Tough Questions

We are nearing the end of the Sabbath series at the church I serve. This has been a fantastic very practical series and the dialogue, growth and stories that have emerged as a result only reinforce its value. So now we move into a series on evangelism called "Good News." Much of the prep work for this series has come out of the book "True Story: A Christianity Worth Believing in" by James Chung.read more here about the book In a nutshell, the book lays out a new paradigm for explaining the Gospel message in a far more accurate and robust way...In fact this issue and how (and what and why) we as believers share our faith is profoundly important. Here in fact is a great Scot Mcknight (Covenant theologian) article loosely addressing the same issues. right here

So this brings me two my thoughts the last few weeks. As a believer I seek to share this good news and the whole message of God with the world. I do this because I am called to be God's hands and feet and to love God and love others. (seems pretty simple so far, right?) But what about when those big worldview questions that will and do inevitability come up when I am sharing this good news with people? For Instance how do I address this: The Problem of Evil, Why would a good all powerful God allow pain and suffering and evil? How can the Bible be even close to accurate? And this is but a sampling of these types of great questions.

As a believer in Jesus, it is of paramount importance that I a) understand these questions and b) have studied the scriptures and live in the world in enough to realize that these questions are important! That these questions are for some individuals what keep them from being able to follow Jesus. I believe I (we) must be able to have intelligible dialogue and responses to these questions. We don't even necessarily have to be able to completely exhaustively answer them, (what then is the purpose of faith?) But we cannot use faith as a rationale for mediocrity in knowledge and growth.

Perhaps the most ironic thing is this, I do not hope to (nor would l or any of you be able to) answer these questions fully. I would suspect that most individuals would agree we don't have all of these big questions figured out completely. These questions are too big for me. These tough, big, complex questions have had thousands of individuals try and figure them out. They have been written on and discussed for centuries by individuals of every faith (secular humanists too). So why talk about these?

The purpose of these posts will be to reflect on, and offer incite on these big questions. I hope to offer resources for further study. I hope to have great blogger dialogue so we can learn from each other. I hope these posts to be resources and to help posit that Christianity has valid and respectable answers but also still needs to ask questions. Below are a few topics I am thinking about reflecting on. Each one of these topics I have personally read on, reflected on taken numerous classes on and in general interacted with an extreme amount. These actually are questions that when sharing the good news with people I have actually encountered...(in order of which I get asked the most and probably are the hottest topics)

-The Problem of evil and suffering, How can there be a God that is all powerful if all this junk and evil exists?
-Who is Jesus? (Divine? actually existed? resurrection? miracles?)
-Science and Religion (how do those two work together?)
-Whats with the bible? Is it accurate?
-What about other religions?
-What happens when we die? (afterlife)

(This by no means is an exhaustive list but is more then enough to think about)

Again, these are big questions that any world view has to wrestle with. As a Christian I believe I am called as Anselm reminds us be about "faith seeking understanding". Simply put, often we need to know what the good news is before we can be a vessel to give it to someone. In a respectful manner I invite your thoughts and feedback within the next few weeks....