“It’s a Yes or No Question!” – Reconstructing Faith

On my faith journey one of the hardest things was when people I used to agree with would aggressively demand yes or no answers to what they thought were simple questions but that I thought were incredibly difficult and complex to answer.

Then they’d be angry about my hesitancy to answer. “It’s just a yes or no question!” they’d exclaim. Many continue to offer these questions to me as I consider questions about faith. The dichotomies that are offered are thought to be definitional, of deepest concern, and simple. But so often they’re not–they’re false dichotomies, they’re secondary issues, and they’re incredibly complex. Even trying to explain some of the difficulty with how complex these issues are would take much more than a single blog post. I’ll show a few examples of some of these dichotomies, some of which I actually did have offered as yes/no questions to me.

Do you believe that God created the heavens and the earth? Yes or no?
Do you believe in hell?
Do you believe we have souls?
Do you believe the Trinity is an essential doctrine?

Some readers might see some of these questions as quite simple–maybe even all of them, but here are some examples of the complexity:

Do you believe that God created the heavens and the earth? Yes or no?
What is meant by “created” here? Is it direct, fiat creation? Could God have used processes? What is meant by “heavens and the earth”?

Do you believe in hell?
What do you mean by hell? Do you mean endless, eternal, conscious torment? Do you mean literal fire? How does one “believe in” hell? Shouldn’t we all wish there were no hell and be hopeful that all might be saved, even if we don’t think all shall be?

Do you believe we have souls?
What is meant by the soul? Is it dualism? What kind of dualism–Cartesian, interactionism, emergentism? Could a Thomistic view of the soul be correct?

Do you believe the Trinity is an essential doctrine?
Yes, I do. But! What exactly does it mean to call it “essential”? Must one have it 100% correct in order to be saved? What does one make of the immense disagreement over subordination of the Son in recent debates, if so? What about questions of rejection of the Trinity being based upon rejection of colonialism?

Yes or no questions, intentionally or not, cut across sociological, theological, and philosophical lines without any precision and are seemingly designed to stop serious discussion and debate about a topic. They are used as a divisive tool, cutting apart people to show others what they’re right or wrong about? They’re traps that cut off discussion.

So yes, people will continue to get angry with me, but I refuse to allow some of these incredibly complex issues get boiled down to a yes or no question. It might make things simpler to boil down these topics to yes or no, affirm or deny type dichotomies, but it doesn’t help us get at truth. And that is what I desire: to seek truth.

Links

Reconstructing Faith– Read other posts as I search for truth and navigate the messiness that is faith.

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SDG.

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