Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

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.

The Bible is the book of my life. It's the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by.

You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world ... That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.

Certainly Paul shares the view of the Old Testament prophets that God will one day flood the world with justice and joy - and that this has begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus.

Just as many who were brought up to think of God as a bearded old gentleman sitting on a cloud decided that when they stopped believing in such a being they had therefore stopped believing in God, so many who were taught to think of hell as a literal underground location full of worms and fire...decided that when they stopped believing in that, so they stopped believing in hell. The first group decided that because they couldn't believe in childish images of God, they must be atheists. The second decided that because they couldn't believe in childish images of hell, they must be universalists.