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.

It's not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God.

That is what worship is all about. It is the glad shout of praise that arises to God the creator and God the rescuer from the creation that recognizes its maker, the creation that acknowledges the triumph of Jesus the Lamb. That is the worship that is going on in heaven, in God's dimension, all the time. The question we ought to be asking is how best we might join in.

The Christian is prepared to say, 'I don't like the sound of this, ... but if this is what it really means, I'm going to have to pray for grace and strength to get that into my heart and be shaped by it.'

If you don't have properly constituted civic authorities you will encourage vigilantism and solo efforts at retributive justice - which is anarchy, and God doesn't want his world to be anarchic.

For Paul 'righteousness' and 'justice' are the same word, as they were in Hebrew. Paul clearly believes that helping the poor is a central and ongoing part of Christian commitment, precisely because in Jesus Christ God has unveiled and launched his plan for the rescue, redemption and renewal of the whole creation. Justification and justice go very closely together.

I'm not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols - money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol - you become like what you worship. That's one of the basic spiritual laws.