Asking the Wrong Question

The concept of "Asking the Wrong Question" names a structural error shared by ostensibly opposed parties in a debate—specifically, the error of accepting a common, unexamined premise about the nature of the thing under dispute before any argument has properly begun. In the source passage (rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete, p.106), Rollins identifies this error in the so-called New Atheism vs. religious apologetics debate: both Dawkins-style secularists and Christian defenders tacitly agree that Christian truth-claims are empirical or rational assertions about the furniture of the world, adjudicable by the same criteria used to evaluate claims in natural science or philosophy of religion. The "wrong question" is therefore: "Is Christianity's account of reality empirically/rationally warranted?" This question is wrong not because it is badly formed in its own terms, but because it already presupposes a conception of truth—propositional, correspondence-based, world-asserting—that may be entirely foreign to what Christianity's truth-claims actually are. The prior and more fundamental question that must be asked first is: what kind of truth does Christianity claim to bear?

This move is structurally analogous to a transcendental critique: before adjudicating first-order disputes about the content of claims, one must interrogate the conditions of possibility—the type of truth—that makes such adjudication legitimate at all. Failing to do so means both sides in the debate are engaged in a category error, mistaking the mode of truth (e.g., a truth of enunciation, or a performative/existential disclosure) for the mode of assertion (propositional correspondence to states of affairs). The concept thus functions as a diagnostic for ideological complicity between apparent adversaries: the two sides fight vigorously over the answer while jointly foreclosing the question that would destabilize the entire frame.

Within rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete, "Asking the Wrong Question" serves as a hinge concept for Rollins's broader theological project: by exposing the shared epistemological premise of the secularist-apologist debate, he clears space to argue for a mode of Christian truth that is not reducible to propositional assertion. The concept is directly entangled with all three cross-referenced canonicals. With respect to Truth, it implicitly deploys the Lacanian distinction between statement and enunciation: both combatants in the debate operate at the level of the statement (is this assertion correct?), while Rollins gestures toward a dimension of truth that precedes and exceeds propositional form—truth as structural, as something closer to Lacan's "half-said," belonging to enunciation rather than predication. The "wrong question" is precisely the question that stays at the level of statement-truth and never reaches this deeper register.

With respect to Judgment and Reason, the concept performs a meta-critical operation. The Kantian framework of Judgment (as analyzed in the corpus) distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate extensions of a given cognitive faculty; "Asking the Wrong Question" identifies an analogous illegitimate extension—applying criteria of empirical or rational adjudication to a domain where those criteria have no proper purchase. This resonates with the Kantian move of asking "how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?" before engaging first-order claims, and with Reason's tendency (in both its Kantian and Hegelian registers) to generate apparent antinomies by failing to examine its own foundational commitments. The concept is best read as an extension and application of these canonical operations: it specifies, in a concrete discursive context, what it looks like when both Reason and Judgment are misdirected by an unexamined premise about the nature of truth.

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond BeliefPeter Rollins · 2008 (p.106)

the most fascinating aspect of this debate...concerns the fact that, at a very basic level, both sides implicitly affirm the idea that the truth claims of Christianity take the form of assertions about reality

The theoretical load of the quote lies in the phrase "implicitly affirm"—it identifies not a conscious shared thesis but an unconscious structural complicity, a common premise that operates below the level of explicit argument. The further specification that truth-claims "take the form of assertions about reality" names precisely the correspondence-propositional model of truth that the concept challenges, making the quote both a diagnosis of the error and a pointer toward the alternative mode of truth the author wants to open up.