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Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Questions

Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Questions

Last updated on: September 1, 2026 at 7:58 pm by Jordan Hathcock

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Maybe We’re Asking the Wrong Questions 2026-09-01T19:58:16-07:00 Jordan Hathcock

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

There is something strange happening in modern spirituality. We live in an age of artificial intelligence, smartphones, quantum physics, instant communication, self-driving technology, and refrigerators that apparently know when we are running low on raw cow’s milk (moo). We can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet in seconds, ask a machine to summarize two thousand years of Christian theology, and watch a documentary about ancient Egypt while sitting on the toilet. And yet, increasingly, we are looking backward. Way backward. We are digging through ancient spiritual practices, forgotten rituals, mystical traditions, sacred texts, manuscripts, meditation practices, monastic writings, Jewish mysticism, Christian mysticism, Gnosticism, Buddhism, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and just about anything else that sounds like it might have been written on papyrus. Apparently, the future has made us nostalgic for people who didn’t have indoor plumbing. Maybe there is a reason.

Our Obsession With Getting It Right

For a long time, much of Christianity seemed preoccupied with certainty. Is the Bible literally accurate? Are the stories historically verifiable? Did Moses actually write the Pentateuch? Did the Gospel writers record the exact words of Jesus? Were biblical manuscripts transmitted accurately? What happened to the original manuscripts? Which translation is the most trustworthy? What does archaeology prove? What does archaeology disprove? Did Jesus really bang Mary Magdalen (scholars love this one hehe)?

These aren’t stupid questions (maybe one is…). They’re important questions. Modern biblical scholarship has spent generations examining manuscripts, textual variations, languages, historical contexts, and the complicated process through which biblical texts were transmitted. The field of textual criticism exists precisely because ancient manuscripts contain variations and scholars have to carefully compare the surviving evidence. The Society of Biblical Literature has extensive scholarship devoted to the study of biblical texts and their transmission.

So yes, we should ask whether ancient documents are historically reliable. We should care about evidence. We should care about history. We should care about what ancient people actually wrote and what they might have meant. But I wonder if we’ve become so obsessed with proving the ancient world that we’ve forgotten to ask what the ancient world was actually trying to do.

Maybe the more important question isn’t simply, “Is this ancient text true?”

Maybe it’s, “What happens to a human being when they actually live it?”

That’s a very different question.

When Truth Becomes Trivia

Because we can win the argument about the Bible and still lose our souls. We can spend three hours arguing online about whether a particular verse was originally written in Greek or Hebrew and then walk into the kitchen and treat our spouse like an unpaid employee. We can memorize Greek words for love, grace, and salvation while remaining spectacularly bad at loving anybody. We can debate whether Jesus said something exactly the way a Gospel writer recorded it while completely missing what Jesus might have meant for us to actually do.

At some point, scholarship has to meet life. Otherwise, truth becomes trivia. And Christianity already has enough trivia.

Our fascination with ancient spirituality can sometimes turn into a weird form of historical romanticism. We imagine ancient people sitting around fires, contemplating the mysteries of existence, drinking tea, communing with nature, and having profound conversations about God. That’s adorable. It’s also nonsense. Ancient people were human beings. They were capable of extraordinary wisdom, but also violence, tribalism, oppression, superstition, slavery, inequality, cruelty, and just about every other terrible thing human beings have invented. If you broke your leg two thousand years ago, you probably didn’t have an orthopedic surgeon waiting for you with an MRI. You had some guy named Bartholomew who rubbed goat fat on it and told you to pray.

Modern Life: Better, But Not Necessarily Wiser

Modern life has given us extraordinary gifts. We have antibiotics, anesthesia, modern surgery, instant communication, global transportation, clean water, advanced science, and access to more information than any civilization in human history. In many ways, modern life is dramatically better.

But here’s the strange part: better technology hasn’t necessarily made us better humans.

We have more information and less wisdom. More communication and more loneliness. More entertainment and less attention. More convenience and less patience. More religious content and, perhaps, less spiritual depth.

We can access almost every sacred text ever written from a device that fits in our pocket, and then use that same device to watch a raccoon steal a sandwich for the next forty minutes.

That is progress.

Sort of.

What Did the Mystics Understand?

This is where the ancient mystical tradition becomes fascinating. Christian mysticism wasn’t simply ancient Christianity with candles and dramatic robes. It represented a stream of Christian spirituality concerned with contemplation, transformation, prayer, silence, and direct awareness of God. The tradition stretches through early Christianity, monastic spirituality, medieval mysticism, and figures such as Evagrius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross. Cambridge University Press provides a scholarly overview of early Christian mysticism.

The mystics weren’t primarily interested in collecting information about God. They wanted to encounter God.

That’s different.

There’s a massive difference between knowing about something and knowing it. You can read one hundred books about surfing and never actually paddle into a wave. You can study marriage for twenty years and still be a terrible husband. You can own every cookbook ever written and still burn toast. And you can possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Scripture while remaining completely untouched by the mystery the Scriptures are attempting to communicate and still be a huge dick about it.

The mystical tradition understood that information and transformation aren’t the same thing.

And maybe modern Christianity desperately needs to remember that.

We’ve Turned Faith Into an Information Problem

We want the correct doctrine, the correct translation, the correct interpretation, the correct denomination, the correct eschatological timeline, and the correct opinion about what happens after death.

We’ve turned theology into a competitive sport. And, like most competitive sports, everybody seems convinced they’re winning.

Meanwhile, the mystics were often interested in something much more uncomfortable: transformation.

What happens to your ego when you become quiet? What happens to your anger when you stop feeding it? What happens to your fear when you sit with it rather than running from it? What happens when you stop trying to control God and simply become present? What happens when prayer stops being a shopping list and becomes silence?

Those questions don’t make particularly good bumper stickers.

But they might make better human beings.

Scripture Was Meant to Be Experienced

One of the fascinating practices that emerged from Christian contemplative tradition is lectio divina, or “divine reading.” Instead of treating Scripture simply as information to be extracted, lectio divina involves reading slowly, meditating, praying, and allowing the text to become something personally transformative. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops provides resources explaining contemplative approaches to Scripture and lectio divina.

That’s a fascinating contrast to the way many of us consume Scripture today. We read a verse. We highlight it. We screenshot it. We post it. We argue about it. We move on.

The mystic might sit with it.

Not because they’re trying to squeeze another piece of information out of the sentence, but because they’re allowing the sentence to work on them.

That’s a completely different relationship with Scripture.

The Desert and the iPhone

The Desert Fathers and Mothers offer another example. Beginning in the Egyptian desert during the early centuries of Christianity, these communities sought lives centered on prayer, simplicity, solitude, and transformation. Their wisdom often dealt with anger, judgment, ego, forgiveness, humility, hospitality, and the struggle to become a different kind of person. The Center for Action and Contemplation has a helpful introduction to the Desert Mothers and Fathers and their spiritual tradition.

And there’s something almost hilariously relevant about that.

The ancient monks went into the desert to escape distraction. We carry the distraction around in our pockets.

They were trying to get away from noise. We pay subscription fees for more of it.

They sought silence. We put earbuds in so we don’t have to experience it.

They were asking what was happening inside their own minds. We’re checking what everybody else is doing.

Maybe the mystics would look at our civilization and think we had built the world’s most sophisticated machine for avoiding ourselves.

And perhaps they’d have a point.

Maybe We Have Forgotten How to Be Still

The problem isn’t necessarily that modern people don’t believe in God. Maybe the problem is that modern people rarely become quiet enough to wonder about God. We are constantly stimulated by notifications, headlines, podcasts, streaming services, advertising, political outrage, religious outrage, celebrity outrage, and whatever fresh disaster the internet has decided we should be furious about today. Someone, somewhere, is always angry about something. And the algorithm has figured out that anger is profitable. Silence isn’t. Contemplation isn’t. Patience isn’t. Nuance certainly isn’t. Maybe that’s part of what makes the ancient mystical tradition so interesting. Looking backward doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting modernity. It might mean recovering disciplines that modernity has gradually made harder to practice: rest, silence, ritual, prayer, community, hospitality, attention, Sabbath, and contemplation.

These practices don’t require us to believe ancient people were smarter than us. They simply require us to admit that technological advancement doesn’t automatically equal spiritual advancement. We have learned how to manipulate matter at an astonishing level, but we haven’t necessarily learned how to manage our own egos. We can edit photographs, alter voices, manipulate images, create artificial worlds, and ask computers to imitate human conversation. But we still struggle to apologize. We can communicate instantly with thousands of people, but we still struggle to listen to one person. We can access nearly every sacred text ever written from a device in our pocket, but we still struggle to be fully present with the person sitting across the table. Maybe our greatest technological achievement has been finding increasingly sophisticated ways to avoid sitting quietly with ourselves.

What If We Asked a Different Question?

Perhaps that’s why the ancient mystical tradition matters. Not because everything ancient was better. Not because every ancient spiritual practice was true. And certainly not because the ancient world possessed some magical access to God that modern people have somehow lost. The value of the mystical tradition may be much simpler: some ancient people understood that human beings need practices that interrupt our obsession with ourselves. They understood that spirituality isn’t merely something we think about. It’s something that is supposed to do something to us. And that may be precisely what a fractured world needs.

Because we don’t necessarily need another argument about who is right. We might need people who know how to listen. We might need people who can sit in silence without immediately reaching for their phones. We might need people who can disagree without turning the other person into an enemy. We might need people who can encounter uncertainty without becoming terrified by it. We might need people who can say, “I don’t know,” without feeling like their entire worldview has collapsed. And maybe most of all, we need people who understand that spirituality is supposed to produce something in us.

If our spirituality consistently makes us more arrogant, more judgmental, more afraid, more tribal, and more obsessed with proving everyone else wrong, perhaps we should have enough humility to ask whether it’s actually working. Jesus didn’t say, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples: if you have successfully defeated everyone in the comments section.” He said something about love. That’s considerably harder.

Maybe Truth Is Supposed to Change Us

The ancient mystics understood that truth was supposed to transform the person who encountered it. And perhaps this brings us back to the Bible. Does the Bible have to be historically perfect before it can be spiritually meaningful? Does every difficult passage have to be completely resolved before we can allow it to challenge us? Does every mystery have to be explained before we can experience wonder? Does uncertainty automatically destroy faith? Maybe not. Maybe faith becomes more interesting when we stop pretending that certainty and truth are the same thing.

We can investigate ancient texts honestly. We can study manuscripts, wrestle with contradictions, acknowledge difficult passages, and ask uncomfortable questions about history and authorship. We can take scholarship seriously without becoming cynical. In fact, perhaps genuine faith should be strong enough to survive honest questions. If something is true, it shouldn’t require us to be terrified of investigating it. But scholarship should lead somewhere. And perhaps that destination isn’t certainty. Perhaps it’s wisdom.

Because there is a difference between proving something and allowing something to transform you. I can prove that a recipe exists without ever cooking the meal. I can study the history of surfing without ever paddling into the water. I can explain the psychological benefits of forgiveness while continuing to hold a grudge against somebody for twenty years. Information can tell me what something is. Experience begins to tell me what it can do.

Maybe that’s what the mystics understood.

Maybe Christianity Doesn’t Have a Monopoly on Mystics

Of course, Christianity doesn’t own the mystical experience. Humans have been staring into the mystery of existence and wondering what the hell is going on for thousands of years. Buddhist traditions developed practices of meditation and mindfulness to confront suffering and attachment. Hindu mystical traditions explored awakening and the relationship between the self and ultimate reality. Sufism within Islam emphasized love, remembrance, and direct experience of the divine. Jewish mysticism explored the hidden and mysterious dimensions of God and existence.

But mysticism isn’t limited to religion either. There are plenty of people who would never call themselves religious yet still experience something that looks suspiciously like awe. Scientists staring into the incomprehensible size of the universe, philosophers wrestling with consciousness, artists losing themselves in creativity, surfers sitting quietly in the ocean before sunrise, or someone standing beneath a sky full of stars suddenly realizing they are a tiny, confused meat creature floating through space. Call it God, consciousness, mystery, nature, the universe, or simply the overwhelming realization that you have absolutely no idea what is going on. The experience itself can still shake us out of our normal obsession with ourselves.

Now, before anyone assumes I’m saying all religions, philosophies, and mystical experiences are secretly saying the exact same thing, relax. They’re not. Their beliefs about God, humanity, reality, and the meaning of existence can be dramatically different. Pretending everyone is secretly saying the same thing isn’t spiritual enlightenment. It’s just intellectual laziness wearing yoga pants.

But maybe we can still learn something from each other.

One thing religious and non-religious mystics often seem to understand is that life cannot be reduced entirely to information. You can collect facts about God forever and still never become a better human being. You can also collect facts about the universe, consciousness, history, and human behavior and still be a complete asshole.

The modern world has become obsessed with proving the past—who wrote what, when it happened, whether every event can be historically verified, and whether we have enough archaeological evidence to finally win the argument. History matters. Facts matter. But imagine refusing to learn from a story because you couldn’t verify the GPS coordinates. “Interesting parable, Jesus, but before I love my neighbor, I’d like some archaeological confirmation on the road to Jericho.”

At some point, our obsession with proving everything that happened in the past can become a convenient way of avoiding what needs to happen inside us right now.

Maybe that’s what mystics—religious and otherwise—can remind us. Not every mystery is a problem waiting to be solved. Sometimes it’s an invitation to pay attention. And perhaps in a world obsessed with knowing everything, controlling everything, and being absolutely certain about everything, one of the most radical spiritual things we can say is:

“I don’t know.”

And maybe that isn’t the end of the search.

Maybe that’s where the real one finally begins.

What Happens If We Actually Live It?

Imagine that tomorrow we discovered definitive answers to every major biblical historical question. Imagine we could finally settle every argument about authorship, manuscript transmission, chronology, archaeology, and interpretation. Would the world suddenly become less fractured? Would Christians stop fighting? Would greed disappear? Would lonely people suddenly become loved? Would husbands become better husbands? Would parents become more patient? Would we become more compassionate?

Probably not.

We’d probably just create a new Facebook group to argue about the discovery.

A perfectly reconstructed manuscript won’t teach us compassion. A flawless theological system won’t make us forgive. An airtight argument for God’s existence won’t automatically make us love our neighbor. We can be completely right about a doctrine and still be completely wrong in the way we treat another human being.

But ancient wisdom that actually changes how we live?

That might be worth something.

Maybe the question isn’t whether we should return to the ancient world. Maybe the question is what we should bring forward from it. We don’t need ancient medicine. We don’t need ancient sanitation. We probably don’t need to start rubbing goat fat on broken legs. Modernity has given us some things we should absolutely keep.

But perhaps we need ancient practices of silence, contemplation, community, hospitality, simplicity, and attention. Perhaps we need to rediscover the idea that sacredness doesn’t always require spectacle. Maybe spiritual depth isn’t found by constantly adding more information, more experiences, more opinions, and more noise. Maybe sometimes it’s found by removing things.

Maybe God doesn’t always have to shout.

Maybe the divine can be encountered in silence, in a breath, in forgiveness, in an act of generosity nobody sees, in the ocean, or in the uncomfortable moment when we finally stop talking long enough to hear what’s happening inside ourselves.

And maybe that’s the great irony of our obsession with ancient spirituality. We keep looking backward for something that was always pointing inward.

The ancient mystics weren’t necessarily trying to give us all the answers. Maybe they were trying to teach us how to ask better questions.

And perhaps the best question isn’t simply, “Is every word of this ancient document literally true?”

Maybe the better question is:

“What kind of person is this truth asking me to become?”

Because the world doesn’t desperately need more people who can prove God exists.

It needs people who can make the existence of love believable.

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