Starting Questions

Here is the beginning of a list of questions I hope to finish seminary either A: having answered, B: having better tools to answer, or C: realizing it was a dumb question (and knowing why). I do this with some trepidation, as it makes me realize the depth of my ignorance and I fear that all of these will be answered “C.” Please feel free to add your own questions to my list and I’ll do my best to figure them out too.

The order here is arbitrary:

1. What do we mean in this day and age when we say “God is sovereign”?

(Note: My father asked, “do we still say this?” My answer is, we do, at least during the Venite in Morning Prayer, Psalm 95:7, “We are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” Are we just saying that just because it sounds vaguely comforting? What do we mean by a belief that God has and/or can act in history?)

2. What does it mean to “pronounce God’s blessing”? What do we mean when we say “We bless God”? What the heck is a “blessing” or “being blest” anyway?

3. What is a “marriage” in our church and what is “blessing a civil union”?

4. Is there a theology of religious diversity and non-belief that is defensible from an anthropological perspective?

5. Why do we pray?

6. Is there an existing theology that adequately considers the time depth of the earth (as evidenced geologically) and the universe (as evidenced through astrophysics)? The phrase “A thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past” (Psalm 90:4; see also 2 Peter 3:8), while a beautiful metaphor, doesn’t feel sufficiently rigorous to me....

7. Where or what exactly is/are the reconciling point(s) between our critical scholarship (text criticism, translation, contextual criticism, etc.) on the Bible and our deep understanding that this is an extremely important document that we (or at least some of us) are called to make meaningful today? Another way to put this is, I know (and love) all the scholarly attempts to unpack and understand the text of the Bible itself, particularly those aimed at understanding the Bible within the social and historical context(s) under which it was written. However, we will never fully understand the context(s) in which it was written, nor, importantly, are we the same society as the one(s) that wrote it. How do we take the valuable scholarship seriously and still make the entire text meaningful and important, here and now?

8. We Episcopalians still espouse (at a bare minimum in liturgy) atonement theology (Jesus died for our sins). We don’t play it up, but we haven’t discarded it. What the heck do we mean by “Jesus died for our sins”? What does “being saved” mean?

9. Can we reclaim Revelation and Daniel from the fundamentalists?

10. Can I improve my singing voice to the point that I can lead a smaller congregation in song without everyone cringing?

11. Do the Buddhists really have the best explanation of suffering? Is theodicy (why, if God is all powerful and all loving, is there suffering?) a fruitful area of inquiry? Or is Rabbi Kushner right, the only thing that matters is our response to suffering?

12. Do the translation difficulties surrounding the Greek word “epiousion” (often translated “daily bread”) matter in daily community religious practice? If so, why and how?

13. What particular aspects of Christianity are uniquely insightful for us today? What aspects of Anglicanism?

14. How can we as Christians meaningfully and seriously consider and incorporate the fact that Judeo-Christian beliefs occupy a historically (and geographically) brief blip within the overall scope of humankind’s theological and religious thinking? “We finally figured it out” doesn’t really cut it for me.

15. What do you say (or what are some options) in the following situation: you are visiting someone who is suffering and they (as they do rarely but occasionally) lay some theological explanation on you for the event they just suffered, and you completely and fundamentally do not agree, but they are looking at you with that “right?” expression on their face and you can tell that whatever the explanation was, and however you disagree, it just gave them a lot of comfort.