Why does Mark’s Gospel end so suddenly? And what do we do with violence in Scripture? @profntwright & @mbird12 help us wrestle with the Bible’s most puzzling passages. #NTWrightPodcast #ScriptureDebate #FaithAndDoubt premierunbelievable.com/ask-…

What did Paul mean by “the righteousness of God”? And what really happened at the Ascension? @profntwright brings clarity to faith’s biggest questions. @mbird12 #BiblicalQuestions #JesusAscension premierunbelievable.com/ask-…

The aim of the Christian life in the present time—the goal you are meant to be aiming at once you have come to faith, the goal which is within reach even in the present life, anticipating the final life to come—is the life of fully formed, fully flourishing Christian character. -After You Believe / Virtue Reborn

I will be speaking on Romans in Dallas, Texas in November. See below for more information. The Fresh Challenge of Romans with N.T. Wright eventbrite.com/e/the-fresh-c…

The New Testament, I suggest, must be read so as to be understood, read within appropriate contexts, within an acoustic which will allow its full overtones to be heard. It must be read with as little distortion as possible, and with as much sensitivity as possible to its different levels of meaning. It must be read so that the stories, and the Story, which it tells can be heard as stories, not as rambling ways of declaring unstoried ‘ideas’. It must be read without the assumption that we already know what it is going to say, and without the arrogance that assumes that ‘we’—whichever group that might be—already have ancestral rights over this or that passage, book, or writer. And, for full appropriateness, it must be read in such a way as to set in motion the drama which it suggests. -The New Testament and the People of God

The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about us. If it was, we might admire it as a fine bit of idealism, but we’d then return to our normal lives. It’s about Jesus himself. This was the blueprint for his own life. He asks nothing of his followers that he hasn’t faced himself. And, within his own life, we can already sense a theme that will grow larger and larger until we can’t miss it. If this is the way to show what God is really like, and if this is the pattern that Jesus himself followed exactly, Matthew is inviting us to draw the conclusion: that in Jesus we see the Emmanuel, the God-with-us person. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t just about how to behave. It’s about discovering the living God in the loving, and dying, Jesus, and learning to reflect that love ourselves into the world that needs it so badly. -Matthew for Everyone

I had the pleasure of working with Sandra McCracken on the lyrics for her new song 'How Long Till Heaven Comes Down.' You can listen to it on her website: sandramccracken.com/

God regularly works through ordinary people, doing what they normally do, who with a mixture of half-faith and devotion are holding themselves ready for whatever God has in mind. -Luke for Everyone

“Hope” and “optimism” are not the same thing. The optimist looks at the world and feels good about the way it’s going. Things are looking up! Everything is going to be all right! But hope, at least as conceived within the Jewish and then the early Christian world, was quite different. Hope could be, and often was, a dogged and deliberate choice when the world seemed dark. It depended not on a feeling about the way things were or the way they were moving, but on faith, faith in the One God. This God had made the world. This God had called Israel to be his people. The scriptures, not least the Psalms, had made it clear that this God could be trusted to sort things out in the end, to be true to his promises, to vindicate his people at last, even if it had to be on the other side of terrible suffering. “Hope” in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. -Paul: A Biography

Love is what will hold the church together when various pressures threaten to pull the Messiah’s body apart—when those with different gifts, or enthusiasm for a particular teacher, or a sense of their own rights and a disregard for other people’s conscience, or a failure to recognize those of different social standing as equal at the lord’s table, seem to want to go their own way. This chapter [1 Corinthians 13] has a claim, alongside chapter 15, to be considered the real heart of the letter. If the church can only grasp this, it will solve at least half the problems Paul has been grappling with. And yet even this exquisite chapter looks forward, particularly in the section just quoted, to the final discussion, which will concern the resurrection, the new world that God will make, and the continuity between the resurrection life and life here and now. The point of 13:8–13 is that the church must be working in the present on the things that will last into God’s future. Faith, hope and love will do this; prophecy, tongues and knowledge, so highly prized in Corinth, will not. They are merely signposts to the future; when you arrive, you no longer need signposts. Love, however, is not just a signpost. It is a foretaste of the ultimate reality. Love is not merely the Christian duty; it is the Christian destiny. --The Resurrection of the Son of God

Paul here assumes three things. First, the human mind can in principle grasp the truth about the creator God. Second, the mind determines the behaviour. Third, the mind is closely linked to the heart: the reasoning faculty is linked to the driving centre of the personality, with its emotions and longings. From these he argues three further things. First, idolatry produces a darkening of the heart and a failure to think straight, an inversion of wisdom and folly. Second, this results in dehumanized and dehumanizing behaviour. Third, the creator allows this process to take its natural course: the ‘unfit’ decisions lead to an ‘unfit’ mind, a mind not fit for purpose, for the purpose of grasping the truth and living in the light of it. That is a core part of his diagnosis of the problem of the whole human race. -Paul and the Faithfulness of God

We must, I would stress, beware of imagining that we can produce a new kind of salvation-history, reading divine intention and action off the all too ambiguous pages of even the best history. Just because we believe in divine providence we cannot copy the inspired writers of scripture and leap straight to a God's-eye view of events. Hegel saw history as inexorable progress; we beg to differ. Martin Luther saw the mediaeval period as the Babylonian Captivity of the church: well, perhaps. But perhaps not. As with the depths and ambiguities in our own lives, divine order is seldom perceived all at once, and perhaps that's just as well. Even St Paul, musing on the meaning of Onesimus's conversion, used that word, 'perhaps', to introduce his suggested interpretation (Philemon 15). Back to humility, patience, penitence and love. -History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology

Eschatology, rightly understood, is not antithetical to ethics. It generates them. When the kingdom comes, the will of YHWH will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. -Jesus and the Victory of God

Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, climaxing in his actions in the Temple and the upper room, and undertaken in full recognition of the likely consequences, was intended to function like Ezekiel lying on his side or Jeremiah smashing his pot. The prophet’s action embodied the reality. Jesus went to Jerusalem in order to embody the third and last element of the coming of the kingdom. He was not content to announce that YHWH was returning to Zion. He intended to enact, symbolize and personify that climactic event. -Jesus and the Victory of God

Once we see sacramental grace at the intersection of the homecoming of God in Jesus and the homecoming of God in the spirit, it isn't the baptism that might have failed. What may be lacking is the theological understanding, fellowship, and encouragement. I suspect that our cultural and philosophical climates have made it more difficult to see that grace confers responsibility, a responsibility that includes the challenge to seek the further infilling and enabling of the spirit. -God's Homecoming

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. -The Case for the Psalms

God's Vision for a New Humanity: Overflowing with Hope youtu.be/V1IcVjL0CLc?si=HZF2…

Francis Collins and N. T. Wright: Evolution, Truth and the Case for God youtu.be/QxZn5GDjp2g?si=SCmR…