The God I Don't Understand

This book releases in January - media and bloggers may email me for a review copy at ajennings@tbbmedia.com.

“Why does God do that?”
Fascinating new book reveals how to find an empowering, sustaining faith in an overwhelming fog of tough times and troubling, unanswerable questions


Why is there evil and suffering in creation? Can someone explain what the Cross really means and how what happened there saves me? What are we supposed to believe about the so-called end of the world?

There are few who can truthfully say they have never had questions about things God has done and said. Even the most beloved and devoted theological scholars and believers throughout the ages have had questions for which they’ve never found satisfying, understandable answers.

So how can you have joyful, fulfilling faith where you find no answers to these and other of life’s most puzzling questions?

Dr. Chris Wright’s revealing new book, The God I Don’t Understand (Zondervan, January 2009), tackles those questions and more. Dr. Wright is the international director of the Langham Partnership International, a consortium of trusts founded by John Stott which combines three ministries: Langham Scholars, Langham Literature, and Langham Preaching. John Stott Ministries is the member body of LPI in the United States.

With the kind of passion for which Dr. Wright has become well known, he opens his heart to non-believers, believers, and those who work in all kinds of ministry with an immediately engaging, less academic, more approachable style than many theologians. The questions on his heart are the questions on ours; his search for answers is our search as well.

In The God I Don’t Understand, Dr. Wright confronts head-on issues including:

-The mystery, offence, and defeat of evil
-The destruction of the Canaanites and why it is such a stumbling block for Christians
-The embarrassment some Christians feel about the “God of the Old Testament”
-The incomprehensibility of the Cross, the misleading ways some Christians speak of it, and what it means to set the Cross in the light of the whole biblical story—including the OT
-Why “the end of the world” is a very inadequate phrase for what the Bible teaches
-What the new creation will be like and what the future holds for believers

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland to missionary parents, the Cambridge University educated Wright has authored many books, including Old Testament Ethics for the People of God, Knowing Jesus through the Old Testament, Salvation Belongs to Our God, The Mission of God, and commentaries on Deuteronomy and Ezekiel. Dr. Wright also serves as chair of the Lausanne Committee’s Theology Working Group and as chair of the Theological Resource Panel of TEAR Fund, a leading Christian relief and development charity.

Each page offers a new, encouraging discovery as he examines every facet and nuance of some of the most puzzling questions in the Christian faith and shares with readers how to find and maintain a joyful, soul-calming faith even when no definitive answers can be found.

The God I Don’t Understand by Dr. Christopher J. H. Wright
Zondervan/January 2009
ISBN: 978-0-310-27546-6/224 pages/Hardcover/$19.99
http://www.zondervan.com/

Comments

Paul D. Adams said…
I find Wright's book outstanding. It gives me biblical permission to honestly struggle intellectually and emotionally over suffering while offering hope on every page.