What Was the Question?

This essay on Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History is just too obscure. I'm moving on to the next one, called The Gospel and Culture, in which Voegelin discusses one of our perennial concerns, which is

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

It seems I already wrote a number of posts on this very essay, so let's find out if any of it still makes sense.

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Voegelin takes a "scientific" approach to revelation, seeing it as a long historical process of successive insights into the ground of being: thus, "in the end,"

the Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long "historical drama of revelation."

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Now, if we are still trying to make sense of the Word in our historical time and cultural context, this is no different from what the early fathers did; and furthermore, if they hadn't -- if 

the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history. 

At the time of the early church, "the culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

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If Christ is the answer, what is the question?

Voegelin cites the Dutch Catechism, which "begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist?"

We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence (Dutch Catechism).

Now, there is a kind of answer that is technically correct but existentially wrong, or at least incomplete. It is the difference between, say, knowing how to swim and actually diving into the water and doing so; the former is abstract and secondary, the latter embodied and primary.

Except this relation can often be reversed, such that one begins living in the abstract theory, so everything one sees is conditioned by it. Such a one has all the answers but has forgotten the Question. 

In this way, the Answer becomes a kind of existential defense mechanism -- a matrix or second reality superimposed on the first. (Which is reminiscent of how ideologies are lodged in the LH, to such an extent that they can eclipse RH contact with reality.)

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One of Voegelin's main themes is how we deploy symbolism in order to capture and convey a more primary experience. Again, whatever the field or discipline, this relation can be reversed, such that the dogma displaces the experience:

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man (Voegelin).

Harsh, but we all know the type. This process occurs when

the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as "non-Christian attitude." 

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The very "life of reason" is 

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer... 

Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however..., can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... 

The answer will not help the man who has lost the question, and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer...

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Back to the present, I suppose we need to recover the question to which Christ is still the answer.  

Seems to me that the Question of questions is always the same -- pardon my French, but it is a startled  WTF?! in the wake of the raw experience of being. And many layers of superficial, ideological, conventional, and defensive answers must be peeled away before we get down to the experience of this Question.

An extreme question calls for an extreme answer? 

"Existence," says Voegelin, "is not a fact." Rather, "if anything," it

is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.

Only "in this In-Between of darkness and light arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life."

So, where does this leave us? I don't know, but it calls to mind the alcoholic who must hit bottom before putting his faith in a greater power that can restore him to sanity. Come to think of it, there's an aphorism for that:

We should not believe in the theologian's God except when He resembles the God Who is called on in distress.