Questions to Ask About God
Questions about God for your own reflection or for a conversation with someone who will not mind being asked: how they picture God, what they make of unanswered prayer and long absence, and what they would keep hold of if they turned out to be wrong.
The questions
Open any question for the note
When you say God, what picture comes to mind?
Why ask it
Nearly everyone has an image before they have a doctrine, and it is usually visual: a face, a light, a presence at the end of a room. What arrives first is generally older than anything they were formally taught.
Where did that picture come from?
Why ask it
Images of God are inherited from particular people and particular buildings, often a grandparent or one grade school teacher. Tracing the source is gentler than examining the belief and usually more revealing.
Is your sense of God different from what you were taught?
Why ask it
Many people carry a private version that diverges from the official one. Asking about the gap is often the first time anyone has given them permission to describe it out loud.
Do you think God acts in particular situations?
Why ask it
This is where general belief becomes concrete, and answers vary widely inside a single congregation. Listen for whether they draw a line between being comforted and being intervened for.
What do you make of the prayers that were not answered?
Why ask it
Unanswered prayer is where most theological positions get tested. Responses range from resignation to reframing to unresolved anger, and the third is the most honest and the least often said.
What do you do when God feels absent?
Why ask it
Long absence is a common experience and rarely mentioned in public settings. Whether they keep praying, wait it out, or stop tells you how their faith operates when nothing at all is coming back.
What is hardest to hold on to when someone dies young?
Why ask it
The hardest case in any theology. Ask it quietly and expect no tidy answer, because anyone offering a neat one has usually not yet needed it.
Do you think God is affected by us, or unchanging?
Why ask it
This separates a God who responds from a God who simply is, and it changes what prayer is for. Most people have an intuition about it without ever having been asked to state it.
Which is hardest for you: God's justice, mercy, sovereignty, or hiddenness?
Why ask it
Offering options lets someone name their real difficulty instead of defending the whole picture. Whichever they choose usually connects to something specific in their own history.
Is God male to you, and has that changed?
Why ask it
The language people inherit shapes the image they carry, and many revise it later without telling anyone. The question can open a serious conversation about what that imagery has given or cost them.
What do you think God asks of you day to day?
Why ask it
Moves from the nature of God to obligation, which is where belief becomes visible. Vague answers about being a good person are common, and worth following with what that looked like this week.
Do you believe God has a plan for individual lives? What does that mean when plans fall apart?
Why ask it
The doctrine is simple to state and hard to hold after a miscarriage or a layoff. Asking both halves together stops it becoming a slogan and usually produces something considered.
How do you hold suffering on this scale together with a God who is good?
Why ask it
This does not resolve, and the value is in hearing which unsatisfying answer a person actually lives with. Do not offer yours in exchange unless they ask for it.
Do you think people outside your tradition are known by God?
Why ask it
The answer predicts a good deal about how someone treats neighbors, colleagues, and relatives who left. It is a question about the borders of their tradition and about where they stand inside it.
What has changed your mind about God?
Why ask it
One specific cause, a book, an illness, a person, a single conversation, is far more informative than a description of gradual growth. Some people will say nothing ever has, which is also worth knowing.
Have you ever prayed for something you would not admit to?
Why ask it
Petitions people are ashamed of, for someone else's failure, for release, for it simply to stop, are close to universal and almost never spoken about. Only ask where the trust is already established.
What do you think happens after we die, and how sure are you?
Why ask it
Certainty varies enormously between people holding the same stated belief. The second half is what turns this from a recitation into a real answer.
If you turned out to be wrong about all of it, what would you still want to have lived by?
Why ask it
Separates commitments from metaphysics. Most people can name something they would keep, and it tends to be the part of their faith they have thought about longest.
Is there anything about this you would rather not be asked?
Why ask it
Gives them a chance to close a door before you open it by accident. It also tells you which questions they have been asked badly in the past, and by whom.
If you could have one answer from God, what would you ask?
Why ask it
Ends where their real uncertainty sits. What people want to ask is usually about one specific person rather than about theology at all.
How to use these questions
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Asking well
Ask about experience before propositions
How someone pictures God, and what they do when nothing comes back, is answerable. Whether God exists is a debate, and once it starts nobody says anything they had not already prepared.
Let the answer be unfinished
Several of these have no resolution, and the useful response is to sit with the incomplete version rather than tidy it. Filling the silence with your own view ends the exchange.
Say where you stand if you are asked
Refusing to answer while asking twenty questions feels like an examination. A plain sentence about your own position, held lightly, keeps it a conversation between two people.
Watch which words they use
Whether someone says the Lord, the universe, Hashem, Allah, or the man upstairs tells you a lot, including how formal they want this to be. Use their vocabulary rather than translating it into yours.
What tends to go wrong
Asking during grief
The questions about suffering and about dying young are not for the week of a funeral, however sympathetically meant. Wait until the person raises it themselves.
Setting a trap
A question built around a contradiction you have already spotted is recognizable instantly. If you genuinely want to know how they hold two things together, say so in those words.
Assuming a shared vocabulary
Grace, sin, sovereignty, and blessing carry different weight in different traditions and in different families. Ask what a word means to them before you build a question on it.
Treating doubt as an opening
If someone admits uncertainty, it is not an invitation to argue them out of belief or back into it. Doubt shared is a form of trust, and pressing on it usually ends the honesty for good.
If you are using these on your own
- Write the answers rather than think them. The picture that comes to mind, and where it came from, is harder to dodge on paper.
- Answer the questions about unanswered prayer and absence with dates and specifics, since generalities are how these get avoided.
- Keep the one about what you would still live by if you were wrong. It tends to be the most durable thing you write.
- If a question produces a strong reaction, note the reaction and come back to it another week rather than working it out in one sitting.
- If you are moving away from a faith you were raised in, consider talking it through with someone outside the community before you talk to anyone inside it.