Blogging in Christ — Issue 12

Answer with the Text

Sooner or later, letters come back. A reader writes with a question, an objection, a passage he cannot reconcile with another. The way the writer answers reveals what he thinks his writing is for. If the writing is a product, the question is an obstacle on the road to a sale, and the answer is crafted to remove it. But if the writing is a herald's announcement, the question is something else: a man standing before the text, asking what it says. He is not an obstacle. He is a neighbor, and he deserves an answer drawn from the same place the announcement came from.

The order of the command matters. "But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts. Always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, with humility and fear," (1 Pet 3:15) "having a good conscience. Thus, while you are spoken against as evildoers, they may be disappointed who curse your good way of life in Christ." (1 Pet 3:16) Sanctify first, answer second. The Lord is set apart in the heart before the mouth opens, because the answer belongs to Him before it belongs to the argument. Readiness is not quickness of wit. A man is always ready only if he has done the work before the question arrives: he has sat with the text and verified what he quotes. The answer is "to everyone who asks," not only to the friendly or the learned. It is given "with humility and fear," because the man answering is himself a creature under the same Word. The good conscience is the answer's guard: a man who has answered truly need not manage what his answer does afterward.

Philip shows the method in a single scene. He found a man reading Isaiah on the road, and he did not begin with himself. "Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and said, “Do you understand what you are reading?”" (Acts 8:30) "He said, “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” He begged Philip to come up and sit with him." (Acts 8:31) The question came from the man's own reading: "The eunuch answered Philip, “Who is the prophet talking about? About himself, or about someone else?”" (Acts 8:34) Philip answered at the exact place the question lived. "Philip opened his mouth, and beginning from this Scripture, preached to him about Jesus." (Acts 8:35) That is the whole craft of answering: find the text the question stands on, open it, and let it speak. A question answered from its own text gives the reader something he can return to and read again when the writer is gone.

The Lord's own answers work the same way, and His diagnosis of a wrong answer names the disease. "But Jesus answered them, “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God.”" (Matt 22:29) The error was not a lack of cleverness. It was ignorance of the Scriptures. Therefore His correction was a text: "But concerning the resurrection of the dead, haven’t you read that which was spoken to you by God, saying," (Matt 22:31) "‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”" (Matt 22:32) The answer was already written. The questioners had read the words and missed the life in them, because a God who says "I am" of men long dead is speaking of the living. The writer does not need to invent an answer stronger than the text. He needs to know the text well enough to point to the place where the answer already stands.

Yet not every question is answered the same way, and Scripture keeps two proverbs side by side that refuse to be flattened into one rule. "Don’t answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him." (Prov 26:4) "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." (Prov 26:5) Both stand. The tension is the discernment. To answer according to folly is to adopt the fool's terms, to fight on his ground with his weapons, to become like him in the answering. But to leave the folly unanswered is to leave the man wise in his own eyes, confirmed in his error by the silence. The distinction lies in what the answer serves: an answer that takes up the text serves the truth even when it contradicts the questioner; an answer that takes up the questioner's game serves only the game. The writer must learn to tell them apart in his own draft before he sends it.

The manner of the answer is part of the answer. "Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one." (Col 4:6) Each one: the answer is particular, not a form letter pasted onto every letter. Grace is not softening; salt is not sting. Alongside it stands the servant's discipline. "The Lord’s servant must not quarrel, but be gentle toward all, able to teach, patient," (2 Tim 2:24) "in gentleness correcting those who oppose him. Perhaps God may give them repentance leading to a full knowledge of the truth," (2 Tim 2:25) The word "perhaps" is doing heavy work. The servant corrects, but he does not control the correction's fruit. Repentance is God's gift, not the writer's achievement. A writer who answers in order to win has already changed the work: he is quarreling, not correcting.

There is one more honesty the answer requires: to say, where the text stops, that it stops. "The secret things belong to Yahweh our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." (Deut 29:29) A question that presses beyond what is revealed cannot be answered by invention, however pious the invention sounds. To name the boundary is itself an answer from the text, because the text itself draws it. The reader will check the answer, and the writer should want him to. "Now these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so." (Acts 17:11) The Bereans did not take the apostles' word for it. They opened the Scriptures daily and tested what they heard. A true answer invites that examination, because it came from the passage and can be found there again. An invented answer fears it, because examination is where invention dies. "Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good." (1 Thess 5:21) The test is not an insult to the writer. It is the reader doing exactly what the writer claims to have done.

All of this gathers in one direction. "You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and these are they which testify about me." (John 5:39) The Scriptures testify about Christ, and therefore every answer drawn from them points beyond the writer, beyond the question, beyond the debate, to Him. The questioner came asking about a passage, a doctrine, a seeming contradiction. The faithful answer opens the passage and follows it to the Person, as Philip did. It does not end with the writer's vindication. It ends where the text ends: with Christ, the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in whom the hope the reader asked about actually lives.

Let the practice be plain, then. Read the question twice before answering once, and ask where it lives in the text rather than what reply would settle it fastest. Open that passage, not a neighboring one that is easier to defend. Answer from it, with the gentleness of a man who knows he too stands under the Word. Say plainly where the text stops. Then send the answer and release it. The reader may receive it, test it, argue with it, or set it aside. That is not the writer's portion. His portion was the readiness, the text, and the truth spoken in humility and fear.