What is the difference between God disguising himself and deceiving us? That is where the principle of suspended judgment operates. Face to face with mystery, and especially the mystery of evil, the faith that understands why it has come to trust must trust where it has not come to understand. Faith does not know why in terms of the immediate, but it knows why it trusts God who knows why in terms of the ultimate.

Christian advocacy always goes wrong when we become the focus of our efforts, rather than the Lord. For when we are the focus, we subtly come to believe that God is no more certain than our defense of him. Argue and defend God well, and the world of faith appears unshakable. Defend him badly, and doubts creep in or crash down on top of us.

Thinking Christians think in believing and they believe in thinking.

Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply.

If ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly and it can enjoy God more deeply.

Don't trust anyone over thirty," the 1960s radicals cried. "Don't trust anyone under three hundred," came Thomas Oden's wise reply. "Vox temporis" (the voice of the times) is no more trustworthy than "vox populi" (the voice of the people) when set against "vox dei" (the voice of God).

Not only do Christians believe, they are those who "think in believing and believe in thinking," as Augustine expressed it. The world of Christian faith is not a fairy-tale, make-believe world, question-free and problem-proof, but a world where doubt is never far from faith's shoulder.

If we truly know why we trust God—and that crucial if must be answered with full intellectual and spiritual assurance—if we truly know why we trust God, then God is greater than all, and God may be trusted in all situations, despite everyone and everything.

The deep logic of God's truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.

The truth of the faith does not stand and fall with our defense of it.

For any follower of Jesus Christ who follows this path on the quest for meaning, the statement is true: A Christian thinks in believing and believes in thinking.

As it happens, the differences are clear between the major answers to the search for purpose in life, and they lead in entirely different directions.