Faithful Questioning: A Gospel Key

My friends, my friends. Today was a riveting day of gospel scholarship at Church. Why? Because I had a principle driven home to me: the importance of faithful questioning.

I was browsing the news this morning when I saw a very sad news account of a man who lost his faith over some little historical nuggets of which he had not been aware (you can see the story here). There are two tragedies here (the first being relatively minor, the second being more serious):

1) Would that we, as Latter Day Saints, had been more informed generally concerning this issue that when the topic came up (as it almost assuredly had), he could have heard these things from a friend and not some sneering journalist like Jon Krakeur.
This has been common knowledge and accessible (from sympathetic sources) for those who wanted to know. And more importantly:

2) Would that he, after all these years, had developed the intellectual independence, the hard-nosed determination to find the truth that he would not have been surprised at the finding. Other Latter Day Saints have known such things for years--including myself. Provided that this news report gives us the most "juicy" of the tidbits, then his faith must have been a blind one indeed.

In other words, he didn't ask the right questions at the right time in the right place.

It's an odd principle to learn; that much I will admit. But I think it is a sound one. Brent L. Top once remarked that "those with the most insight and inspiration as to God's will for mankind are often those who do the most poignant pleading and questioning" (C.S. Lewis, The Man and His Message, pg. 118) We trick ourselves, and worse, limit ourselves if we think that such questioning is inherently infidelitous to the gospel and the Church. The truth is quite the contrary: a good Saint is a well-informed Saint. We must be renaissance men/women of the gospel. As Elder Oaks once remarked: the day when of the theologian-husband and the "good Christian wife" are over.

Sometimes I even find myself limiting the scope of what "good questions" might be. For example, I have often (from my own lips at times): "perhaps we shouldn't ask 'why is this happening to me?' instead ask 'what should I be learning from this?" A good, even wonderful question to ask! But it naturally leads to other questions, questions which themselves have piercing answers. As we see in the case of Christ ("Why hast thou forsaken me?"), Joseph Smith ("Oh God, where art thou?") and Alma ("How long shall we suffer these great afflications, Oh Lord?), the mere asking of a question in faith is bound to bear fruit. Every affliction is itself a new frontier of knowledge. A good explorer would not travel the same road everyone else has traveled (While the imagery Lehi imploys of the 'strait and narrow path' is powerful imagery, it's not the only imagery). Moreover, afflictions are the specimen of life, and no scientist I know would only perform one test an newly found amoeba. Thanks to such a seeking spirit, we have been blessed with myriad medical treatments. Perhaps we could be similarly blessed if we had such a questing spirit concerning the gospel.