The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.

The whole point of what -Jesus was up to was that he was doing close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term in the future. And what he was promising for that future and doing in the present was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity but rescuing -people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God’s ultimate purpose — ​and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that large project.

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

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

Of course there are people who think of 'heaven' as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.

What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end.

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