Why It Might Be Faithful to Interrogate What you Were Taught

I was born a non-questioning soul.

Or maybe I learned it.

Maybe “don’t ask” was part of how I survived being a kid trying to stay as unbothersome and below the radar as possible. With divorced parents living in very different worlds, carrying very different opinions, and sometimes using me as a tool to hurt each other, I picked up an unspoken rule early: questions draw attention, and attention can go sideways fast.

So, I did what I was told. I believed what I was told. Especially when it came from people older than me. Respect your elders. Respect means complying. Respect means not to challenge. And in the spiritual world I grew up in, that respect was most absolute when it came from the pulpit.

Questioning = rebellion.
Rebellion = sin.

Sin = shame and rejection.

So you can imagine (or maybe you can’t, goodness, I really hope you can’t) how being formed in an IFB (independent Fundamentalist Baptist) church could stunt a person’s ability to recognize that it’s okay to question the theology handed to them, much less the faith that was built on top of that theology.

I will never forget the first time someone named something different in me.

Years after I had started untangling my faith from that church, a friend I deeply love and respect called me a Berean. At first, I didn’t know whether I should be offended. Berean felt like a polite way of saying, “You ask too many questions.”

But then, my blossoming ‘question everything stage’ hit, and I dug into finding out more about these Berean peeps I was akin to. That’s when it landed differently.

In Acts 17, the Bereans weren’t mocked for testing what they heard; they were honored for it. They received the message eagerly, and they examined the Scriptures to see if it was true (Acts 17:11). And I realized…okay. Maybe I was a little like a Berean woman. Testing the word. Questioning. Pursuing a truth grounded in Scripture where I can safely rest my faith.

Interrogating what you were taught shouldn’t immediately be viewed as rebellion. It can be devotion.

You see, when you’ve been formed by fear, you don’t just inherit beliefs, you inherit reflexes.

You learn what to do with your questions before you even know you have them. You learn to swallow them, spiritualize them, confess them away. You learn to call curiosity “doubt,” and doubt “danger,” and danger “disobedience.” And over time, you stop noticing the difference between honoring spiritual authority and making it an absolute authority. You start to treat human teaching as if it carries the same weight as God’s Word, and you can end up building a whole faith on top of secondhand certainty.

But Scripture doesn’t ask us to do that.

The Bible doesn’t present discernment as a threat to faith, but as part of faithfulness. Paul doesn’t say, “Accept everything confidently.” He says, “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). John goes even further: “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits” (1 John 4:1). In other words, the posture of a maturing believer isn’t gullibility, it’s discernment. Not suspicion, but careful, Scripture-rooted clarity.

And I need to say this out loud, so nobody turns this into a trophy: I’m not writing as someone who has arrived.

Part of coming out of legalism is realizing that questions are allowed… while still feeling the old nudges of fear and shame. Sometimes those little pebbles hit my windshield, and I can feel myself wobble, teetering too close to cynicism. I’m a work in progress. Like all of us are.

Still, the call remains.

Jesus Himself made room for this kind of holy interrogation. He confronted religious leaders who were passionately devoted to tradition yet somehow made God’s commands harder to see and harder to live (Mark 7:6–13). That’s the strange danger of legalism: it can look like devotion on the outside while quietly shifting the center of gravity from Jesus to performance, from relationship to rule-keeping, from love to control.

So maybe questioning isn’t the enemy of faith. Maybe refusing to question is.

Because the goal isn’t to become a professional skeptic. The goal is to be set free. Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). Sometimes the path to that freedom starts with one brave, honest question:

Is this Jesus…or is it just law, tradition, or man?

The more I expand my reading and library of theologians (old and new), the more I realize I might not be the only one saying those types of things. Os Guinness talks about the difference between a faith that is merely inherited and a faith that has been examined, strengthened, and made your own.[i] Peter Enns (in his work on certainty and faith) pushes back on the idea that real faith means never wrestling, never rethinking, never revisiting what you were handed.[ii] Both, in their own ways, name something I’ve learned the hard way: an unexamined faith isn’t safer. It’s just more fragile.

Interrogating what you were taught is not a detour from faith. Sometimes it’s the beginning of faith becoming honest, resilient, and rooted in Jesus Himself.

You may have gotten this far and are thinking, “Stacy, ma’am, this is a post you are writing in your Lent season…what does this have to do with Lent?!”

This is what it has to do with Lent:

This Lent, I’m bringing what I inherited to Jesus: not with a clenched fist, but with an open hand.

Not to prove a point. Not to win an argument. Not to deconstruct for sport. But because I want Him more than I want the comfort of secondhand certainty. I want a faith that can breathe. A faith that can tell the truth. A faith that doesn’t collapse the moment it’s bumped by grief, or suffering, or the first real question I wasn’t allowed to ask as a kid.

And I’m learning this: Jesus isn’t threatened by my questions. He meets me in them. He meets me in the tension between what I was taught and what I’m seeing in Scripture. He meets me in the parts of my story where fear trained my reflexes faster than love ever did. He meets me when I start to walk towards the grumpiness of cynicism and draws me back to the hard-fought space of joy. He meets me when I’m brave enough to say, “I don’t know,” and humble enough to ask, “Show me what’s true.”

Because He is gentle in the sifting.

Just as a reminder, Lent is not a season for pretending we’re fine. It’s a season for dust and honesty; for letting God name what is real and letting Him burn off what is false. For releasing what has been stapled to Jesus but doesn’t sound like Him. For laying down the heavy yokes we’ve called holiness, and returning to the One who says His yoke is easy and His burden is light. So, I’m testing what I’ve been taught. I’m holding fast to what is good. And I’m trusting that whatever is truly of Christ will remain.

And whatever isn’t…He is kind enough to set me free.

[i] God In the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt by Os Guiness

[ii] The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct Beliefs” by Peter Enns

Photo by Marsha Reid on Unsplash