Ask John is your opportunity to hear someone address the most crucial questions you have in mind. Prof. John Stackhouse is happy to provide honest, thoughtful answers to issues important to your life and spiritual journey. So take advantage of this open field and fire on!  Present your question below, and we will seek to provide a response.

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Q: I’ve been thinking lately about what I really want to do with my life, but I only have 5 minutes to spare right now. What would you say are the most crucial things when considering one’s calling in life?

A: Short answer: Don’t decide about the rest of your life if you have only five minutes. Just take the five minutes to decide when and where—and perhaps with whom—you’ll deliberate over such a crucial question.

Middle-sized answer: Christians have a sweet arrangement with the Supreme Being. It goes like this: God creates us to be people whose lives will count for something worthwhile. God then calls us to be reconciled to him, and we come to him in repentance and faith. We give our lives to God, promising to obey God’s direction to us in every particular, as well as we can. In turn, God goes before us, opening or closing doors so that we proceed on a path of optimal usefulness in his great mission of saving the world. We finally die, mission completed, and go on to the next life of blessing, happiness, and new, good work to do.

This very nice arrangement doesn’t mean, of course, that God guarantees that life will be easy and happy. Quite the contrary: that Cross that Christians put on top of their churches on the outside and at the front of their churches on the inside symbolizes the cost of following a Crucified Saviour. God’s calling on Jesus’s life meant deprivation, desertion, torture, and death.

But that vocation was also “Saviour of the world.” And as we take up our particular crosses and follow Jesus, we help save the world, too, each in our small, but significant, way. We might help heal people’s sick or injured bodies. We might help inform people’s minds. We might provide necessities of life. We might provide entertainments or comforts, instead. God loves the whole world, so he recruits and deploys Christians throughout the whole world to bless the whole world and bring the whole world back into alignment with him and his good purposes.

The generic human calling, then—the one that God gives all human beings from the time of our creation in Genesis 1—is to “make shalom”: to take the world as God gives it to us and then, as those who resemble (or “image”) God, to creatively care for it. The perpetual human vocation is to encounter a situation and make it better—and as much better as we can.

Since, alas, the world has also fallen into dysfunction and even rebellion against God and God’s good ways, God calls Christians also to our distinctive work of introducing people to Jesus Christ, the Example of properly functioning humanity and the Saviour who opens the door to our restoration to optimal function—the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6).

Each Christian person, therefore, is gifted and situated by God in accordance with both the general concern to maximize shalom and the particular Christian project of helping people become disciples of Jesus…so that they may become properly functioning human beings in the great cosmos of God. For most of us, therefore, it will take more than five minutes to assess our giftedness (and limitedness) and our situation (and the situations to which we might instead aspire) so as to cooperate with God in being as useful to him as we can be while “on our missions” for him according to his master plan.

Long answer: My last book, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World, sets out an elaboration of these themes. My next book, Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology, sets out a way to think about these themes—and everything else. Oxford University Press publishes both, and unless you’re pretty unusual, they’ll each take you more than five minutes to read. But I trust they’ll be worth the time you do take to read them!

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Q: There are lots of religions in the world. So how can a Christian presume that his religion is the only right one?

A: Short answer: A Christian shouldn’t presume that. His religion isn’t the only right one.

Slightly longer answer: If by “the only right one” a Christian is saying that everything his religion says is right and everything every other religion says is wrong, then he’s denying one of the fundamental claims of his own religion, namely, that Christianity is the fulfillment, not the negation, of the religion of Old Testament Israel. Furthermore, it’s just obvious that Christianity has a lot in common with both Judaism and Islam. And, in fact, Christianity has various teachings and practices in common with pretty much every other religion in the world: Christian missionaries have been building on those common features for centuries.

Even longer answer: First, let’s clear the ground a bit. Just because there are lots of opinions about an issue doesn’t mean that one opinion isn’t right and the others are wrong. A math teacher might receive a wide range of responses (= ”opinions”) on an exam, but she knows that only “x + 3” is the correct answer. You ask for directions in a strange town to the museum, and four locals give you four different answers, but the answers usually aren’t all equal in effectively getting you to your destination. So the mere presence of multiple opinions says nothing immediately about whether there is more than one correct answer—or even whether a correct answer is available at all.

Second, we can think of religions as maps and directions on how to best use the maps. They describe reality and tell us how best to negotiate reality. As such, religions that patently fail to describe reality accurately or to tell us how to negotiate it effectively fall out of use in favour of religions that do a better job.

We can also assume that religions that do work, at least somewhat, will make assertions about reality that overlap with assertions made on other maps. If we’re trying to walk from the western edge of Venice to the eastern, any decent map is going to include a description of the Grand Canal and of at least one of the very few bridges that cross it. So even the worst map that actually works—that anyone living in Venice will give you–will share at least some information with the best map possible.

So of course the world’s religions share various claims and practices with others. The world is what it is and living in it is done most effectively this way rather than that, so religions that approximate those realities are going to share a lot of the same claims.

Third, allowing then that more than one religion can be true in important respects doesn’t mean that all religions are equally good, nor that one religion isn’t the best of those available. If you actually had a map and a guidebook furnished by the founder, planner, builder, and ruler of the area–who also demonstrably has taken great pains to communicate with you as truthfully and helpfully as possible–then you’d be very glad to have such instructions and you would have good grounds to consider them the best available. You might even want to share them with people you care about.

That’s what Christians do when they preach the gospel. They say, “We are so thankful to have been given The Directions by The Maker. And they’re free! Come get them!”

Maybe there are better directions available elsewhere. If so, please tell us. We, like any other sensible people, want the best help we can get. But we hope you won’t be angry with us if we’re pretty enthusiastic about what we think is the best map and guidebook we’ve ever seen and we want to share it with you.

In fact, shouldn’t you be angry with us instead if we wouldn’t?

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Q. Isn’t making out a Christmas list kind of crass? Shouldn’t we be more concerned to give than to get at Christmastime?

A. I agree that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” But I also quite like to receive, don’t you? And other people who love me want to know what to get me, so I help them by composing a Christmas list. Plus it’s fun to finally just put right down there what I really, really want.

I once heard my colleague, Cambridge-trained professor of Old Testament Iain Provan, lecture on the story of Jacob. That’s not a typical Advent story, of course, but it’s interesting–which is to say, startlingly confrontational–to consider it in this context.

Dr. Provan noted that when Jacob rests one night while running from his vengeful brother Esau, God reiterates the promise he once gave to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham during Jacob’s famous dream of a ladder reaching to heaven: “The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring” (Genesis 28).

But when Jacob responds to God’s extravagant promise, he mentions nothing about gaining an entire land, or having numberless offspring, or being a blessing to the whole world. He says nothing at all on that stupendous scale.

Here’s what he says instead: “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the LORD shall be my God.”

Provan points out the shocking disjunction between what Jacob wants and what God offers. And as I listened to this story, I was suddenly struck by the embarrassing disjunction between my own paltry desires and God’s great promises.

I confess that I want the usual items on the modern middle-class list: economic security, a spacious home, a nice car, a pleasant vacation each year, career success, and a few high-quality toys. Oh, yes: and good health, and peaceful sleep, and a happy family.

But God offers the following instead: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23).

Well, now, I think, that’s very kind of God to offer me those pleasant things. But how about a Pioneer Elite 60-inch HDTV with a McIntosh home theatre surround sound audio system? That would be cool!

And God promises to transform me into the very image of his Son (Rom. 8:29).

Well, I’m happy to say thank-you to God for this lovely prospect. But then I quickly reply, When will I be able to trade in my banged-up minivan for the Maserati or Aston Martin I’d much, much prefer?

And God tells me that he has prepared a place for me in the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21).

Well, I’m willing to sing a little song of praise to God about all that, because it does sound nice . . . and then I wonder when I can finally move into that half-timber-plus-fieldstone waterfront mansion I’ve always thought would be such a good home base from which I could serve the Lord so much better. You know: the one with the private airstrip and Gulfstream.

And God gently asks if I am completely insane, utterly lacking in perspective, preferring the relatively trivial and ephemeral to the absolutely wonderful and eternal.

This time, I stop and think. And I shamefacedly acknowledge in a murmur that my aspirations are pathetically low. And I realize that my appreciation for what really counts is preposterously small. I am, it is evident, clearly deranged.

What I want so badly to get is just so much less than what God wants to give.

It’s time to make a new, different, better Christmas list, one that beautifully combines getting and giving. You know, the kind of list God would compose for us….

Q. I ask you questions because I’ve studied with you. Other people, I assume, ask you questions because they have heard you speak, or read something you’ve published, or seen you interviewed. But why do so many of us reserve our questions for such dubious, if not scandalous, “authorities”? How do so many pop religious figures–who have little in the way of credentials, whether academic, professional, moral, or experiential–get so popular? And among smart people, too, who I think ought to know better?

A. Believe me, I’ve wondered about that, too. I’ve spent most of my life trying to be as well-informed, well-spoken, and well-what-a-nice-guy as I can be, and then I find that the Reverend Herr S. See has a pop religious bestseller, while Mr. Big Teeth has a rave TV show, and Ms. Not-Too-Bright is packing them in to arenas to hear her spiritual “teaching.”

Stackhouse’s Rule of Odd Behaviour: When clearly intelligent people do clearly unintelligent things, it’s not about intelligence. And people like me who tend to over-value intelligence–indeed, who overvalue particular, restricted forms of intelligence (the kind valued in the academy instead of, say, the kind valued in entrepreneurship or in the care of small children)–can be pretty stupid about realizing how appealing other qualities can be in a spiritual advisor. Transparency, humility, honesty even about failure and regret, enthusiasm about positive possibilities and even miracles, indomitable hope, and all of it put simply, vividly, and with emotional punch–doesn’t sound much like a professor, does it? But boy, do we all pay attention to someone like that.

The problem, of course, is that answering some questions really does require expertise. You can have the world’s most honest, sweet, and convinced financial planner advising you, but if he doesn’t know a stock from a bond or an insurance policy from a retirement fund, you just have to look elsewhere, don’t you? In fact, some questions primarily require expertise, which is why certain specialists (surgeons, car mechanics, lawyers, plumbers) can have terrible affects and still do quite well in their businesses: because most of the time they are simply right.

So I find that how someone construes religious questions makes all the difference as to whom they will consult. If a religious question is a matter of basic human competency–like knowing how to break up with someone properly or knowing how to deal with a taciturn teenager or knowing how to survive deep disappointment–then we ought to look for certain basic human qualities, and forget the Ph.D.’s and the “Reverends” and the like. But if a religious question is a matter of special knowledge and skill–like knowing how to diagnose and treat a disease, or knowing how to analyze and respond to a market shift, or knowing how to find the way along an obscure path to a remote destination–then give me an expert, and I don’t care if she’s winsome or not.

What, then, are religious questions?

I think some are of the first sort, hence the testimony of religious traditions around the world that wisdom can be found in people in all walks of life. And some are of the second, hence the testimony of religious traditions around the world that wisdom on these matters can be found only in adepts, scholars, elites. And some, to be sure, require both kinds of wisdom, and must be sought from those special people who are authoritative on both counts.

So perhaps what we need more of in our religious, spiritual, philosophical, and political conversation is conceptual clarity as to what sort of question we’re asking. Only then can we determine what authority we ought to consult. And if we make a mistake on the former, as I think many people do, we will then consult the wrong people and get the wrong advice. And isn’t there a lot of that around nowadays!

Q: I know so many people ask this, but this is a question that bothers me still. Why does God allow so much evil in the world? Why does he not stop acts of cruelty, or is he there at all?

A: The problem of God and evil can be posed in three distinct degrees.  First, does not any evil at all seem inconsistent with the idea of God?  If God is all-good and all-powerful, and God made everything, then how can there be a single blemish in creation?  Now, such a perfect world, or even a slightly-marred alternative, seems a very long way from our badly-troubled globe, so this question appears rather academic.  But it is a crucial one: why is there any evil at all?