True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace: but, precisely because it is freedom FOR as well as freedom FROM, it isn’t simply a matter of being forced now to be...

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.

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer...

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.(Following Jesus, p. 27.)

It is not about “life after death” as such. Rather, it’s a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: “life after...

Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn’t come naturally. And then, on the thousand and...

The shallow social and political alternatives bequeathed to contemporary western society by the Enlightenment and its aftermath, in which every issue stands either to left or to the right on some hypothetical spectrum, and every...

When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you...

The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

Don’t misunderstand me. The terrorist actions of Al-Qaeda were and are unmitigatedly evil. But the astonishing naivety which decreed that America as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be...

Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered...

The church is often called a killjoy for protesting against sexual license. But the real killing of joy comes with the grabbing of pleasure. As with credit card usage. the price tag is hidden at...

Now love doesn’t stop at death – or if it does, it’s a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love...

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.

salvation”; they are to be part of the means by which God makes this happen in both the present and the future.

The debate that has been conducted in terms of “creation versus evolution” has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion...

…left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there’s nothing much we can do about them. And we...

Nem o cenário alternativo da Páscoa proposto por Lüdemann, no qual Pedro e Paulo experimentaram fantasias geradas pelo luto e culpa respectivamente, nem a alternativa de Crossan, na qual um grupo de escribas cristãos começou,...

We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother’s clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it’s a measure of our maturity...

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If...

The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.

Human was simultaneously the bearer of God’s wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience.

Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.

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...

In particular, we must take account of the well-known and striking saying of Jesus to the dying brigand beside him, recorded by Luke (23.43). ‘Today,’ he said, ‘you will be with me in paradise.’ ‘Paradise’...

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

Many people think that being Christian makes you sort of subhuman or, at least, less than fully human. Guys out there on the street (people think) are having a wonderful time enjoying human life to...

Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.

Human” is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command...

All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit,...

Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.

You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn’t a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture...

Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.

Within biblical theology it remains the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming...

The power of the bleeding love of God is stronger than the power of Caesar, of the law, of Mars, Mammon, Aphrodite and the rest. This is the point that Paul grasped. And that is...

Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it ‘moral...

On the seventh day God rested in the darkness of the tomb;Having finished on the sixth day all his work of joy and doom.Now the Word had fallen silent, and the water had run dry,The...

Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren’t the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more “natural”...

At the heart of Galatians 2 is not an abstract individualized salvation, but a common meal. Paul does not want the Galatians to wait until they have agreed on all doctrinal arguments before they can...

Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people...

If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls will have left behind their mortal bodies, why then death still rules – since that is a description, not of the defeat of death, but...

We applaud patience, but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.

Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the...

Note, though, something else of great significance about the whole Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second coming, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that...

That is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises to God the creator and God the rescuer from the creation that recognizes its maker, the creation that acknowledges...

Put it this way: if your idea of God, if your idea of the salvation offered in Christ, is vague or remote, your idea of worship will be fuzzy and ill-formed. The closer you get...

The only sure rule is to remember that the Bible is indeed God’s gift to the church, to equip that church for its work in the world, and that serious study of it can and...

The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive...