Written by: gfesadmin on October 4, 2012

A few weeks ago I was on a 16-hour plane ride to South Africa. Sitting next to me was a 21-year-old college student, Aileen, who was spending three months in Namibia for a study abroad program. I generally try to avoid long, drawn out conversations with folks on a plane that I don’t know. That rule was broken fairly quickly.

 Aileen and I were talking about all kinds of things and we soon found ourselves talking about faith. I asked Aileen if she had a faith community, and she sheepishly said, ‘Don’t hit me, I’m an Atheist.’ After a few prodding questions I soon realized that she was in fact an atheist and not simply agnostic.

 As I was in this conversation, several thoughts from Grenz and Olson’s, “Who needs Theology’ became very real to me. Those thoughts even helped shape my conversation with Aileen. I used Anslem’s approach to theology, ‘Faith Seeking Understanding,’ to help her understand how (and why) faith and reason could not just coexist, but even flourish.  That people of faith should be the ones asking the best questions and struggling to answer them, and not merely rubberstamping things we were taught as children. Unfortunately this wasn’t her experience. 

It also became quickly apparent that many of her perceptions of the Christian faith were based on the folk theology that Olson, in other books, has tried to correct. Alieen couldn’t believe the simple, easy answers that many people touted to some of the deep mysteries and problems of the Christian faith, so she left the faith and felt the freedom to explore and ask questions.

As we continued in our conversation we talked about how science can answer the ‘how’ questions but not the ‘why’ questions and that the ‘why’ questions were the realm of theology and that each of us asks those questions, whether we want to admit it or not. We talked about some of those questions (purpose, meaning, etc.), and Alieen acknowledged that science couldn’t answer everything.

I wish I could say that as we left, 16 hours later, that Alieen had come to faith in Jesus. She hadn’t. But, I hope she left with some good questions to struggle with during her 3-month Namibia stay. Theology is important. Asking good questions is important. If we want to engage many unbelievers we have to move beyond the folk theology that so many of us are comfortable with and openly wrestle with many of the ‘why’ questions. When we do so, we’ll invite others to join us in the process. We’ll find that we we’re all theologians and that each of us has something to bring to the conversation.

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