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.
All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.
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 ‘life after death.
After defending the value of prepared prayers, the author cautions against over-reliance on them. Just as David could not fight in the armor of King Saul, we are called to fight in the way God has equipped us uniquely.
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 is about.
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, reveals just how bad things really are.
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 new emperor.
Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.
Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend “who is still liable to surprise us.
The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.
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.
Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.
Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.
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.
Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.
The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.
Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.
We applaud patience, but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.
Human” is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.
Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.
Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.
Setting the stage for the Tower of Babel, the author says that, while humanity had a mission to reflect God, it had been distracted by its own reflection and was both fascinated and fearful of what it saw.
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.
What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.
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 God does in and for us.
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.