Theology cannot spill over into history. This is the charge of New Testament critics and ancient historians who are convinced that the person who confronts us in the canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) is a fictional figment of the Church’s theological imagination. Few would go as far as the mythicist route of denying […]

Anyone who reads the Old Testament with 21st century Australian eyes will be confronted with a world completely alien to their own. The people, cultures, geographies, politics and religious practices of the Ancient Near East breed confusion for the modern reader. Perhaps most difficult to make sense of, however, is the deity who stands behind many […]

THE ARMCHAIR: A Wounded Traveller Visits a Christian Philosopher Moving to the second leg of my journey, suppose this wounded traveller is ready to ask some tough questions of the Christian faith. I’m disillusioned with the alternative answers I’ve explored. And yet, being an educated person, I know too well that suffering doesn’t just provoke […]

Much ink has been spilled in recent decades expressing the increasingly popular opinion that science has disproved God. Since Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, science has become a tool employed to develop alternative explanations to the historical Christian teaching of the origins of the universe (cosmology, physics) and the origins and […]

UNIVERSAL PROBLEM: Suffering Challenges Everyone’s View Christianity is not the only one on trial; suffering poses a challenge to every worldview. No matter who you are, you must make sense of suffering somehow. So let me begin with a question. How does what you believe explain and answer the expectations and experiences of the suffering […]

Do we really need another event? The evangelical scene is littered with conferences and events 365 days a year. Those wearied by this event culture tend to write it off as the product of a consumerist era, or as a fly-in fly-out whirlwind to stroke the ego of a speaker. They’re suspect as to whether […]

Objections abound concerning the truth and relevance of the Christian Bible. Isn’t it out-dated? Hasn’t the text been corrupted? Didn’t the church embellish the stories to suit their political/theological ends? Arising from the arenas of textual studies, history, psychology, science, metaphysics, anthropology, archaeology, ethics, or philosophy, myriad arguments are launched against the Christian claim that the […]

Here’s my story: I became a Christian through reading the Bible. After starting in the first pages of Genesis and laboriously trudging through a book that raised more questions than it answered, I eventually was captivated by the towering figure of Jesus of Nazareth in the four gospels. Coming to trust the credibility of Jesus’ […]

For the past two weeks I’ve explored whether the history and philosophy of science are at war with belief in God. The final bastion in which the conflict hypothesis has taken shelter is admittedly the most formidable for the Christian—the results of science. ATHEISM 2.0: The God Hypothesis is Unnecessary Before the dawn of modern […]

THE JOURNEY: Encountering Suffering At only 9 years of age my life was thrown into chaos. Growing up in the West you’re inculcated with a sense of immortality. We eschew pain and pursue pleasure at all costs. That is, until, this naïve perspective is devastated by a painful collision with reality. Here’s a thumbnail of […]

Christians cannot ignore the ethical challenges posed to us by culture. At this moment in the West broadly, and in Australia in particular, the question of same-sex relationships stands at the forefront of public debate. The tide of moral revision on this issue in the last generation seems to crash against the traditional Christian teaching […]

ARRIVING HOME: Jesus Finds Me It’s time for the final leg of my journey to make sense of suffering—the homecoming. If other worldviews can’t answer suffering meaningfully, and if our expectations and experience of suffering don’t disprove but rather point towards God’s existence, can a wounded traveller have faith in a loving God? Imagine this […]

“Christians over the centuries have dug such deep wells theologically, philosophically, and pastorally than I could ever hope to exhaust in speaking to suffering. What I do hope is that by offering you a taste of these wells, you may be awakened to something of the healing and hope that can be found in the cross […]

Belief is fundamental to being human. We cannot function without holding basic beliefs like the belief that I’m currently writing this blog and not plugged into the matrix. Moving from mere function to framework, however, our core identity is shaped by a deeper set of beliefs concerning our origins, meaning, morality, and destiny. Who you […]