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.

The power of the gospel lies[...] in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God's new world has begun.

Often the Jesus-focused churches are leaning towards a 'social gospel' interpretation of the kingdom, and the 'Paul' churches are talking about being saved from sin and going to heaven. But when we understand both Jesus and Paul in their historical contexts within the first-century Jewish world, the issues become both more complex and ultimately (I believe) more clear.

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

Learning to live as a Christian is learning to live as a renewed human being, anticipating the eventual new creation in and with a world which is still longing and groaning for that final redemption.

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.

Jesus didn't really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.