Rethinking Our Theology of God: A Case for God as the Ultimate Question

Rethinking Our Theology of God: A Case for God as the Ultimate Question

For more than twenty-five years, I have had the opportunity to teach the Catholic faith to catechumens in both Nigeria and the United States. I consider those years a sacred gift of sharing the faith with fellow believers who desire to know God intimately. It is this desire to know God intimately that stirs in my heart the need to rethink our theology of God within the Christian tradition. If one were to ask a Christian who God is, one would expect some insightful ideas. Most often, the responses reveal an understanding of God as one who answers prayers. God is thus perceived as an answer—or the answer to all answers.

As the ultimate answer to all questions, God becomes the source of meaning at either a personal or communal level. Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the great minds Africa has given to the universal Church, would argue that God is the answer that brings harmony to the restless human heart. He captures this in his famous Confessions, where he describes God as the one who stirs in us the desire to praise him. That desire to be united with God makes “one’s heart restless until it comes to rest in God.” Karl Barth, the great Reformed theologian, would argue that Jesus Christ, as the self-revelation of God, is the ultimate answer to the human condition. In Jesus Christ, the human person finds the ultimate answer and ground of meaning. Paul Tillich would argue that God, as the ground of meaning, serves as the foundational answer to the human condition as it experiences meaninglessness and finitude. God thus delegitimizes meaninglessness and offers finitude a new hermeneutic content when one turns to God. C. S. Lewis offers a rich theological view that grounds God as the source of meaning and the answer to human questions that reside in the metaphysical domain. What cannot be addressed through the material realities that define human life will be given finality by God, who is the source of all answers and meaning. The quest for meaning is central to the thought of Augustine, Barth, Tillich and Lewis. All of them desire a sense of meaning that endures. Thus, God is the ground of that which endures and gives meaning to the human condition.

This reflection does not intend to discount the above views on who God is and how humans perceive God. With this in mind, I am curious to explore the following question: What opens up for us when we consider God not as the ultimate answer but as the ultimate question? Before addressing this question, it is appropriate to present another insightful view.

Karl Rahner offers a theological-anthropological insight in which he argues that the human person is a creature of transcendence. This movement beyond oneself, as an a priori component of the human condition, is like a question waiting to be asked. As questions, we embody transcendence. This transcendence is the pathway of both proximity and intimacy with God, who is transcendence itself and the answer to the questioning being. Our lives are like questions that reach beyond our current condition and seek answers both to present realities and to those not yet realized. As Rahner rightly notes, if God, who is perfect transcendence, is to be encountered, then our humanity must be grounded in a turn toward transcendence—we must be creatures who go beyond themselves. Yet this movement beyond oneself does not alienate one from oneself. Our going beyond ourselves allows us to return to ourselves as creatures who experience transcendence within history. While acknowledging Rahner’s view as uniquely insightful, I would like to expand the discourse further.

To speak of God as an answer is to risk slipping into the temptation of seeing God through the lens of finality, which may sometimes reduce God to the domain of the known. Yet God remains radically unknown even when God instantiates intimacy with us. Knowing is too limited to unpack the richness of the other’s content. Encounter, rather, allows for a richer hermeneutic that preserves the legitimacy of enduring intimacy. When Rahner speaks of God as a self-communicating God, he is not reducing God to the categories of knowing an object exhaustively. Hence, he insists that God, as absolute mystery, is “incomprehensible and impenetrable.” Intimacy does not equate to knowing. Thus, God, as absolute mystery, invites us to an encounter that exudes intimacy. Our task is to respond to that intimacy and abandon the manipulative tendencies inherent in knowing.

Ask married couples what sparks their intimacy, and they may respond that it is not about knowing the other. Rather, it is about the intimacy that emerges through the ritual of encounters, which allows each person to experience the unfolding content of the other’s qualities.

That said, what does it mean to say that God is the question of all questions? To address this question, one must first probe more deeply into the phenomenological content of a question. In other words, what does a question do? Questions create the possibility of curiosity. They are bridge builders that invite us into the worlds for which they serve as doorways. Questions can also create an intimacy that unfolds insofar as they remain unanswered. Intimacy is not being used here as an affective condition, such as feeling good about oneself. Rather, it means the creation of openness and connectedness as an epistemic condition. An example may help. To ask the question, “Who are you?” is to create a connection between the questioner and the content of the question. The questioner’s world is held captive by the content of the question, even if the response may be considered offensive. She wants to know who you are. Her senses are fixed on you. Until the content of the question is finally grasped, the intimate connection between the questioner and the question’s content remains. Even the answer given can become the foundation for posing another question—the instantiation of our transcendence as question-oriented beings. Probing a question is a concrete manifestation of entering more deeply into the world that the question helps to unpack. Thus, one can conclude that a question is a bond that holds two realities together as though they shared a covenantal connection.

We can never exhaust our knowledge of God. The intimacy that God exudes is not something that can be experienced exhaustively. Consequently, God, understood as the ultimate question, offers a healthy pathway toward appreciating both the transcendence of God and the intimacy that such transcendence exudes. Scripture shows how God, understood as transcendence, is the ground of covenantal intimacy. In Exodus 3:14, God responds to Moses’ desire for an answer that he can deliver to the Israelites, who insist on knowing. Rather than offer an answer that reduces God to the domain of knowing, God offers a response that functions as a question does—an invitation to encounter through transcendence: “I am who I am.” God’s response invites curiosity in the Israelites and establishes the foundation of the covenantal relationship between them and God. Throughout their historical existence as a people, they seek to enter deeply into the intimacy that the transcendent God makes possible. Thus, God’s transcendence becomes the ground of intimacy rather than distance. Similarly, God, understood as the ultimate question, is the ground of an enduring invitation to encounter God and experience divine intimacy. Our problem is that we often insist that the content of an encounter exhausts the meaning of the one being encountered. As Augustine rightly notes, the rest that we find in God does not exhaust God. Rather, it can become the first step in an eternal journey of intimacy with God.

To speak of God as the ultimate question is to understand God, in both transcendence and immanence, as a source of invitation to encounter. Just as questions hold one’s imagination captive and create a bond of intimacy through curiosity, God becomes the source of a curiosity that holds our imaginations captive. In this way, encounter becomes primary rather than answers. In other words, God is not a ready-made solution to our problems that closes our questions; God draws us into an encounter within which we discern how to live faithfully. Again, God is the primordial source of an invitation to encounter—an invitation that unfolds in salvation history and to which we must respond at every epoch of that history. Through this unending encounter, we enter more deeply into the world that God mediates—the mystical life itself. Through this encounter, we also discover our own questions, which help us navigate the world. Stated succinctly, God, as a question, mirrors our world back to us so that we can make the necessary connections in our lives and decide what meaning to give our experiences. Does this mean that God is aloof from our experiences? The answer is no. The intimacy that God has with us as the ultimate question provides the ground upon which we reflect on the unfolding of our lives and make the right choices to maintain our covenantal bond of intimacy with God. This approach preserves our moral agency before God. Jesus Christ, as the self-revelation of God, may also be understood allegorically as God’s question in the world. In this capacity, God poses a question that draws us to encounter God in the concreteness of history. Jesus Christ poses God’s question to us through the moral demand to love our neighbors, care for the sick and comfort the oppressed. Consequently, in living out our Christian vocations, we must ask the questions of discipleship: How am I to love my neighbor as Christ did? How am I to be an agent of justice in the world? How am I to be an agent of God’s life in the world?

As I noted earlier, Rahner was right to ground the human person in the domain of transcendence—going beyond oneself. Questions allow us to go beyond ourselves. We ask questions that sometimes open a world beyond us. As questioning beings, we embody a transcendence that links us to God, who is transcendence itself. As creatures made in God’s image, we are questions that create a ritual of encounter for one another through our concrete interactions. Just as God, the ultimate question, defies the temptation to be known exhaustively, we, as questions, embody an a-cognitive transcendence—the refusal to be given finality through the bias of cognition. If we understand one another as beings who transcend definitive cognition and who serve as invitational bridges of encounter, the exploitative social tools we tend to produce and deploy to control and manipulate one another will become unnecessary.

The crises plaguing our world can be said to originate from the false claims to answers that we make about one another. Nations insist on defining other nations according to their own categories of manipulation. In our interpersonal interactions, we insist on knowing others as though they were objects to be studied and expected to provide answers to the questions we project onto them. In all this, we fail to learn how to encounter one another truly. What if we began to move away from answers and embrace questions not as tools of knowing but as bridges that mediate encounters? What if we understood that the other, who is a question, embodies transcendence just as God, the ultimate question, embodies ultimate transcendence? If we embraced this approach, perhaps we would begin to appreciate how questions can become pathways for seeing anew the beauty inherent in each of us and in creation itself.

I am also compelled to ask: How would the Church understand its mission in the world if it oriented itself away from providing answers and became more intentional about articulating God as a question for the world and the Church, while also presenting the human condition as a question that creates intimacy with God?

If the Church is to be the face of God in the world, then it must be the pragmatic articulation of God as the question that evokes intimacy between God and creation. In this role, it reflects in every epoch on how God, as the ultimate question, is to be posed in ways that create new expressions of the intimacy mediated by questions. In this case, the intimacy residing in God as the ultimate question must be posed to humanity at every turn of salvation history.

It is not entirely comforting to think of God and ourselves as questions. In the face of crises, we want meaning or answers that help us understand what has happened to us. For example, many families in Venezuela are mourning loved ones killed by the two powerful earthquakes that struck the country on June 24, 2026. As creatures conditioned to seek and provide answers, we may slip into what I prefer to call toxic theology, which speaks of such suffering as the will of God or describes God as having new members among the community of saints. Toxic theology can portray the disaster itself as God’s will or employ consoling formulas so quickly that they silence grief. Christian hope should accompany lament, not explain it away.

By understanding God as the ultimate question and ourselves as questions, the Church’s role in the face of such suffering is to embrace a ministry of presence with those who suffer. Rather than provide answers, the Church bears witness by acknowledging the vulnerability of not knowing why evil happens while insisting on being present to those who mourn and grieve. By grieving with those who mourn, the Church becomes a question that creates intimacy with others, just as a question creates intimacy with those who encounter it.

In conclusion, Emmanuel Levinas can offer us a way of encountering God and one another as questions that create intimacy. As he notes, the face of the other is a moral summons that holds us captive. For the face to be a moral summons, it can only be perceived as a question that holds us captive. The faces of the houseless person, the victims of war, the migrant without legal rights and the sick neighbor are questions that evoke moral responsibility because they awaken our moral consciousness and call us to become authentically the other’s neighbor, just as the Good Samaritan became a neighbor to the victim by the roadside (Luke 10:25–37). By conceiving God as the ultimate question that invites us into an intimate connection, Christian mysticism can once again radically define the Christian life. Rather than hold firmly to our claims to truth, this new orientation can help us become more comfortable with the mystery of God that disrupts our familiar categories of knowing. The Church can also expand her mission in the world through a radical ministry of presence without an arid turn to proselytizing. Such a Church will be better equipped to proclaim a hope that endures without silencing grief.