Christopher J.h. Wright Quotes

It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission. Chris Wright

The jubilee then is about restoring to people the capacity to participate in the economic life of the community for their own viability and society's benefit.

our mission is nothing less (or more) than participating with God in this grand story until he brings it to its guaranteed climax.

Lament is missional because it keeps the world before God, and it draws God into the world – with the longing that God should act, and the faith that he ultimately will.

Failure to honour God in the material realm cannot be compensated for by religiosity in the spiritual realm.

the whole Bible is itself a missional phenomenon. The writings that now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of and witness to the ultimate mission of God. The Bible renders to us the story of God's mission through God's people in their engagement with God's world for the sake of the whole of God's creation. The Bible is the drama of this God of purpose engaged in the mission of achieving that purpose universally, embracing past, present and future, Israel and the nations, "life, the universe and everything," and with its centre, focus, climax, and completion in Jesus Christ. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, "what it's all about.

for God, doing justice means particularly attending to the needs of the weak and poor, it makes us question whether the traditional understanding of justice as ‘strict impartiality’ is really at all appropriate in the biblical context. On the contrary, it is so clear that the LORD is especially attentive to the needs of the marginalized (see Deut. 10:18–19) that it would seem to be the very nature of justice, on God’s terms, for humans also to have such a prioritized concern.

To dwell in love with saints above— Oh that will be glory! But to dwell below with saints we know— Ah! That’s a different story!

Mission arises from the heart of God himself, and is communicated from his heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.

Evil and sin weave their way into every aspect of God’s creation and every dimension of human personhood and life on earth.

If our mission is to share good news, we need to be good news people. If we preach transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like.

The power imbalance between male and female, the fear between God and humans and the enmity between humans and nature, are all described in Genesis 2 and 3 as originating not in the nature of things as God intended them to be, but rather in the collusion of Adam, Eve and the serpent, who together deny the goodness and sufficiency of the garden and distrust the good intentions of the creator.

The reality is, of course, as soon as you think seriously about it, that the mission field is everywhere, including your own street – wherever there is ignorance or rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It is well known that great art, great music and great literature can emerge out of great pain. This does not lessen the reality of the suffering of the artist, composer or writer, but it points to something creative and redemptive in the human person, made in the image of God, which can bring forth a thing of beauty in the midst of surrounding ugliness, brutality and evil. Nowhere is this more true than in the book of Lamentations.

There should be no theology that does not relate to the mission of the church – either by being generated out of the church’s mission or by inspiring and shaping it. And there should be no mission of the church carried on without deep theological roots in the soil of the Bible. No theology without missional impact; no mission without theological foundations.

Mission is not ours; mission is God's. Certainly, the mission of God is the prior reality out of which flows any mission that we get involved in. Or, as has been nicely put, it is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world but that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission-God's mission.14

This feature of Israelite law stands in sharp contrast to many ancient law codes where certain thefts by certain people were punishable by death. Indeed, it contrasts with British law until fairly recent times (people were hanged for sheep-stealing in Britain until the nineteenth century). On the other hand, as mentioned above, theft of a person for gain (kidnapping) was a capital offence in Israel (21:16; Deut. 24:7). Stealing a human life was different from stealing property.

Science, according to Kuhn, has not actually followed the classic myth of steady evolution of accumulating theories based on deeper and deeper probing of the evidence. Rather, science has sometimes made huge transitions as one paradigm, which may have stood for centuries, is found to be inadequate and crashes to the ground, to be replaced by another.

This means we do not ignore the particularity of biblical commands (and apply them to our own day as if they were timeless universals). Nor are we paralysed by their particularity (and thus unable to apply them to our day at all). We rejoice in their particularity because it shows us how the will of God was expressed in their context, and we take them as our paradigm for our own ethical construction.21

Treating all this great collection of texts merely as the expendable container for independent universal principles we can express more simply and tidily denies the character of the Bible as God has given it to us, and might even seem to render Bible reading a waste of time. Regarding the biblical texts about Israel as providing us with a paradigm preserves their historical particularity and forces us to observe all the non-reducible hard edges, all the jarring tensions and all the awkward corners of earthy reality within them.

It does appear, then, that what you find in the landscape of the Old Testament when you ‘get there’ very much depends on whom you take with you and through whose eyes you view it.

Words matter deeply to the authors of Proverbs, for they see words as powerful vehicles of good or evil, just as much so as actual deeds.

It is instructive (and sometimes properly humbling) to give thought to that great stream of tradition within which we stand, rather than fondly imagine we are the first generation to face the challenge the Old Testament sets before us as Christians.

One can detect, therefore, a difference between Luther’s and Calvin’s handling of the law that is almost as much psychological or intuitive as theological. Whereas Luther often sees what the law prohibits, in order to emphasize its role as a ‘killer’ from which one must flee to the grace of the gospel, Calvin looks for what the law promotes, using it as a model or primer that he applies to all kinds of issues of Christian living in the world of his day. When either of these approaches (both of which can claim New Testament precedent) is taken to extremes, they can, of course, become unbalanced in opposite ways. Thus, the danger of Lutheranism is a slide into practical Marcionism or antinomianism, while the danger of Calvinism has always been a slide into legalism. But neither of these extremes can be charged against Luther or Calvin themselves.

To argue that because Old Testament law does not prescribe explicit penalties related to infringement of its economic legislation, therefore modern civil authorities are excluded from any form of intervention in the economic marketplace betrays both the inadequacy of theonomism’s preoccupation with penalties and also, in my view, its ideological bias towards unfettered, free-market economic capitalism.

The order of the commandments thus gives some insight into Israel’s hierarchy of values. Roughly speaking, the order was God, family, life, sex, property. It is sobering, looking at that order, that in modern society (in its debased Western form at least) we have almost exactly reversed that order of values. Money and sex matter a lot more than human life, the family is scorned in theory and practice, and God is the last thing in most people’s thinking, let alone priorities.

It is vitally important that we pay attention to the narrative framework in which the Old Testament laws are set.

An Israelite could not have sung the familiar song ‘God is so good, God is so good, God is so good, he’s so good to me’ (though the words echo the Psalms) without being reminded also of its ethical consequence: ‘God asks me to show that goodness to others.

Since the primary manifestation of Yahweh is Israel itself, any misconstruction of Israel entails a misconstruction of Yahweh.

Our psalmists were not Judaizers, nor were they Calvinists, Arminians, Theonomists, Dispensationalists, Legalists or Antinomians. They were worshipping believers, members of a people who knew themselves to be in a unique covenant relationship with the LORD their God, redeemed by God’s saving grace, and privileged to have been given a land to live in and a law to live by. Let us, then, do our best to understand and appreciate the law through their eyes.

The Ten Commandments can be seen as given in order to preserve the rights and freedoms gained by the exodus, by translating them into responsibilities.

Yahweh intends that Israel be a nation of sisters and brothers in which there will be no more poor (cf. Deut. 15:4). This in itself makes clear that, according to the bible, the poor of Egypt are to become, through the Exodus, a kind of divinely-willed contrast-society . . . In fact, the new society that Yahweh creates out of the poor Hebrews through the Exodus is not only in contrast to the Egyptian society they have left behind, but beyond that it is in contrast to all other existing societies in their world [it is thus a task directed not just at Israel’s good but to the good of all humanity].

It is surely very ironic and tragic if those who speak most loudly about the gifts of the Spirit are themselves failing to show much of the fruit of the Spirit.

There is one voice we never hear. God does not speak in the whole book of Lamentations.11 Heaven is silent. Which does not necessarily mean that heaven is deaf or blind. We shall consider later what Kathleen O’Connor calls ‘the power of the missing voice’.

relationship between God and Old Testament Israel. In fact, as Jeremiah and other prophets pointed out, the catastrophe of 587 BC was not a denial of that covenant relationship, but the proof of it. It demonstrated that God meant what he said, that YHWH was as faithful to his threats as to his promises. At its inception the covenant had included sanctions – the notorious curses that would come on the people for persistent disloyalty to their covenant Lord (Lev. 26; Deut. 28).16 In 587 BC, they came.

the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.

Kindness can be as simple as a pleasant word, or a caring smile. But more importantly, being kind means being willing to do something, or to take some action, that helps somebody else even if it might be inconvenient to myself. When others are willing to use some of their precious time to help me out of some difficult or confusing situation, they are being kind. Kindness goes beyond duty—it means doing something you don’t have to do, but just choose to do. Kindness goes beyond reward—it means doing something you won’t get paid to do. In fact, real kindness usually costs something and doesn’t expect any reward.

La cruz es la demostración definitiva del amor de Dios, el amor del Padre y del Hijo.

The God who walks the paths of history through the pages of the Bible pins a mission statement to every signpost on the way.

I wanted them to see not just that the Bible contains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavor but that the whole Bible is itself a "missional" phenomenon.

This understanding [of the image of God] turns our supremacism upsidedown, for if we resemble God in that we have dominion, we must be called to be “imitators of God” (Eph. 5:1) in the way we exercise it. Indeed, far from giving us a free hand on the earth, the imago Dei constrains us. We must be kings, not tyrants – if we become the latter we deny, and even destroy, the image in us. Huw Spanner

At the heart of Deuteronomy stands chapter 15, with its laws on the release of debts and slaves.

Spiritual warfare is not about naming territorial spirits, claiming the ground or binding demons. It is all about the gospel. It is to live a gospel life, to preserve gospel unity and to proclaim gospel truth. It is to do this in the face of a hostile world, a deceptive enemy and our own sinful natures. And it is to pray to a sovereign God for gospel opportunities. Advance comes through godliness, unity, proclamation and prayer. Timothy Chester, on Ephesians 621

The tragedy of polytheism and idolatry is not the arithmetic (many gods instead of one), but that they exchange the only true source of salvation for lifeless and powerless substitutes, and in doing so, introduce injustice, bondage, and cruelty into human life (cf. Rom. 1:21–32).

For we need to be clear that in the Bible the conflict with the gods is a conflict waged by God for us, not a conflict waged by us for God. To be sure, the people of God are involved in spiritual warfare, as countless texts in both testaments testify. However, it is assuredly not the case that God is waiting anxiously for the day when we finally win the battle for him and the heavens can applaud our great victory. Such blasphemous nonsense, however, is not far removed from the rhetoric and practice of some forms of alleged mission that place great store on all kinds of methods and techniques of warfare by which we are urged to identify and defeat our spiritual enemies. No, the overwhelming emphasis of the Bible is that we are the ones who wait in hope for the clay when God defeats all the enemies

Since we seem to have lost the willingness, the vocabulary, or even the capacity, to engage in authentic biblical lament (at least in public worship and certainly in the West), what use have we for a book with such a name? We hardly know how to use the numerous psalms of lament, let alone a whole bookful of (almost but not quite) unrelieved grief and protest. Ironically, by giving no attention to the book of Lamentations, we join those within the book itself who passed by Lady Zion, shaking their heads but offering no comfort to the desolate suffering city and people.

So then, we must not read Lamentations without the rest of the Bible. But equally, we should not read the rest of the Bible without Lamentations (as Christians have habitually tended to do).

When we connect the death of Christ to the Old Testament, as Paul tells us we should,45 we can see the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC as a portent of the cross (both of them acts of human wickedness that were simultaneously the outpouring of God’s judgment), and the return from exile as a portent of the resurrection (and ultimately, in longer prophetic vision, of the new creation). And as we read Lamentations again in the light of that connection, the experiences of Lady Zion (especially in Lam. 1), and the Man (in 3:1–18) find multiple echoes in the passion of Christ.

The distinctive form of address espoused by the prophets was “thus says the Lord.” Christopher J. H. Wright suggests that there were four principal prohibitions God expressed to Israel that were cultural in nature: idolatry, perversion, that which was destructive of persons, and callousness to the poor.

It is important to understand that Paul is not just using Abraham as an illustration of the gospel or of his teaching about justification by grace through faith. No, Abraham is the beginning of the gospel.

the economic sphere is like a thermometer that reveals both the temperature of the theological relationship between God and Israel (angle A), and also the extent to which Israel was conforming to the social shape required of them in consistency with their status as God’s redeemed people (angle B).

Legalism at one extreme (keep all the rules) and license at the other (reject any rules) are both completely wrong answers to the question of how Christians should live.

It is a mistake to suggest that the difference between the Old and the New Testament is that the Old Testament taught that salvation came by keeping the law whereas in the New Testament it comes by grace. That is precisely the distortion of the Scriptures that Paul was combating.

God’s revelation was not a mystic secret for the initiated, but a light to guide every member of God’s community.

the same apostle Paul was sure that if the church in Corinth would worship God aright, any unbeliever who came into their meeting would “fall down and worship God, exclaiming, ‘God is really among you’ ” (1 Cor. 14:25). That’s missional praise.

The invisible God makes himself visible in the love that Christians have for one another.