Against the “Answer Bank” Theory of Religion

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The world’s religions are often seen, by believers and nonbelievers alike, as repositories of eternal truths — answer banks for the big questions. Billboards and bumper stickers declare that “Jesus is the Answer,” and Christians have historically seen Jesus not only as the Way and the Life but also as the Truth. Given such claims, it is not surprising that atheists almost always attack Christianity on the basis of its doctrines: there is no God, Jesus was just a man, and no one was ever raised from the dead.

This “answer bank” theory of religion makes some sense when it comes to Christianity, because the Christian tradition has been preoccupied with orthodoxy (“right doctrine”) at least since the promulgation of the Nicene Creed in the 4th century. But not all religions are so obsessed with answers.

Judaism, for example, is more concerned with orthopraxy (“right practice”), and right practices have varied across time and place. Though there may be one eternal Jewish answer when it comes to monotheism, the answers necessarily vary when it comes to how to observe the Sabbath or what should be said and done at a Passover Seder.

Every year I tell my Boston University undergraduates that there are two worthy pursuits for college students. One is pre-professional — preparing for a career that will put food on the table and a roof overhead. The other is personal — finding big questions worth asking, which is to say, questions that cannot be answered in a semester, or even in a lifetime: How do things come into being? How do they cease to be? What is my purpose in life? What happens when I die?

As predictably as fall follows summer, incoming college students bring these sorts of big questions into the classroom. Just as predictably, many professors try to steer them toward smaller things — questions that can be dispatched in an hour-long lecture, and asked and answered on a final exam. But the students have it right. In this case, bigger is better.

There are all sorts of reasons to try to become more religiously literate. One is civic. It is impossible to make sense of town or nation or world without reckoning with the extraordinary influence, for good and for ill, of the world’s religions. But there are also personal reasons to cultivate religious literacy, including the fact that learning about the world’s religions allows you to enter into a fascinating, multi-millennial conversation about birth and death, faith and doubt, meaning and confusion.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty famously referred to religion as a “conversation stopper” — and who hasn’t had the experience of a conversation run aground on the rocks of dogma? But religion also serves as a conversation starter. We human beings ask questions. We want to know why. Our happiness depends upon it (and, of course, our misery too).

When people ask me how I became a professor of religious studies, I usually say that I discovered the study of religion just as I was losing the Christian faith of my youth, and that this discipline gave me a way to hang in with religious questions without the presumption that answers were close at hand. When, to paraphrase Augustine, I became “a question to myself,” even bigger questions called out to me, and my ongoing conversation with the great religions began.

One of the most common misconceptions about the world’s religions is that all of them plumb the same depths, ask the same questions. They do not. Only religions that see God as all good ask how a good God can allow millions to die in earthquakes and tsunamis. Only religions that believe in souls ask whether your soul exists before you are born and what happens to it after you die. And only religions that think we have one soul ask after “the soul” in the singular. Every religion, however, asks after the human condition. Here we are in these bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?

There are wonderful traditions of argumentation in Hinduism’s Upanishads, Tibetan Buddhist sutras, and Christian theology. But the argumentative tradition that has most captured my imagination in recent years has been created and sustained inside rabbinic Judaism.

This tradition makes an invaluable distinction between two types of arguing: arguing for the sake of ego (which it does not value) and arguing for the sake of heaven (which it does). Today our radio and television stations are clogged, on both the Left and the Right, with arguments on behalf of ego. The point is to cling to the answers you already have, even as you shove them down the throat of your antagonists. It is no wonder that so many of my students are allergic to argument. Happily, however, there is an alternative.

The name Israel refers to one who has wrestled with God (Genesis 32:28), and for millennia, Jews have done just that. They have also wrestled with one another, and with their own tradition’s tensions between story and law, exile and return, mercy and justice. According to the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, “If a Jew has no one to quarrel with, he quarrels with God, and we call it theology; or he quarrels with himself, and we call it psychology.”

In the Talmud, two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, joust with each other over some three hundred different issues. Hillel, who has been described as “Judaism’s model human being,” almost always gets the upper hand (which is why the Jewish student center near my office is named Hillel House and not Shammai House). But the Talmud does not simply record Judaism according to Hillel. It records Shammai’s views too. His words are also scripture. Or, as the Talmud reads in a passage that concluded three years of fierce debate between the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, “Both are the words of the living God, but the law is in accordance with the view of the house of Hillel.”

I know that many will continue to see the great religions as repositories of answers. But that is not why I continue to go to them in my life and in my work. I go to the great religions to look for questions.

The great Christian question is, “What must I do to be saved?” The great Buddhist question is, “How can I eliminate suffering?” The great Confucian question is, “What can we do to create social order?” Hindus inquire about the cycle of life, death, and rebirth; Taoists, about health, long life, and immortality.

What is the point of these big questions? Are they simply paths to the great answers — or to The Answer? Or are they themselves eloquent articulations of various facets of the human predicament?

When a high school friend of mine, who also happens to be a committed Roman Catholic, noticed that I describe myself on my Facebook page as “religiously confused,” he wrote to offer his condolences. Not to worry, I told him. At least when it comes to spiritual things, I don’t mind a little confusion. In fact, I prefer it to having all the answers.

Stephen Prothero is a professor in the department of religion at Boston University. The most recent of his many books is God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — and Why Their Differences Matter. He blogs about religion for CNN.