Kirjahaku

Inheritor of a magical stone, Christopher finds only the philosophical frustration of owning a glorious power that is impotent in the face of sorrow and suffering. To find answers to his questions, he journeys to the Mountain of God, meeting along the way friendship and wisdom, enemies and death. Companions offer their own answers -- from the mystical to the nihilistic -- and in the end the "answer" of God may not be the kind of answer Christopher wants.

Two (fictional) philosophy professors exchange emails about God, developing arguments that suggest both belief in the greatness and majesty of the Creator and an outraged dissatisfaction with God's distance from the suffering of the world. The result is misotheism, the hatred of God, and, perhaps strangely, a kind of Christianity.

The Christian Epic is an effort to tell the story of Christian belief as theological poetry, from the glory of the eternal, Triune God through creation, fall and redemption, to the recreation of wholeness and glory in heaven. Attempting to combine truth and beauty, its poetry is meant to contain rigorous Christian apologetics, philosophical argument and comparative theology. It defends the Christian faith and faces challenges as diverse as Vedantic Hinduism and Nietzschean deconstruction. Yet all is written as verse, meant to inspire, to be felt as well as understood.

Is it possible to walk slowly and carefully into Christian faith? The reader of this book is invited to start where we are and to reason about who we are as human beings and what we seek in the world around us. By understanding ourselves as remarkable creatures, seekers of truth and goodness and beauty, and by understanding that there are wonderful, immeasurable values in life, we can begin to consider our relation to ourselves, our world, and God. Honest thought then moves us to consider the struggles of those relationships and, ultimately, the possibility of Jesus as both historical person and divine gift.

A series of dialogues in which "Christian" examines the strengths and weakness of a series of alternative worldviews, from Pluralism and Materialism to Buddhism and Islam. Further dialogues allow the imagined interlocutors to question the Christian understanding of scripture, church, and Christ. Ultimately the book is a defense of the possibility of an honest Christian faith when compared to the alternatives.