N.T. Wright

Questions for God (Paperback)

Volume 1, Before Faith

In November 2025, N.T. Wright sat down with pastor Arthur D. Jones for a two-hour conversation about the questions people ask on the way to belief: why a good God allows suffering, whether only one faith can be true, whether the resurrection happened, why God goes quiet, whether the Bible can be trusted. Questions for God, Volume 1: Before Faith turns that conversation into a ten-session workbook. Each chapter frames the question, hands you Wright’s own response on video through a QR code, then gives you room to write and prompts to talk it through with others. The goal is to take each question seriously enough to live with it. This is formation, not information: an invitation to bring your real questions into the open and discover a faith with room for them.

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Somewhere along the way, most of us learned which questions are welcome.

You can ask why the sermon ran long. You cannot ask whether the resurrection actually happened. You can ask about the mission trip budget. You cannot ask why your prayers for your mother went unanswered, or why the God who made a hundred billion galaxies would care what you do on a Tuesday. So the questions go underground, where they harden. And the faith that remains gets thinner, because it is being asked to hold weight it was never allowed to test.

Arthur D. Jones has spent nearly two decades on the other side of those conversations — in coffee shops with people who had stopped going to church, in hospital rooms with young parents who wanted to know where God was, in small groups where the real conversation started after the study guide closed. The questions were rarely polite. They were rarely abstract. Over the years he learned that honest doubt is not the enemy of faith.

In November 2025, N.T. Wright came to St. Andrew Methodist Church in Plano, Texas, where Jones serves as senior pastor. The morning after Wright’s public lecture, the two of them sat down and recorded a two-hour conversation. Jones asked the questions he had been collecting for twenty years — the ones people actually ask, rather than the ones scholars assume they should. Wright answered with the rigor of a historian and the warmth of a pastor. He did not simplify. He did not condescend. Sometimes he reframed the question and answered the better one underneath it.

Questions for God, Volume 1: Before Faith is built around that conversation. Ten chapters, ten questions, and Wright on video for every one of them, unlocked by a QR code printed on the page.

Each chapter opens with an essay from Jones framing the question and explaining why it matters, followed by an excerpt from Ask: Faith Questions in a Skeptical Age, the book he wrote with his father, Bishop Scott Jones. Then comes Wright’s response, drawn straight from the recording and appearing here in print for the first time. A short essay grounds the theology in ordinary life. Five reflection questions follow, with space to write. Each chapter closes with a discussion guide built for real conversation.

Before Faith takes up the ten questions that surface first:

• Why did God create us — and why does God love us at all?
• How do we make sense of other religions? Can only one faith be true?
• If God is good, why is there suffering, pain, and a fallen world?
• Why is God sometimes silent? Why doesn’t God give clearer evidence?
• Why does God reveal himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
• Was Jesus’ resurrection real — and why does it matter?
• Why trust the Bible when parts of it confuse or disturb us?
• How do we live differently in a world where Christianity is confusing, compromised, or countercultural?
• Does my work matter to God — and what am I here to do?
• What is Christian hope really about — and who will we see in the world to come?

These chapters are doorways rather than airtight compartments. The question of suffering bleeds into the question of God’s silence. The question of other religions raises the question of what makes Christianity distinctive. That is how life works, and this workbook is built to follow it.

Questions for God leads readers to:

• Ask the question they have been carrying, without apology and without a rehearsed answer waiting
• Hear a world-class scholar answer plainly, on video, in language anyone can follow
• Trace how the hardest objections to faith have been met for two thousand years
• Write down what they actually believe, and notice where it has shifted
• Talk honestly with other people who are asking the same things

Questions are instruments of faith rather than obstacles to it. The Psalms are full of them — angry, desperate, bewildered. Jesus himself died with a question having just past his lips.

If the Son of God can ask, so can you.