To Think God as Love

The point of the Ascension, so strikingly highlighted here in John’s resurrection narrative on the lips of Jesus himself, is not that he is going a long way away but that he is being elevated to be the true Lord of the world. The resurrection has vindicated his claim to be Israel’s Messiah; and Israel’s [...]

‘But if God’s future has arrived in Jesus, how do we get in on the act? From the very beginning, the church has answered: baptism and faith. (Confirmation, as I expect most of you know, is how people who were baptised as infants make the baptismal promises good for themselves.) Sometimes people worry about baptism [...]

 As N. T. Wright often quips, “Heaven’s great. It’s just not the end of the world.” “The world to come” names not “heaven” (as popularly conceived) but the kingdom of God. Not a reality that threatens the termination of what we know as “world,” but a reality which is coming to us, and which will [...]

“And now we begin to see, perhaps, that after all judgment and forgiveness are not two quite different things, but two ways of saying the same thing, both of them following directly from the Easter victory of Jesus Christ, through whom all things are put to rights and in whom all who believe find themselves [...]

“Here is the paradox of Christian political theology, a paradox which the western church has all but ignored for many years, assuming that the main object of the game was to forget earth and concentrate on heaven instead. Precisely because we believe that Jesus Christ has been exalted to heaven, into God’s space, so that [...]

In this talk, Wright explains that the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and baptism are the reverse of speech-acts; meaning sacramental performance provides us with a “word” to communicate a truth otherwise (almost?) incommunicable.

  Those of us who’ve grown up in “low church” traditions (for me the Holiness-Pentecostal and Pentecostal/Charismatic traditions) know how right Wright is. We have great difficulty involving ourselves in daily corporate worship because (1) our churches use their buildings once or (at most) twice a week, and (2) we lack the liturgical framework to sustain [...]