I asked social media if you can you have morality aside from a divine authority? This is some of the discussion that resulted.
Can you have morality aside from a divine authority?
Tag: asking questions
Should each gender have different roles?
I asked social media, should each gender have different roles? This is the discussion that followed.
Is God all-powerful?
Is God all-powerful (omnipotent)? Is it true, as it is written in Luke 1:37, that there is nothing He cannot do?
God as an omnipotent creator is what I was taught growing up. It is what the Bible does indeed seem to teach (the foundational axiom is that the Bible is good for teaching and establishing doctrine).
So why do we have a common teaching that suggests God is not all-powerful?
Continue readingIs it okay to question God?
Is it okay for Christians to question God? Asking questions is often cited as a sign of intelligence. We see several examples in the Bible that seem to suggest it is. Should we place God (and leaders) beyond the scope of our challenge?
Continue readingAsking Questions
As well as blogging here, I run a Tumblr blog where I ask a lot of questions aimed at other Christians. This blog post is simply a collection of some of the questions we have explored.
A mixed bag of questions for Christians
Why are we less than united? It’s a question with no particular answer. Like the question(s) about hell.
You might recognise this next one (I blogged about it recently).
Many of these questions lack an easy answer.
Others expose us to faults we are not always ready to explore in ourselves.
But some are just about our own preferences.
How to question church doctrine?
It was recently pointed out that there were no results for the exact search phrase “how to question church doctrine” on Google. That in itself is
When scriptures say things like test everything (1 John 4:1) and examine the scriptures to see if it is true (Acts 17:11 and 1 Corinthians 14:29) – how are we not teaching our congregations how to do this?
To correct that, I plan to try and write a whole series on this one topic – how to question (church) doctrine. More importantly, how to question your own doctrine.
Why question doctrine?
Asking questions is a sign of maturity and intelligence. Asking questions shows that you are interested. Not to mention that, asking questions stops us from making assumptions that mislead and cause confusion.
At the heart of questioning doctrine, is the idea of putting it to the test. That’s something I have addressed before.
A lot
How to question doctrine
There are a number of metrics you can use to question doctrine. I’ve talked about them before.
Here is the short version:
- You can check the fruit of the doctrine
- You can look to see if any scriptures seem to contradict the doctrine
- You can examine if it is well reasoned and logical
Doctrines do not need you to defend them. If they fall over without a rigorous, active, and complex defense then it was not a very good doctrine to begin with. God’s truth can stand by itself while the ideas of mortals tend to be a bit more flakey.
That is why I intend to examine ways to question church doctrine. Ideas welcome.
Asking questions
One of the oft-repeated truisms that I heard growing up was that asking questions was a sign of intelligence. Usually, this was uttered by the same sort of teachers that would say “there is no such thing as a stupid question.”
There is no such thing as a stupid question.
Teachers everywhere
It was with this in mind that I took myself to Tumblr where I began asking questions. If I am honest, I figured that I would use the questions to keep the Tumblr ticking over so that I could share posts from here.
Instead the whole thing took off in a big way. I was very quickly seeing a couple of hundred notes a day sometimes. In the grand scheme of things, I doubt that is very much but it seemed like a lot to me.
Instead of exploring issues deeply I found myself in conversation exploring other people’s perceptions of the same issues. The rapid turnover of posts has allowed me to discover many more questions about topics I thought I had previously understood.
This process of asking question had pretty much taken over my blogging.
Sharing the questions
At some point during that time, the team back on this platform quietly rolled out a new editor. I think the old one might have supported embedding Tumblr posts, but the new editor makes it very easy. That is when I had a new idea.
What if, I thought, I shared some of the more popular questions back here and explored the implications of the answers I have received?
That is what I plan to do. I’m going to keep asking questions but also try to find some answers too.