All human governments are intended by God to do justice and mercy - to look after, in particular, the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.

The logic of cross and resurrection, of the new creation which gives shape to all truly Christian living, points in a different direction. And one of the central names for that direction is joy: the joy of relationships healed as well as enhanced, the joy of belonging to the new creation, of finding not what we already had but what god was longing to give us.

What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is differentthe End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah

There is all the difference in the world between the nonviolence that the ordinary Christian should embrace and the duty of civic authorities to police their communities. The end of Romans 12 is quite clear about the first; the start of Romans 13 is quite clear about the second.

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.

Arguments about God are like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?