Craving Answers, Craving God

The separation of church and state is taken for granted in the current West, but this sort of division between a person’s religious beliefs and his or her public persona finds no place in the biblical worldview. So how are Christians supposed to think about their relationship with their country? The key is to recognize the difference between one’s identity and one’s vocation. The Christian’s ident...

One mistaken notion about Christianity is that its primary goal is to foster good ethical behavior. But the biblical reality is that Christianity is fundamentally God’s plan to rescue his humans and creation as a free act of grace. This grace is both necessary (since we humans have rebelled against God we have rendered ourselves unable to do anything to make ourselves right) and loving (God is com...

When Christians talk about the spiritual gifts, they frequently get hung up discussing the so-called charismatic gifts - healing, speaking in tongues, prophecy, etc., but this unfortunately short-circuits the very important discussion about what the spiritual gifts actually are, and (maybe more importantly) what they do. Chuck and Aaron have just this discussion. The spiritual gifts are different...

Dating, since it is a fairly new phenomenon in how humans relate to each other, is not mentioned in the Bible. But the Bible has much to say about romantic relationships, and how we should look for a future spouse. First, the Bible highly values the marriage relationship, so any effort put into finding a spouse is worthwhile. But second, it must be recognized that our current system (in the West a...

In a culture obsessed with individual rights and personal autonomy, parenting and raising kids remains - mostly - a relationship recognized as being valuable to the extent that it is self-sacrificial. What is it about our relationship with our own children that glorifies and valorizes the type of love that gives and expects nothing in return? Chuck and Aaron talk about how the relationship between...

Why is marriage so important? The Bible describes God not as one powerful being, but as three persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - who have always known and loved each other with complete commitment. And when they decided to create human beings in their image, they decided to create a married man and woman so the humans could experience in their lives together what the Trinity has...

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,...