“Why is that man standing there?”
“How should I know?”
I could make so
So I've learned to respond to this sort of question with a question of my own: “What do you think?” Works like a charm. Usually.
Of course, akin to this are the wonderfully wacky ideas that children will invent: complicated nonsensical rules to explain the mystery of the world around them: “The grass is green so we won't confuse it with the sky, which is blue.”
But then, there are also the manifold questions when they really are clueless and really are hoping to get an answer. “Why are there lines on the street?” asked while you’re driving and usually when you’re in the middle of so
I bring up all this to make a simple point: being a theologian is much like being a child. As I think about God or read the Bible, how often am I like my children when they were younger?
I like to believe that God is never tired, distracted, or too busy. And so I’m hopeful that he finds even my most inane and silly questions to be cute. I believe this on the basis of an analogy. The Bible informs us that human beings have been created in the image of God (see Genesis
So. When I am not too tired, distracted or whatever, I can’t help but find my own children incredibly fascinating and cute. If God is the ideal father, then his feelings about
Of course, how often do my questions about the Bible resemble so
One day she was singing “Little bunny fu-fu, hopping through the forest, picking up the field mice and bopping them on the head” followed by the good fairy coming down and warning little bunny fu-fu to stop the mouse bopping or else she’d turn the one bopping into a goon.
Suddenly, in the middle of this odd song, my daughter got a puzzled look on her face and asked very seriously, “Is little bunny fu-fu a boy or a girl?”
“Uh...” I answered profoundly. “It doesn’t matter.”
“All bunnies are boys or girls, so bunny fu-fu has to be one or the other, right?”
“I suppose…”
Needless to say, arguing with a five-year-old is an exercise in futility, and it was easier just to make up a gender for bunny fu-fu since my daughter wasn’t going to go on to anything else or leave
Nevertheless, the gender of bunny-fu-fu has no bearing on the song’s purpose or
Perhaps, therefore, I might occasionally behave that way with the biblical materials: asking questions of it that are beside the point. After all, the Bible is not designed to give
Rather than thinking of theology and its workings as an example of supre