Craving Answers, Craving God

It’s true that different people find different particular things beautiful, ugly, or plain. This seems to validate the notion that beauty is subjective, that there is no accounting for taste, as the saying goes. But everyone agrees that eating really delicious food can be an experience of beauty, as is falling in love or seeing a wonderful site of nature. Perhaps there are standards of beauty that...

Jesus, quoting Moses, says that the greatest good for a human is to love God with all our being and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. This at least implies that self-love is good and healthy, but it places healthy self-love in the context of relationship. We love ourselves truly when we find who we are in the context of our personal connection with God and others. Paul explains self-love...

In spite of our culture’s current skepticism about knowledge, people nevertheless are desperate to know what’s real and true. How is this possible? How can we find a model of knowing that doesn’t artificially divide “faith” and “knowledge”? How can we avoid the postmodern trap of confusing power for knowledge? In order to know things, we have to give up the Enlightenment error of connecting knowle...

Anger is not inherently good or bad, but is right or wrong depending on its motive and its object. Righteous anger, in fact, is necessary for a healthy humanity - to be confronted by gross injustice and not be angry would be inappropriate and (perhaps even) evil. But nevertheless, it’s clear that anger can sometimes be incredibly damaging. What is the difference between righteous anger and damagin...

Hinduism, as an eastern religion, emphasizes the ultimate spiritual reality of humans and nature. Contemplating this truth can provide a welcome corrective to American Christians who tend - along with the rest of our culture - to value and emphasize the material world at the expense of the spiritual. Hinduism, though, ultimately lacks a grounding in the physical world since it denies that the mate...

Depression, far from being a purely physical or purely psychological or spiritual problem, affects every part of the person who is experiencing it. Physical remedies - everything from eating right and becoming more active to perhaps taking doctor-prescribed medicine to break out of a damaging cycle - should be a part of anyone’s grappling with chronic emptiness or sadness. But since humans were cr...

Skeptics claim that there are contradictions between the texts of the four Christian gospels. But on closer inspection, what are frequently called contradictions are better understood - not as errors - but as differing perspectives on the same events. The resurrection narratives are perhaps the most notable example: four separate accounts of the same event that differ in details - the sort of deta...

One of the defining features of our current postmodern world is an increase in selfishness, a rise that has resulted from the lack of a controlling belief system. With nothing larger than oneself to believe in, our natural tendency will be to act, think, and speak in ways that serve ourselves. The Bible describes this desire as the primal problem of the human situation - the centering of ourselves...

The key to understanding the Bible is recognizing the genre: it’s not primarily a book of rules, it’s not primarily a book of inspiration, it’s not even primarily a book of religious belief - it’s primarily a story, narrative. And the Bible claims to be the story of everything, the story of how God created a beautiful world which humans messed up and which he is redeeming back to himself. Another...

There are roughly two parts to Christian fundamentalism: a commitment to the fundamental truths of the Bible, and a strong impulse to separate from the surrounding culture. Aaron and Chuck talk about what’s biblical and what’s unbiblical with this definition of Christianity, and discuss Aaron’s background in a particular version of American Christian fundamentalism. The difference between biblical...

Just about everyone agrees that evil exists, but why it exists causes much disagreement. According to the Bible, the evil things that happen in our universe - things like genocide and wars - cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms; after all, if the universe is nothing more than matter, than what humans call evil - including genocide and wars! - are just natural events that can be explai...

The heart of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths: the reality of suffering, the reality of desire, the goal of nirvana, and the solution of the eight-fold path. In the case of suffering and desire, Buddhism and Christianity agree that all of life is broken, and at the heart of that brokenness is human desire. But they disagree in two important areas: first, the Buddhist goal of nirvana is an imperso...

One of our most basic assumptions in the West is that each person should be allowed to judge for themselves what’s right and wrong. This, along with the companion belief that God - if he does exist - does not interact with our world means that anything that happens, even those things we know are evil, are just random events without any sort of correspondence to good and evil. But if God is real, a...

The Bible claims that there is one creator God, Yahweh, who made everything that exists. Some people wonder then if there was someone or something that made God. But the uncreatedness of God is, in fact, one of the most basic ways to understand what or who God is, since if there is someone who made God that person would by definition be the creator of everything and therefore, God. Chuck and Aaron...

One of the most common misunderstandings about the Bible is that it can’t be trusted because it’s been translated so often. The English versions one can buy in any bookstore or online are not translations of translations, but are translations from the oldest manuscripts of the original biblical languages, Greek and Hebrew. Some question whether we can really know anything about Jesus since the gos...

If God wanted people to believe in him, it seems like it would be wise on his part to show himself to everyone. But everyone agrees that knowledge of God, if he exists, hasn’t happened in that sort of way. But while God doesn’t typically appear to people in visions or dramatic circumstantial experiences, the Bible insists a couple things: first, the reason he doesn’t is because it’s not safe for w...

When the Bible says that no one is good, it’s comparing fallen humans to the greatness, power, and moral purity of God. This doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as a good human - when we compare ourselves to other humans it’s hard to escape that some of us are well-behaved and some of us are scoundrels. The trick in defining human goodness is to not confuse these two relative categories: comp...

Christmas is unavoidable. Politicians utilize it to create a good vibe of accessibility and gentleness around themselves; the entertainment industry uses it to churn out cheap movies and even cheaper music, gobbled up by millions of consumers every year; and of course the commercial interests have nearly successfully turned Christmas into an essential end-of-year financial harvest. But because the...

Happiness is vitally important to the human experience, but in spite of our culture’s conviction of the primacy of happiness, and in spite of our culture’s current ability to easily acquire those items and experiences we all are convinced have the ability to make us happy, we now find ourselves in the position of being profoundly and chronically unhappy. The problem, from the Christian viewpoint,...

The modern west holds that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that this enlightenment principle of human liberty is “self-evident.” But this deistic idea of God-created principles of freedom which are available to humans without revelation from God (“self-evident”) is founded on the misguided belief that humans are equipped and desire...

We all know people who are good people, and we all know people who are bad people. But does the human race as a whole tend to be one or the other? While the tendency, in our Instagram culture, is to see people as either good guys or bad guys, Christianity insists that humans are both beautiful and good because we’re made to look like God, but we’re also broken and evil as a result of our collectiv...

If God is God then his human creatures shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t completely comprehensible. So when the Bible says that he is sovereign and does whatever he wants but also that he genuinely engages his people in conversation in prayer and adjusts what he does based on their requests, the argument that this is necessarily a contradiction because we can’t understand how it works is illegi...

The Bible describes God as a God of love, but also frequently describes him angrily judging sins. For many people, Christians as well as non-Christians, these descriptions are very disturbing. If God is a God of love we don’t like to think about him getting angry. But if we reflect on our own relational experiences we know this is not possible. God gets angry precisely because he is a God of love,...

In the Bible Christians are told to not love the world, but we’re also told to bear God’s image, and God describes himself as loving the world. This makes sense if we understand what St. Augustine meant by not loving anything or anyone out of order; in other words, loving what we should love in the right order: God first, our fellow image-bearers next, and his good creation third. So Christians sh...

Christians agree that God created the whole universe, but what does this mean for how humans are to rule over or take care of his environment? The Bible says that God created humans to be his representative on earth, which means we are to take care of the world like he does, with care and love and stewardship, not manipulation and selfishness. So Christians, of all people, should be leading the wa...