Craving Answers, Craving God

In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith - the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin - the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fund...

Every human belief or opinion is based upon a presupposition - a faith commitment that cannot be proven but can only be assumed. For instance, the difference between Christianity and atheism is not the difference between “faith” and “reason”, between opinion and fact, between superstition and rationality; instead, both positions are based on unprovable, faith-based assumptions - presuppositions. C...

Some Christians have held that cremation is not permitted by the Bible, on the grounds that bodies buried intact, or “sleeping”, are a concrete anticipation of the resurrection of the dead on the last day. But the Bible never expressly forbids cremation, and in at least one place cremation is approvingly performed (1 Samuel 31:11-13). The key issue is the question of what the resurrection from the...

Virtue, in the ancient world, was the word for moral and physical excellence. Those who were brave, those who were honest, those who accomplished great things, were excellent, therefore virtuous. The Bible, too, picks up on this ancient idea and calls humans to pursue virtue. But the Bible, unlike the Stoics and other ancient philosophies, holds that virtue is something that is only located in God...

When Jesus was falsely accused of sedition and blasphemy, Pontius Pilate asked him a question which has persistently confounded every thinker before and since: “What is truth?” Pinning down truth so that everyone can have access to reality has been notoriously difficult. One option is to hold that humans can figure out the truth based upon their own observations and experiences - but the human pro...

The cultural trope of the twenty-something guy living in his parents basement, not working, not exercising, and playing hours of video games, is perhaps a caricature, but it touches on a reality that is all too common today: the disillusioned and lonely young man. Individualism has taught all of us that community responsibility and living life in relationship is unimportant, and guys who have boug...

Sometimes churches close for demographic reasons: a small, rural community whose citizens are moving away will perhaps struggle to keep its churches open. But the primary reason why once healthy churches shrink and die is that they stop recognizing their foundation, Jesus Christ. The liberal way of ignoring the foundation is to ignore his teachings, his strong Jewish commitment to the way God’s La...

If God is indeed infinite, like the Bible says, then it’s clear we can never completely comprehend what this means. After all, if the finite (we humans) could comprehend the infinite it would no longer be infinite. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand who God is. Like any other intellectual pursuit (learning new technology, a new language, a new musical instrument, etc.), reaching...

Christians often talk about serving the Lord. And while it’s true that the Bible calls his people to serve him with all their hearts, it’s a mistake to think that what this means is that God needs us to meet his needs. So, in what sense is it appropriate to talk about us serving God? First, since God is God and we are not, he is in charge and we’re not. As such, he is our master and we are his ser...

Music has a power which logic and rationality do not - the power to tap into the human emotional experience. This experience is no less spiritual than understanding and reflecting on the truth of the gospel intellectually, merely different. Music evokes memories that mere words cannot, connecting us to our experience of God in worship from the past. Music taps into our creativity, allowing us not...

What makes the books of the Bible sacred scripture is that they were written by prophets (Old Testament) or apostles (New Testament). The books of the New Testament bear witness to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, either as a first-hand account of his life, death, and resurrection (we call these the four Gospels) or by reflecting on and applying this Gospel to the life of the Christian communiti...

After a discussion about how it’s impossible to prove things like whether spirits exist or not, Chuck and Aaron talk about how the Bible describes the spiritual world. The existence of angels - powerful, supernatural beings whose job it is to serve God - is assumed by the Bible, and there are times when angels interact with humans. Most of us have never had an experience of an angel, but the Bible...

For Christians, the question of how we can be saved has too often been framed as a future question: how can I know I’m going to heaven when I die? But the Bible just doesn’t talk enough about going to heaven when we die for us to justify making that the baseline of our assurance of salvation. Instead, the Bible talks about our assurance in terms of what God has done in the past and is now doing in...

For the past three hundred years it has seemed obvious to many modern Westerners that cataclysmic, global floods are impossible, and so the biblical story of the great flood has been seen as a legendary myth highlighting the vindictive judgment of the Bible’s angry God. But this assumption fails to acknowledge the existence of great flood narratives spread throughout the ancient world - from the C...

The question of whether Christians should go to church or not can only be answered by answering the question, are Christians the church or not. Once again, Western-style individualism blocks us from even understanding the nature of the problem. The Bible insists that our highest value comes not from our individuality but from how our individuality flourishes in community. By ourselves we have no w...

Legalism is the belief that humans flourish best when they have order, structure, and rules to guide them. The opposite philosophy is liberty - the belief that humans need freedom from restrictions to flourish. Christianity, while definitely promising freedom from the burden of sin while also providing order and rules for living, definitely holds that humans flourish best when in relationship, esp...

Is Christianity merely a crutch for those who believe - a sort of whistling-in-the-graveyard, a head game naive and superstitious people play to avoid the hard reality of materialistic realism? The rise of the psychological sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries might lead us to think so. But what psychology does well - describe the human mind, human emotions, human behavior, and human...

Stoicism, which flourished in Greece around 250 years on either side of Christ’s birth, taught that the highest good for humans is to be ultimately happy. This happiness, though, is far different from our culture’s notion that happiness is equal to personal pleasure; instead, Stoicism held, true ultimate happiness can be experienced only through the practice of virtue - especially the virtues of c...

While the Bible insists that those who deny the reality of God are fools, this in no way means such skeptics are unintelligent. The biblical idea of “fool” and “foolishness” has less to do with brain power and more to do with an unwillingness to conform to reality: it’s foolish to not go to the doctor when you have cancer because it doesn’t align behavior with the real-life situation. Many smart p...

Islam and Christianity share a lot in common: they’re both Abrahamic religions - tracing their heritage back to God’s call of Abraham and the promises God made to his offspring, they both insist that polytheism is wrong and that there’s only one true God, they both hold that this one true God is holy and cannot tolerate sinful behavior. But the main thing they disagree about is the Muslim insisten...

When it comes to current events Christians too frequently fall into one of the twin ditches of either allowing themselves to become spokespeople for one of the approved cultural positions (usually either “conservative” or “liberal”) or withdrawing from the world in the name of “separation of church and state”. The key is understanding that the Gospel of Jesus’ kingdom stands over against all human...

The content of movies has changed dramatically in the last 100 years. What once was considered offensive and even pornographic is now commonplace. The false dichotomy of either mindlessly enjoying all contemporary media or withdrawing from and rejecting it undermines the Christian’s vocation to both be separate from the idolatrous values of the world and simultaneously live redemptively in and for...

Our first impulse when someone we know and love goes through a season of suffering tends to be either to try to assert ourselves too much - by talking too much, using trite cliches, or by trying to cheer our friend up by distracting them, or by avoiding them altogether - frequently by rationalizing to ourselves that our friend probably needs some alone time. But both these paths fail to show genui...

The two most common notions in the West of what makes a man masculine are, on one hand, a physically strong, domineering man who leads through sheer force of physicality or personality and, on the other hand, a sweet, sensitive man who refuses to assert himself. Both of these visions, while acknowledging some important aspects of what men should be, have resulted in the fostering of a self-absorbe...

The Western Liberalism of John Locke, Rousseau, and the founding fathers of America, promised to set us free from the tyranny of kings and priests. That the God of the Christian Bible would be a casualty in this great purge seemed to many to be a necessary step on this path to liberation. But far from making us happy and free, sociologists, counselors, and therapists (not to mention the billion do...