Justice never means "treating everybody the same way" but "treating people appropriately".
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.'
We applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.
[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.
Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God's saving sovereign kingdom...
The power of the gospel lies[...] in the powerful announcement that God is God that Jesus is Lord that the powers of evil have been defeated that God's new world has begun.
Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.
I have met many Roman Catholic theologians who will emphasize as much as any good Protestant preacher that everything comes from the love and grace of God.
If you have never felt or known the sheer power and strength of God's love take another look at Jesus dying on the cross.
The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious uproarious absurd generosity.
Right answers to difficult questions are better than wrong answers to difficult questions.
My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another.
I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70
We have to train ourselves to use words accurately. And there's so much loose Christian talk for which I've no doubt been as guilty as any.
Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.
Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one.
Tolerance is a cheap low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.
I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.
True worship is open to God adoring God waiting for God trusting God even in the dark.
The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.
Resurrection means bodily life after "?life after death ' or if you prefer bodily life after the state of "?death'
You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.
First-hand acquaintance with the actual texts is always the best way.
You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe admiration and wonder at something or someone you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.
Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.
Deism historically produces atheism. First you make God a landlord then an absent landlord then he becomes simply absent.
[Albert] Schweitzer thus carved out his own path through the first half of this century a lonely and learned giant amidst the hordes of noisy and shallow theological pygmies.
It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing) all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.
To pray 'your kingdom come' at Jesus' bidding meant to align oneself with his kingdom movement.
Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love best of all.
Hope for the Christian is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing a mode within which new things are possible options are not shut down new creation can happen.
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.
The Bible is the book of my life. It's the book I live with the book I live by the book I want to die by.
Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.
To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.
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.
Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That as we saw is part of the meaning of baptism the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.
By all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church's original hymnbook is to put it bluntly crazy
If you believe in the Bible you've got to do business with it and not just screen it out.
But if Christians don't get Jesus right what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?
One of the reasons we do history in fact is because it acts as a brake a control on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.
God has taken us utterly seriously. How can we not do the same with him?
God has committed himself ever since creation to working through his creatures--in particular through his image-bearing human beings--but they have all let Him down.
Genesis 1...was designed to reflect God both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship.
Human" is a kind of midway creature reflecting God into the world and reflecting the world back to God.
Worship is love on its knees before the beloved; just as mission is love on its feet to serve the beloved
Rest you well beloved Jesus Caesar's Lord and Israel's King In the brooding of the Spirit in the darkness of the spring
The closer you get to the truth the clearer becomes the beauty and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That's why theology and worship belong together.
The Holy Spirit in enabling the already-justified believers to live with moral energy and will so that they really do please God again and again.
A 'conservative believer' must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.
Justice and beauty are central to God's new world and should be central to our work. Together they frame the good news of Jesus.
You become like what you worship
I'm a people person. I like being with people. So I like being a teacher and so on.
Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project.
I really don't care too much what the different later Christian traditions say. My aim is to be faithful to Scripture.
Indian leaders are saying "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.
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.
think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.
Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.
The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.
The cross is the surest truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.
Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you've got to believe to be a good sound Christian.
The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.
If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.
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.
I accept the historical challenge and with that I accept the essentially Christian position that God always has more light to break out of his holy Word.
The rule of love I say again is not an optional extra. It is the very essence of what we [Christians] are about
The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.
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.
Without God's Spirit there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit the church simply can't be the church.
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.
Made for spirituality we wallow in introspection. Made for joy we settle for pleasure. Made for justice we clamor for vengeance.
Within orthodoxy there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.
Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.
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.
Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.
Whenever you see in an official lectionary the command to omit two or three verses you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless of course they are about sex.
Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death it overthrows it.
The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends in the end to put the whole creation to rights.
The cross is the place where and the means by which God loved us to the uttermost.
When you're writing theology you have to say everything all the time otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.
Death is a monster; death is horrible.
When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his death was all about he didn't give them a theory he gave them a meal.
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.
All human governments are intended by God to do justice and mercy - to look after in particular the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.
To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem as Daniel did (6:10) no matter where our exile may have taken us.
Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.
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.
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.
Heard in full sound the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.
Heaven is important but its not the end of the world
The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly knowing they possess all God's truth.
Christ's resurrection doesn't mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus's lordship over the world.
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are individually and corporately places where heaven and earth meet.
Worship is humble and glad worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God's truth not its own.
Fortunately Paul is much more interesting than most of his interpreters myself included.
It's not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.
I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.
Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more not less fierce.
The resurrection gives you a sense of what God wants to do for the whole world....
Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.
Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue Christian style.
All history involves selection and it is always human beings who do the selecting.
I have never been to India and I am not a specialist on Indian culture and I would not wish to be heard to be taking swipes at a culture which I've never experienced and where I've never lived.
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.
It is faith alone that justifies but faith that justifies can never be alone though one is justified by faith alone the faith which justifies is never in fact alone.
True worship doesn't keep looking at its watch.
Hope comes as a surprise at several levels at once.
All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.
Of course there are people who think of 'heaven' as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.
To many "The Bible is a form of verbal wallpaper pleasant enough in the background but he stop thinking about it after you have lived in the house for a few weeks.
People often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.
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?
Wherever St. Paul went there was a riot. Wherever I go they serve tea.
God is the Creator God he doesn't want to say "Okay creation was very good but I'm scrapping it." He wants to say "Creation is so good that I'm going to rescue it.
When we begin to glimpse the reality of God the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done.
Scripture is at its heart the great story that we sing in order not just to learn it with our heads but to become part of it through and through the story that in turn becomes part of us.
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.
Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.