The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.

But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold - and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.

It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it's not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

Christians living in a democracy should always vote if they can. If they cannot in conscience bring themselves to vote for any of the candidates on offer (in the UK quite often there are several candidates for a parliamentary seat) they might consider deliberately spoiling the ballot paper as a sad protest which still says 'but I believe in being involved'.

Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion.

We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can't be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.

The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.