Most men stop asking somewhere around thirty. They get a system, the system stops working, and rather than look at the system they take up explaining that the ground is against them. I have watched good men do it for twenty years and I have done it myself.
The fellow whose writing fills this part of the claim never stopped asking. He had two separate authorities tell him early on that he did not amount to much — one holding a ledger and one holding a rifle — and instead of settling into it he went and found out. What follows is the shape of what he found. The words underneath are his; I am only pointing at the seams.
Where Do You Turn When Your Back Is Against the Wall?
He was put out of college at the end of his second year. The motto over the door was An Adventure in Excellence, and they had concluded he did not qualify for the adventure. Uncle Sam was less fussy — join up or go to jail, which he thought was rude — and sent him to Germany to patrol the Czechoslovakian border in the early years of the Cold War.
Regimental headquarters had a room you needed top-secret clearance to enter. He did not have it, but he had a door he could watch and ears that worked, and the walls inside were covered in maps with every Russian tank and soldier pinned on them. Listening at that doorway he worked out his own place in the plan. If the Russians came across, his assignment was to die.
So there he was at twenty-one. The college said he was not fit for excellence and the Army said he was fit to be a casualty. He makes a joke of it — Sad Sack, the cartoon private things went wrong for — and then he stops joking and asks the question the whole piece was built to ask. Desperate times come that are nobody’s fault and nothing you can control. If something does not intervene you are going under. Where do you turn?
Does God Ever Say No?
Here is a man catching himself running a system on God and telling it on himself, starting at two years old.
The terrible twos, he says, are not when a child discovers himself. They are when he discovers how to work other people. He had two aims — not being told what to do, and getting what he wanted when he wanted it — and he tried the full catalogue. Holding his breath until he turned colors. Blowing up with rage, which got him spanked. Pretending not to hear, which got him threatened. And when all else failed, a magnificent tantrum on the floor, which got him a pail of cold water from his mother. Years later he told a psychology professor about the pail, fishing for sympathy, and the man said good for her.
Then the one that matters: if you loved me you would give me a cookie now. His mother’s answer was because I love you, I am not giving you a cookie.
He grew up, got good at it, and — without ever deciding to — pointed the whole apparatus at God. Which is where the familiar formula comes from, the one everybody repeats and nobody can find in scripture: that God sometimes says yes, sometimes later, sometimes no. That is a two-year-old’s theology of a parent, dressed up.
Two things have to be settled before the question can even be asked properly. Whether God is a liar — God is not a man, that he should lie; has he said, and will he not do it? — and whether his written word is the authority for what we believe and how we live. Settle those two and the answer to the question changes shape entirely.
Is the Bible Doing Everything It Was Built to Do?
Picture a car in your driveway. Very old, oddly futuristic, doors hinged at the top so they open like a gull’s wings. Everyone has one. Everyone has learned to drive it to work and back, and everyone has been told, often and from platforms, that this is what the car does and all that it does.
But you sit in it and look at the console, at panels that look like doors that might slide open, and you have a suspicion. There are old stories that these are Star Cars, built to cross to other worlds. The Manufacturer’s Handbook seems to say so, though the language is archaic and the experts explain that the space-travel passages were understood as metaphor by their first readers.
And here is the thing he notices, which is the sharpest observation in the whole piece. There are scholars on the age of the manuscripts, scholars on single or multiple authorship, scholars on the meanings of individual words — and not one expert who can tell you how to do what the Handbook says to do.
So you begin your own quest. You set the scholars aside for a while. You read it as though for the first time, assuming the writer says what he means, taking the literal sense unless he flags otherwise. You look for others who suspect there is more to their cars. And one day, with the handbook open on your knee, you notice a button you had always taken for decoration.
→ Is there a Star Car in your future? — and it is worth knowing that the Star Car parable is the second half of A Skeptic Asks His Questions. Read them in that order and you get the whole man: the questions first, then what he did about them.
What Is Worth Having at the End of All the Asking?
He answers that himself, and it is the plainest sentence he ever wrote.
I don’t like religion. Religion can get hung up providing answers to questions no one is asking. What I want is a Person who knows my name, who talks with me, who takes my place dying the death I deserve, and rising from the dead to give me the eternal life I don’t deserve.
That is the bottom of the hole and the reason for all the digging. Not a philosophy that holds together. Not a system that explains suffering to everybody’s satisfaction. A Person, who knew his name, who died the death that belonged to him, and who came out of the grave to hand him a life he had not earned and could not have bought.
A man who has been told by two separate authorities that he does not amount to much needs to hear that from somebody with the standing to say it. And there is exactly one.
Ask your questions. The ground can take it, and so can God. What I would not do is settle for a religion that answers things you never asked while leaving the one thing you actually want to know sitting there in the dark.
Till Next Time, The Rockwell Break-a-Bean
Still to come in this series: Festus Just Doesn’t Get It! · The Chains I Thought Were Toys · The Last Great Adventure · Who Art in Heaven: Heaven Is a Real Place. Each will be linked here as it publishes.
