Searching for a Better God: Book Review

A dangerous rift has opened up between society and the Christian church—a moral friction between the Bible’s message and the current culture’s sense of right and wrong. Questions about God that used to center around His existence are now aimed at His morality. How moral is the God who permits diseases and natural disasters that kill innocent people or the God who allows brutal dictators to rule with an iron fist? At best this God is aloof and uncaring. At worst He is primitive and cruel.
Many in this contemporary culture have concluded that we are actually morally superior to God and that He is less than adequate. Even some in the church have begun to suspect this same thing, that God just may not be that great. But, as people of faith, we have an understanding that helps us bridge the reality of what we see with those realities we do not see. But how are we to communicate this understanding to a skeptical generation?
In his new book, Searching for a Better God (Paternoster, March 2008), author and pastor Wade Bradshaw thoroughly explains and examines the repercussions of the “common sense theology” which has condemned the God of the Bible as vindictive, angry, distant—and worse. “People cannot flourish without hope,” says Bradshaw. “Yet this growing suspicion that God exists but is not worthy of our affection or devotion is subtly robbing the world of its one true hope. God cannot be a source of hope, not because He isn’t real, but because He would not be good to know and to live with forever. This is what I call the New Story.”
In Searching for a Better God, Bradshaw explains why the caricatures many have drawn of God are not accurate and God, as described in the Bible, is misunderstood. By giving readers practical ways to talk to those who doubt God’s character, Bradshaw skillfully instructs the church how to reach the lost with a hope that can only be found in a confident, unwavering hope in God, the perfect and moral God of the Bible.

About the Author

Wade Bradshaw is currently a pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Charlottesville, Virginia. He has a diverse background working as a veterinarian in Nepal for three years, at the Francis Schaeffer Institute at Covenant Theological Seminary for four years, in the English branch of LAbri Fellowship for eleven years, and as the pastor of the International Presbyterian Church in Liss, Hampshire, England for a year. He is married to Chryse and has four children.