Draining Evil's Power

"Jesus doesn't explain why there is suffering, illness, and death in the world. He brings healing and hope. He doesn't allow the problem of evil to be the subject of a seminar. He allows evil to do its worst to him. He exhausts it, drains its power, and emerges with new life."

      ~ N. T. Wright, from Simply Good News

Don't Cut Off the Branch You Sit On

N.T. Wright on Gay Marriage

N.T. Wright on Gay “Marriage”   J. John (Revd Canon) of Philo Trust interviewed New Testament scholar N. T. Wright and asked him about the redefinition of marriage:





  Matthew Schmitz provides a transcript here.

Ancient Idols Revived

N.Y. Wright on modern idolatry::

These other gods are not strangers. The ancient world knew them well. Just to name the three most obvious: there are Mars, the god of war, Mammon, the god of money, and Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love.Today’s Western world hardly needs reminding about the place of Mammon, the worship of money, in our society. Britain, or rather London, has prided itself on being the financial capital of the world, and the major financial scandals and banking crises that have shaken our system over the last decade have done nothing to damage our faith in this ancient and yet very modern god. We still assume that though something has gone wrong, the only thing to do is to shore up the system and get it going again—despite the gross inequities, the countries still suffering from unpayable debt, the rising tide of poverty even in our affluent Western world, and so on. Perhaps it wouldn’t be straining the point to say that many students now hope, rightly or wrongly, that a degree will be a passport to a good job and a good salary, and that is justification enough. You can recognize the worship of Mammon precisely at the point when someone asks you to do a job for which you will be paid considerably less than you are at present. What would you say?

….These ancient and well-known gods have not gone away, have not been banished upstairs, but are present and powerful—all the more so for being unrecognized. In what sense are they divine? The ancients would have no trouble answering that. First, those who worship gods become like them; their characters are formed as they imitate the object of worship and imbibe its inner essence. Second, worshipping them demands sacrifices, and those sacrifices are often human. You hardly need me to spell out the point. How many million children, born or indeed unborn, have been sacrificed on the altar of Aphrodite, denied a secure upbringing because the demands of erotic desire keep one or both parents on the move? How many million lives have been blighted by money, whether by not having it or, worse, by having too much of it? (And if you think you can’t have too much of it, that just shows how deeply Mammon worship has soaked into us.)

And how many are being torn apart, as we speak, by the incessant demands of power, violence, and war? Now, please note: I am not saying sex is evil. I am not saying money is bad in itself. I am not even saying that there is never a place for force in defending the weak against violent evil or unjust tyranny. I am neither a killjoy, a Marxist, nor a pacifist. My point is that our society, claiming to have got rid of God upstairs so that we can live our own lives the way we want, corporately and individually, has in fact fallen back into the clutches of forces and energies that are bigger than ourselves, more powerful than the sum total of people who give them allegiance—forces we might as well recognize as gods.
Perhaps the convulsions we have gone through—the disasters that come from worshiping Mars, Mammon, and Aphrodite—are signs that the theological vacuum caused by separating god from the world is at last imploding. But do we know what to do under such circumstances? Have we got a road map to help us navigate such dangerous and complex territory?

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture,, "Idolatry 2.0",, quoted at BibleGatewayBlog

Colony of Heaven

Some great N. T. Wright quotes for Easter:

“Jesus's resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.”

― N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church


“Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.” 

― N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

Look to Jesus

N. T. Wright - On Reading the Gospels.



 HT The Work of the People

The Fulcrum of History

"The death of Jesus of Nazareth as king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel’s destiny, the fulfillment of God’s promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns."

        - NT Wright, Simply Christian

Hat Tip: Vitamin Z 
(Wright's book is a good one, BTW)

Ascension Sunday Thoughts

Some thoughts on Ascension Sunday:

“The Ascension is not really a departure. It is entering into a new more dynamic manner of presence beyond the bounds of ordinary space and time. It is the assurance that Jesus is with us always during the ministry He gives unto the end of the age, and a hope for the age to come.”                           - John Michael Talbot

  Hat Tip:  internetmonk.com

What happens when you downplay or ignore the ascension? The answer is that the church expands to fill the vacuum. If Jesus is more or less identical with the church—if, that is, talk about Jesus can be reduced to talk about his presence within his people rather than his standing over against them and addressing them from elsewhere as their Lord, then we have created a high road to the worst kind of triumphalism. …and the other side of triumphalism is of course despair. If you put all your eggs into the church-equals-Jesus basket, what are you left with when, as Paul says…we ourselves are found to be cracked earthenware vessels?

N.T. Wright • Surprised by Hope, p. 112

Hat Tip:  internetmonk.com

“Ascension Day proclaims that there is no sphere, however secular, in which Christ has no rights – and no sphere in which his followers are absolved from obedience to him. Instead of it being a fairy tale from the pre-space age, Christ’s ascension is the guarantee that he has triumphed over the principalities and powers, so that at his name ‘every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil. 2:10-11).” - Bruce Metzger

60 Years of Mere Christianity.

N.T. Wright has written his reflections and evaluation on C. S. Lewis' classic work Mere Christianity and its 60 years of influence on evangelical apologetics and evangelism. You can read it at Touchstone Archives: Simply Lewis:

Hat Tip:  Justin Taylor