I Don't Know

For thirty-some years they came into the university ethics class that I taught, most of them twenty to twenty-two-years-old, honors students mostly. On classroom day one, I always announced as a major objective of mine that they leave the course knowing less than they did at the start. They knew right from wrong. I effectively undermined that knowledge, or as I stated it in class, as another objective, I intentionally muddied what they thought were clear waters. This is one of our larger major problems as citizens of the “developed” world: we know too much. Worse yet, we know that we know it all. We don’t live plagued by uncertainties and doubts. That is very scary. There just is not that much in this world that we can know with certainty. There is not. W. T. Conner was perhaps the greatest Baptist theologian of the 20th Century, at least west of the Mississippi. One of his students related that one day in class, a student asked him for his answer to a particularly difficult and controversial point of theology. Dr. Conner responded, “I don’t know.” Whereupon, the young student began to give a full and clear answer to the class and Dr. Conner. The professor interrupted him with, “Mr. ___, I didn’t say, ‘You don’t know the answer,’ I don’t know the answer.” In her 1994 acceptance speech on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wislawa Szymborska spoke of why she valued that little phrase ‘I don’t know’ so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us and the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, ‘I don’t know’ the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself, ‘I don’t know,’ she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some . . . highschool. . . . I’ve been in church all my life, am an ordained minister, hold three advanced degrees in theology, and have taught theology for thirty-some years, yet I don’t know–about, for instance, “demons,” “evil spirits,” or whatever. I’ve read and heard just about everything others think or know or think they know, and I understand their reasoning. But I don’t know what they are all about. I do know that whatever they are, in the gospel stories, they were the cause of suffering unspeakable. Those possessed by demons did not live a life of comfort and ease. In a core sense of the word, they were dis-eased. What I do know about them is that Jesus had power over them, and had the power and compassion to heal those under the bondage to these dis-eases of the spirit. That only touches the surface of what I don’t know biblically or theologically–my Christian agnosticism.