable System of Thought were not only tolerated, we were given a position of great authority in a society that had venerated teachers from Kongzi (Confucius) to Mao with the utmost of respect.

As their teachers, we did not have to pose any questions to our students or speak to them of our own "heretical" ideas. By our sheer presence, we became the crack in the heretofore unquestionable authority box of the State - and we had the unwitting sanction of that very State to do so. As we used to explain to our rookie teachers from the "Outside," the first step toward the Cross begins with a question. We didn't have to point people to the Cross as much as get them probing reality, because in God's universe, all honest questions eventually lead to the foot of the cross.

For the first time in their lives, these students realized that questions could be raised, and thus everything was open to inquiry, even the Box itself. If we had come in attacking that Box, we would have closed their minds for another generation. Instead we became a sanctioned part of the System's desire -- yes, the system itself -- to raise doubts about the status quo, in true Marxian dialectic methodology.

Marxism, real Marxism, is all but dead in China. What is left of the old ideology is a failing pseudo-Statism that is as dogmatic-and-dead as elements of Faith and Science can at times be in the West. Such dogmatism will not fade away through direct attack, especially by outsiders, but only through honest and guileless -- and persistent -- questioning. This pseudo-Marxism is as ripe for failing as Khrushchev prophetically said the West was, especially a West that denies its twin roots of doubt and faith.