My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another.

If you read 1 John you'll see that love of God and neighbour are very closely tied together. Partly this is because all humans are made in God's image, so that when you love another human you are loving someone who is reflecting God himself. Of course there is a distinction but the minute you try to drive a wedge between the two things start to fall apart.

Hope, for the Christian, is not wishful thinking or mere blind optimism. It is a mode of knowing, a mode within which new things are possible, options are not shut down, new creation can happen.

think about the way God rules. He doesn't do it by sending in the tanks. He does it by calling servants.

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 point what God provides, exactly as for a newborn infant, is the comfort, protection, and nurturing promise of a mother. "If God is our father, the church is our mother." The words are those of the Swiss Reformer John Calvin ... it is as impossible, unnecessary, and undesirable to be a Christian all by yourself as it is to be a newborn baby all by yourself.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.