At the heart of Christian ethic is humility; at the heart of its parodies, pride. Different roads with different destinations, and the destinations color the character of those who travel by them.
What we have at the moment isn’t as the old liturgies used to say, ‘the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,’ but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.
Justice never means “treating everybody the same way”, but “treating people appropriately”.
Tolerance is a cheap, low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.
Certainly Paul shares the view of the Old Testament prophets that God will one day flood the world with justice and joy – and that this has begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus.
All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.
Jesus didn’t really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he’d defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.
I’m not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols – money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol – you become like what you worship. That’s one of the basic spiritual laws.
I work in a very tough area of Britain. There is not much hope sociologically where I live and work, they’re all sorts of conditions of poverty and deprivation and so on, I really do believe that the message of the kingdom of God is for places like this.
It’s very easy for a church just to slide along from week to week, taking it for granted that we do our services like this and that, and we celebrate the sacraments like this and that.
Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God’s saving, sovereign kingdom...
The question of Heaven, the question of what happens after death, is one which a lot of people in our culture try to put off as long as they can, but sooner or later it suddenly swings round and looks them in the eye.
While some who downplay Christ’s divinity have imagined Jesus as a great social worker ‘being kind to old ladies, small dogs and little children,’ orthodox Christianity has not wanted Jesus to have a political message.
I’m very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.
The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.
To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.
Love is not just tolerance. It’s not just distant appreciation. It’s a warm sense of, ‘I am enjoying the fact that you are you.’
The gospel is not itself about you are this sort of a person and this can happen to you. That’s the result of the gospel rather than the gospel itself.
The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.
I didn’t write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.