The Power of a Question

 "Why would you trust a God you fear?"

I was listening to Alisa Childers' podcast today and her guest, Josh Morris, told the story of ex-Christian progressive guru Rob Bell posing the above question to him after noticing a tattoo on his arm that said "Fear God." Morris said he was so agitated by this question and his lack of a good answer to it that he eventually had it altered to cover up the words. 

In his book Tactics, Greg Koukl writes that questions are powerful, for several reasons: They're non-threatening, they can teach us a lot about what other people think, they allow us to make progress on a point without seeming pushy, and they put us in the driver's seat of the conversation. They put a pebble in someone's shoe that can eventually lead them to change their mind.

Not all questions are innocent, though. Some questions, like the serpent's in the garden ("Did God really say...?") are designed to cause the hearer to doubt a belief they have a legitimate right to hold. These kinds of questions can force people into a corner in which there are no good options. 

Koukl writes that the best answer to a loaded question is often another question that requests clarification. Bell's question is designed to make the hearer sweat, but a request for clarification would put the ball back in his court and subtly expose the equivocation his query depends on: "What do you mean by fear? How are you defining that word?" Or maybe, "If your God doesn't cause you to tremble, is he really God?"