Hugh Anderson - "Asking the Right Questions" (October 16, 1960)

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-	In the name of God the Father,	0:17
	God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.	0:19
	Amen.	0:23
	I feel very privileged at this juncture in my life	0:32
	to have had now three years experience	0:37
	of different American schools, colleges, and universities.	0:40
	I want to say to you this morning that I have the impression	0:48
	that at least with regard to a great many American students,	0:53
	there is a refreshing curiosity about them	0:57
	and an openness towards fresh illumination of the mind.	1:02
	One doesn't always discover this	1:08
	in all Europe in these days.	1:10
	We sometimes get rather the impression	1:13
	that our students have become	1:15
	somewhat jaded with curriculum.	1:17
	At any rate, I suppose that a great many	1:22
	of my teaching colleagues in this university	1:25
	who are here this morning would be ready to agree with me	1:28
	that there is nothing more thrilling	1:33
	or challenging in all life	1:35
	than to be set before a class of young people	1:38
	who are intent upon your every word,	1:41
	and with whom you can see the other one say	1:45
	the rare soul sitting in their eyes.	1:48
	There is no doubt at all	1:54
	that where the questioning attitude is present,	1:56
	tremendous possibilities and opportunities	2:02
	for the enhancement and the enrichment	2:05
	and the deepening of life open up.	2:09
	The questing spirit is the authentic spirit	2:13
	of the true university.	2:18
	This is the place where first and foremost,	2:21
	we ask life's most ultimate questions.	2:24
	The university is not in the first place	2:31
	the repository of all the world's wisdom.	2:34
	Certainly we expect to find on the campus	2:39
	at least one or two people who know a thing or two,	2:42
	but what is the fellowship of a university?	2:46
	Here in this fellowship, we rather try to channel	2:52
	our corporate energies and endeavors	2:57
	in our relentless drive towards	3:01
	life's as yet unexplored possibilities in every area.	3:04
	The true university don, or savant,	3:11
	is not in the last analysis the man who knows everything,	3:15
	but the man who in humility	3:20
	knows that there is everything to know.	3:23
	He is a man who is always asking questions of life.	3:28
	Let us apply this test to different departments	3:35
	of our university's life.	3:38
	Let us ask, for example, this morning,	3:41
	what constitutes a good medical school?	3:44
	I think the answer to that question is not only,	3:48
	and not perhaps even primarily, that its practitioners	3:52
	are already far advanced in technical skill and knowledge.	3:57
	What seems to me to constitute a really great medical school	4:02
	is that its practitioners live and work	4:08
	in a spirit by which they are constantly challenging	4:12
	the unanswered questions, seeking to forge new weapons	4:16
	in the unremitting and unceasing fight against disease.	4:22
	It is characterized, that is, by the spirit of adventure,	4:27
	the spirit of quest, and search.	4:32
	This certainly would be true also	4:37
	of any department of science in any university.	4:39
	It will be distinguished	4:43
	by the spirit of a Sir Isaac Newton.	4:45
	Remember how Newton said	4:49
	at the end of an amazing life of great discovery,	4:50
	how he felt that he had just been like a little child	4:55
	gathering pebbles on the seashore of the universe?	5:00
	He felt.	5:06
	And if any science department in a university	5:08
	is to be true to his spirit,	5:11
	it must feel also that the greatest questions	5:13
	are still to be asked, and the greatest discoveries	5:17
	still to be made.	5:21
	Let's ask further what will constitute in a university	5:24
	a good faculty of theology or divinity.	5:29
	Here in the faculty of theology,	5:34
	we most of all live by asking ultimate questions	5:37
	for we most of all dwell in the shadow	5:42
	of life's incomprehensible and unfathomable mysteries.	5:47
	Not for us are content and quiet and peace of mind,	5:52
	for we go seeking a city that we shall never find.	5:57
	It is the role of a faculty of divinity, of course,	6:02
	to send out into the world	6:05
	men who are to cheer the fallen,	6:07
	heal the pain, and bind up the broken hearted.	6:09
	It is not our role, however,	6:14
	to equip these men with a kind of a rule book	6:17
	or a card index system	6:21
	by which they will have an answer ready at their hand	6:23
	to every conceivable human problem,	6:27
	for the truth is life is too big and religion is too big	6:31
	and God is too big to be reduced to the status	6:35
	of our Ready Reckoner in the hip pocket.	6:39
	Let me tell you what I think is a classic little story	6:43
	about Dr. A.J. Walton,	6:46
	professor emeritus of practical theology in this university.	6:48
	It was his duty in the department of applied theology	6:53
	to try to teach his students	6:57
	how to conduct marriage services,	6:59
	burial services, and so on.	7:02
	One time six months after a particular class had gone out,	7:04
	Dr. Walton was startled one night	7:09
	to get a phone call from one of his former students,	7:13
	and the former student said to him over the phone,	7:17
	"I have a death in my congregation, sir, can you help me?"	7:20
	And Dr. Walton said, "Well, you learned the procedure	7:25
	"and how to go about it in class."	7:28
	And the student said, "Yes, but Dr. Walton,	7:31
	"this man's really dead."	7:33
	(crowd laughing)
	(chuckling)	7:39
	Life has a way, life has a way, men and women,	7:41
	of upsetting our cut and dried answers	7:44
	and our actuarial calculations	7:47
	because the truth is that life is mysterious.	7:51
	Life is unfathomable in its depth.	7:57
	And God, the real God,	8:01
	the true God whom by our very littleness	8:03
	we so often obscure is not a familiar and well-known figure	8:06
	whom I can touch out here.	8:10
	The true God is the invisible and infinite	8:12
	and transcendental God before whose greatness	8:15
	we can only wrestle and struggle	8:19
	and ask ultimate questions.	8:21
	Hannon F.R. Berry, the great Anglican churchman	8:25
	said recently that the desperate need of our time	8:28
	in the Christian church is for believers	8:32
	who have the courage to ask questions.	8:35
	And Steven Bane put it even more forcibly	8:39
	when he said part of every man's university education,	8:42
	and assuredly part of every Christian's education,	8:48
	ought to be and must be education in ignorance.	8:53
	It's a startling thing to say,	9:00
	but I believe you will see it's profound	9:02
	and searching and challenging implications.	9:05
	Suppose we have established then	9:09
	that for fullness and depth of life	9:13
	and for wealth of character,	9:15
	it is necessary for us to keep on asking questions.	9:18
	I want to add now that even greater than the ability	9:23
	simply to ask questions is the capacity	9:28
	for asking the right questions.	9:32
	You see, after all, life's greatest discoveries	9:37
	have been made by men and women	9:41
	who have been able to put the right questions	9:44
	to the right data at the right time.	9:48
	This is particularly true in the area of religion	9:54
	in its relation to our daily life that we absolutely must	9:59
	put to our holy religion the right questions.	10:06
	Let me call this this morning	10:11
	the principle of correct interrogation,	10:14
	and let us try to apply	10:18
	this principle of correct interrogation	10:20
	to the principle phases of the biblical message.	10:23
	Some of the principle phases	10:28
	of the biblical message at any rate.	10:29
	First, let's apply it to the story of creation	10:32
	in chapters one and two of Genesis,	10:38
	part of which I read to you this morning.	10:41
	Here in language of sonorous beauty	10:45
	and concrete pictorial simplicity,	10:49
	we read how God created the world and everything in it,	10:52
	including man, in six days, and then rested the seventh day.	10:57
	Now it's important to ask	11:04
	of the creation story in Genesis the right question.	11:07
	Wrong questions would be did it happen this way?	11:13
	It would be quite naive to speculate	11:18
	about the creation narrative in Genesis	11:21
	in regards to its possibility or its actuality.	11:24
	We must not say to it,	11:29
	did these things happen in this way?	11:31
	For the truth is, of course,	11:35
	that the book of Genesis is not a book about science.	11:38
	The men of the Old Testament were a pre-scientific people.	11:43
	Their concept of the universe wasn't only pre-Copernican,	11:47
	it was pre-Ptolemaic.	11:51
	They envisaged this strange universe of ours	11:53
	as having three layers, the waters above the firmament,	11:56
	the firmament, and the earth,	12:01
	like a kind of gigantic cosmic Duke Grinder.	12:03
	This is how they regarded it.	12:07
	We must not go to the story to make biological	12:15
	or scientific or archeological investigations of it.	12:20
	The only right question to ask	12:25
	in the presence of this narrative is who am I?	12:28
	Who am I?	12:34
	Life's ultimate question, who am I?	12:35
	This is what you ask in the presence of the Genesis story,	12:38
	because in fact,	12:43
	it does not invite us to biological or archeological	12:44
	or geological calculations	12:48
	about the origins of the earth and man.	12:50
	It is seeking to break through to us	12:54
	to tell us something about ourselves.	12:57
	It is addressing your existence and my existence,	13:01
	and it is saying to us,	13:07
	you cannot say that God is the creator of all	13:10
	until in your heart of hearts	13:14
	you have said God has created me.	13:16
	And you can only say that God has created you	13:20
	on your bended knees in an attitude of worship,	13:24
	acknowledging before Him your creatureliness,	13:29
	your finitude, your frailty, and your dependence.	13:32
	The difficulty with the creation story	13:37
	is not that it presents intellectual	13:40
	or scientific difficulty.	13:44
	The difficulty with it is that it confronts us	13:47
	with a positive declaration about our own nature.	13:50
	It is trying to tell us that we are creaturely,	13:54
	that we are frail mortals who are dependent for life	13:58
	on the great God Himself,	14:03
	and we can only discover this truth on our bended knees.	14:05
	The belief in God as the creator	14:09
	is difficult and not easy to come by, of course,	14:11
	because life very rarely finds us on our bended knees.	14:15
	And that's not just because we are arthritic at the joint	14:19
	for most of us are young and agile still.	14:23
	The truth is that we refuse so often to be creatures.	14:28
	We grasp on to life as though it were our very own.	14:35
	Like SERT and the atheistic existentialists,	14:40
	we claim that we alone give meaning to our own lives.	14:44
	Extending around the whole world today,	14:50
	there is a kind of society which has no room for God.	14:54
	Which is self-contained, self-explanatory,	14:59
	and self-justifying.	15:03
	The French are referring to the spread	15:06
	of this secular society in the modern world	15:07
	as Cocacolonization.	15:11
	Like every single bottle off the deep dark red stuff,	15:15
	life has become for multitudes of men self-contained,	15:23
	self-explanatory, and self-justifying.	15:28
	And where we become so self-reliant and so self-resourceful,	15:32
	we are on the downward path to ruination.	15:37
	I have encountered young people	15:42
	who have made some tragic mistake in life,	15:44
	and I've heard them protest in their rebelliousness,	15:48
	well, after all, it's my life,	15:52
	and it's my body and I have a right to these	15:54
	and I can do what I wish with them.	15:57
	No, it's not your body, and it's not your life,	16:01
	and you have no right to do what you wish	16:07
	with either your body or your life.	16:09
	The word of the creation story in Genesis	16:12
	is that your life is a gift.	16:15
	That you are dependent for it	16:18
	on the creative action of God.	16:21
	As Paul Gerhardt, the German poet, puts it,	16:25
	all the creatures God has made	16:28
	are guests at a strange hearth.	16:32
	God is master in his house,	16:36
	and as he wills, his gifts impart.	16:39
	Our difficulty with the creation narrative,	16:44
	the word of Genesis,	16:47
	is not intellectual or scientific difficulty.	16:49
	Our difficulty is existential and personal.	16:53
	We will not readily go down on our bended knees	16:57
	and acknowledge that we are the weak and frail ones	17:01
	who are dependent upon the sovereign grace of a creator God	17:04
	for the life itself.	17:09
	All this comes home to us	17:11
	only when we ask the right question of the biblical message.	17:13
	Let us apply, secondly,	17:19
	the principle of correct interrogation	17:21
	to that interesting old story of the Tower of Babel	17:24
	in the 11th chapter of Genesis.	17:29
	Again, this story is told in the graphic and vivid way	17:33
	in pictorial concrete terms	17:39
	that were so characteristic of the Hebrew genius.	17:42
	It's as if the writer were saying,	17:45
	here's a group of folks, and he said,	17:47
	come on, boys, come on.	17:49
	We're so clever, we're so mighty.	17:52
	If the kingdom of heaven is to come, we'll build it.	17:55
	We, the human agents of the kingdom.	17:58
	And you see them there in their cleverness,	18:00
	expert bricklayers, expert architects,	18:03
	expert chemists, expert scientists, brick on brick on brick	18:06
	and up it goes until it's there	18:12
	at the very gates of Heaven, this tower.	18:14
	Ah, but the sequel to this abortive enterprise	18:19
	was chaos and confusion and misery on a lavish scale.	18:24
	This is symbolized for us in the story	18:30
	by the picture of the Babel of languages	18:34
	that resulted from man's humanistic enterprise.	18:37
	What question must we ask of this story?	18:41
	Not did it happen?	18:45
	You don't run looking for an Old Testament scholar	18:47
	and say please sir,	18:50
	draw me a wee sketch of a Babylonian tower.	18:51
	That's the wrong approach.	18:57
	You say in the presence of this word of God, you say,	18:59
	what is this saying	19:03
	about the realities of the human situation?	19:05
	And when you ask that question,	19:10
	the word of this story is a very sharp and disturbing one.	19:12
	Sharper than a two edged sword	19:18
	for it tells us precisely that man's tragedy,	19:22
	the disorder and the corruption of individual	19:27
	and community and international life today	19:31
	is the direct result	19:35
	of our imperialist, humanistic pretensions.	19:37
	We usurp, we who are one with the creatures,	19:43
	we usurp the sovereignty of the creator.	19:46
	We masquerade as Titans upon the earth.	19:50
	We cherish utopianist delusions	19:54
	about our own unaided ability to create new kingdoms	19:56
	and build heavenly towers.	20:00
	The novelist, Merejkowski.	20:04
	This is his novel, "The Forerunner," wonderful novel.	20:07
	He bases it on the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,	20:11
	and the theme and the thesis of the novel	20:17
	is the struggle that goes on	20:20
	in da Vinci's soul between God made man,	20:22
	the Christ, on the one hand, on manmade God on the other.	20:27
	And this is the truth of the struggle	20:34
	not only in the breast of Renaissance man,	20:36
	this is the truth of the struggle in the breast of all men.	20:39
	It is the struggle between God made man,	20:43
	Jesus the Christ, and manmade God,	20:47
	and our sorrow is that we annihilate the God-man,	20:51
	we annihilate the Christ,	20:55
	and we elevate the manmade God,	20:57
	and we worship man instead.	21:01
	This humanism in our day has taken	21:05
	the particularly sinister form of scientific humanism.	21:09
	Today, we think our mastery is advanced.	21:14
	We are lords today not only of the earth,	21:19
	we are lords of the stellar spaces.	21:22
	We make an apotheosis or deification	21:26
	of our technological and scientific skill.	21:29
	We are the crown kings of the nuclear pile.	21:34
	Ah, but the head that wears such a lordly crown as this	21:39
	lies very, very uneasy.	21:44
	So today, the nation's rage,	21:49
	and the demonic forces of our own rampant humanism	21:52
	bring us nearer and nearer to the edge of the precipice	21:56
	all because we crucify the God man	22:00
	and worship the manmade God.	22:03
	We cut ourselves off from the creative source	22:08
	of all good life, and idolize ourselves as little Gods.	22:12
	Indeed, we make ourselves big Gods.	22:18
	What I want to say in summing this up is this.	22:23
	If you look at a picture of Mr. Khrushchev,	22:28
	thumping the table in the United Nations	22:32
	in these recent weeks,	22:34
	if you look at a picture of Calder Hall	22:36
	Nuclear Research Station in England,	22:39
	if you look at a picture	22:43
	of a space rocket leaving Cape Canaveral,	22:44
	you are finding a more pointed illustration	22:48
	of the meaning of the Babel's story	22:51
	than you would in any Old Testament scholar sketch	22:53
	of an ancient Babylonian tower.	22:57
	You see, you must ask the right existential question	23:00
	of the biblical message.	23:05
	You can never expect to get a relevant answer	23:07
	unless you ask the appropriate question.	23:10
	Young people, don't dismiss our historic and holy religion	23:13
	without first trying to put to it the right questions.	23:18
	I plead with you in any university	23:22
	throughout the world today,	23:24
	you will find young men and women	23:26
	who have discarded and rejected our holy religion	23:28
	without having tried it.	23:32
	Without having asked the right questions of it.	23:34
	Let me just try to bring this home even further	23:39
	by seeking to apply the principle of correct interrogation	23:43
	to the centralities of the Christian message	23:48
	in the New Testament.	23:51
	Let's apply it to the cross of Jesus Christ	23:53
	because that is at the heart	23:58
	of our historic Christian faith.	24:01
	Now it's possible in the presence of the New Testament	24:05
	and in the presence of the cross of Jesus Christ,	24:08
	it is possible to ask the wrong questions.	24:11
	We can ask how did it happen?	24:15
	Why did it happen?	24:19
	Why was Jesus crucified?	24:20
	These are not illegitimate questions,	24:22
	but I want you to understand	24:24
	that they're not the primary or the principle ones.	24:26
	The principle question	24:30
	which we ask of the cross of Jesus Christ	24:32
	is again an existential question.	24:34
	There is only one question we can put to it,	24:37
	can I today in a world torn and tormented	24:41
	share in the fellowship of His sufferings?	24:45
	Can I in redemptive concern for all men	24:48
	be crucified myself with Christ?	24:52
	Well, the truth is that the cross discloses its reality	24:57
	only insofar as we know something	25:03
	of the agony of cross bearing.	25:07
	There may be some skeptically inclined students	25:11
	in this audience today who tend to laugh at the cross	25:15
	and the element of sacrifice.	25:18
	I want to put it to you, don't laugh.	25:21
	Please, don't laugh.	25:25
	For if there is to be any hope for the human race	25:27
	and any peace and any brotherhood of man,	25:30
	the sacrifice of Christ's cross	25:33
	will somehow have to become involved in it.	25:36
	Can you share in the fellowship of Christ's sufferings	25:42
	in redemptive concern for men?	25:45
	Can you be crucified with Christ?	25:48
	You may say if that's the right kind of question,	25:51
	please don't bother me with it.	25:55
	You may say to me this being crucified with Christ,	25:59
	we've heard all this before,	26:02
	this is an archaic mysticism	26:04
	which is the possession only of a select few,	26:06
	but it isn't, it isn't,	26:09
	for to be crucified with Christ,	26:11
	to feel something of the agony of his cross	26:14
	has the profoundest	26:19
	social implications for the 20th century.	26:20
	It means that once again,	26:24
	we shall meet the pride of every Caiaphas with humility.	26:26
	It means that we shall meet the nonchalance	26:32
	and callous indifference of every modern islet	26:35
	with silence, strength, and dignity.	26:38
	It means that we shall the meet	26:41
	the loud hectoring vices	26:43
	of every crowded modern marketplace	26:45
	with compassion and with a broken heart.	26:47
	It means that we shall confront the forces	26:51
	which would seek the crucify Christ of fresh	26:54
	in our time with a prayer on our lips.	26:56
	Father forgive them for the know not what they do.	26:59
	You can only know the cross in its reality	27:07
	in and through the anguish of cross bearing.	27:11
	Dietrich Bonhoeffer,	27:17
	perhaps more than any other modern disciple of Jesus Christ,	27:19
	Bonhoeffer has shown us	27:24
	that it is one thing to theorize	27:26
	and theologize academically about the cross of Christ.	27:29
	To think back to it as though it were a distant event	27:34
	of the faraway and long ago is easy,	27:38
	but, to feel the pain and the agony	27:42
	of trying to keep love's flame	27:48
	burning in our breast for men	27:50
	in the century that has known barbed wire	27:54
	and blood and brainwashing.	27:58
	That is another matter all together.	28:01
	And that alone is the reality of the cross of Jesus Christ.	28:04
	Good.	28:10
	Let us try to put the right questions	28:11
	to the Christian message.	28:14
	And lastly, let us try to put the right question	28:17
	to the resurrection of Jesus the Christ.	28:21
	It is possible to ask about the resurrection	28:26
	in terms of its possibility.	28:29
	You can say, how did Christ rise with what body?	28:32
	How do you account for the fact that his risen body	28:36
	was able to pass through locked doors	28:38
	and apparently to defeat the limitations of time and space?	28:41
	These again are not illegitimate questions,	28:46
	but they are not the primary ones.	28:49
	The primary one is what does the resurrection of Christ	28:53
	mean for men today, including myself?	28:57
	If you ask about the resurrection of Christ	29:03
	in terms of its possibility,	29:05
	you are likely to miss its reality.	29:08
	What is its reality?	29:12
	Its reality is that in this church	29:14
	and from this very pool pit today,	29:17
	and from innumerable pool pits across the world,	29:20
	Christ Jesus the risen one	29:23
	is being proclaimed as the lord of all life	29:25
	and the creative source of history.	29:28
	The reality of the resurrection is	29:32
	that some unexpected and dramatic moment,	29:35
	you in the intimacies of your life	29:39
	may encounter a living lord in Christ.	29:43
	And to encounter Him	29:48
	is to encounter the one who is the hinge of history	29:50
	because he discloses the meaning of man's pilgrimage.	29:54
	How do you encounter Christ?	29:59
	Are you skeptical about that?	30:01
	I can think of only one conceivable answer,	30:03
	and that is that men have encountered Christ	30:06
	when and as they have been willing	30:11
	to abandon their own self-reliance and self-resourcefulness,	30:13
	and have been ready to run,	30:19
	to cling even to the hem of the garment of the living lord.	30:20
	So in the night, my soul, my daughter,	30:25
	cry clinging Heaven by the hems,	30:29
	and lo, Christ walking on the water,	30:33
	not of Genesareth, but Thames.	30:37
	And out of the private sanctuary of one's own life,	30:42
	one could say that to encounter this living and risen Christ	30:47
	is to leave one in no doubt that one has been in touch	30:52
	with the final reality of the universe,	30:55
	and the universe's meaning.	30:59
	We have tried then, in a rather faltering way this morning,	31:02
	to put the right questions	31:06
	through some of the principle phases	31:08
	of the biblical message.	31:10
	We have tried to put the principle of correct interrogation	31:12
	to the creation story,	31:16
	to the word of God in the Babel story,	31:19
	to the cross, and to the resurrection.	31:21
	I hope that God will give us grace, you and me,	31:25
	to continue to ask the right questions,	31:29
	and may we find for an answer	31:32
	not some theoretical or theological	31:35
	or philosophical solution,	31:38
	but may we find the mystery of a transcendent power	31:40
	and the joy of an abiding presence.	31:45
	And unto our lord who calls us to question	31:49
	and to ask the right questions of Him.	31:53
	To Him, be honor and glory forever and forever.	31:56
	Amen.	32:01
	(paper rustling)	32:03

Item Info

Title:

Hugh Anderson - "Asking the Right Questions" (October 16, 1960)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r42f7ps88

Date:

October 16, 1960

Speaker:

Anderson, Hugh

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0120
ref5441_xwh
uachapelsermaud
duke:628663
dcrau002141
ark:/87924/r42f7ps88
948b49b5-1b8e-4dff-b2dd-1467d72e13fb

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

No Re-Use

In Copyright

Rights Note:

This material is made available for research, scholarship, and private study. Copyright in this material has not been transferred to Duke University. For reuses of this material beyond those permitted by fair use or otherwise allowed under the Copyright Act, please see our page on copyright and citations: https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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Hugh Anderson - "Asking the Right Questions" (October 16, 1960)

Transcript

Item Info

Duke University Archives

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