Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to...

The author extols the power of having significant portions of God’s Word read in public worship with the following analogy. He says that by reading a few short verses, we are like someone glimpsing nature...

Since both the departed saints and we ourselves are in Christ, we share with them in the ‘communion of saints.’ They are still our brothers and sisters in Christ. When we celebrate the Eucharist they...

Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.

As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that...

The “word” did not “offer itself” in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion, any more than Caesar’s heralds would have said, “If you’d like a new kind of imperial experience, you might like to try giving allegiance to...

the work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely...

What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These...

Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend “who is still liable to surprise us.

When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves–that insight produces, again and again,...

For Christians it’s always a love game … that He is love itself … Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which...

The church exists primarily for two closely correlated purposes: to worship God and to work for his kingdom in the world … The church also exists for a third purpose, which serves the other two:...

Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the...

Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato’s safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the...

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...