I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.
Heard in full sound, the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy, and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.
Death is a monster; death is horrible.
If you ask people in England where does Tom Wright sit on the theological spectrum, they say, “Well he’s an evangelical of course,” as though, come on, get used to it.
Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.
A ‘conservative believer’ must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.
Blessed are the pure in heart; how will people believe that, unless we ourselves are worshipping the living God until our own hearts are set on fire and scorched through with his purity?
It is faith that looks up at the creator God and knows him to be the God of love. And it is faith that looks out at the world with the longing to bring that love to bear in healing reconciliation, and hope.
Worship is humble and glad, worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God’s truth, not its own.
You become like what you worship.
The phrase “spiritual journey” is one that I’ve only become familiar with comparatively recently. We wouldn’t have put it like that when I was a kid.
Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.
Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation.
I feel about John’s gospel like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn’t claim to understand her.
When it became clear that in fact my father was saying, “It will be interesting to see what you want to do when you grow up,” I realized that there was no pressure on that front. And I remember huge relief: Hey, I can go and do what I really know I have to do!
Hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once.
As we are set free by that love from our own pride and fear, our own greed and arrogance, so we are free in our turn to be agents of reconciliation and hope, or healing and love.
Looking back to the earlier centuries of the church, most of the great teachers were also bishops and vice versa. It’s only fairly recently that the church has had this great divide.
Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.
When Jesus’s followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn’t tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.