NT Wright
Simply Good News - Wrong Future, Wrong Present
Simply Good News - Wrong Future, Wrong Present
by SPCK - N T Wright
Wrong Future, Wrong Present Like the good news about what has happened in the past, the good news about what will happen in the future has proved hard to grasp. There is a powerful reason for this, which I shall come to in a moment. For now, let’s just note some of the other less…
Simply Good News - Resurrection as the Beginning of a New World
Simply Good News - Resurrection as the Beginning of a New World
by SPCK - N T Wright
Saving the World How do we know all this? How can we know all this? How is all this not simply a pious dream, a fantasy, a utopia that we all enjoy but know is a mirage? The answer is simple. Jesus was raised from the dead. This is, of course, the second half of the classic summa…
Simply Good News - Saving the World
Simply Good News - Saving the World
by SPCK - N T Wright
Saving the World But how does the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the good news that this was for our sins and in accordance with the scriptures turn out to be the good news of the new creation? How are these things joined together? The answer is simple – and…
Simply Good News - Rethinking Heaven
Simply Good News - Rethinking Heaven
by SPCK - N T Wright
Rethinking Heaven If Jesus’s first followers spoke about the good news of what had just happened, what did they think would happen in the future as a result? Here we face a major problem. For many generations in the modern church, followers of Jesus in many parts of the world hav…
Simply Good News - The Competing Gospel of the Modern World
Simply Good News - The Competing Gospel of the Modern World
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Competing Gospel of the Modern World The first problem, we recall, is that the church has colluded with the legacy of the Middle Ages, proposing going to heaven as the ultimate goal and an angry God as the problem to get around. The second is that modern culture has operated …
Simply Good News - The Competing Gospels of Rationalism and Romanticism
Simply Good News - The Competing Gospels of Rationalism and Romanticism
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Competing Gospels of Rationalism and Romanticism The second problem has infected both the church and the world for the last two or three hundred years at least. Again, this is not the place to explain how all the complicated ideas in modern European and American thought came …
Simply Good News - Turning the Good News into Bad News
Simply Good News - Turning the Good News into Bad News
by SPCK - N T Wright
Turning the Good News into Bad News The first of these, then, has to do with the popular view of what Christianity is all about – and when I say the popular view, I mean the view of most people inside the church as well as outside. Most people in the Western world think of Christ…
Simply Good News - A Different Kind of Kingdom
Simply Good News - A Different Kind of Kingdom
by SPCK - N T Wright
A Different Kind of Kingdom Americans often tell me this. ‘We used to have kings,’ they say, ‘but we gave them up. You British understand these things; we don’t.’ This is a misunderstanding. The constitutional monarchy we have today in the United Kingdom is quite different from a…
Simply Good News - Can we Trust the Gospels?
Simply Good News - Can we Trust the Gospels?
by SPCK - N T Wright
Can we Trust the Gospels? Let’s start with the obvious problem. Can we trust the Gospels? Answering that properly would take another whole book, and indeed I’ve written one or two on that topic. Despite a continuing chorus of scepticism, I and many other scholars who have studied…
The Real Good News
The Real Good News
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Real Good News First, though, the inadequate and misleading accounts. Jesus’s resurrection does not mean that God somehow gave him a free pass on a personal basis, either because he was God’s son or for any other reason. The resurrection was not a special favour granted to Je…
Mark The People's Commentary - Food in the wilderness
Mark The People's Commentary - Food in the wilderness
by BRF - Dick France
An Abortive “Retreat” This is the only time in Mark’s Gospel that the Twelve are called ‘apostles’. The word means ‘those sent out’, and it describes well the experience they have just shared as Jesus’ emissaries. But having been ‘sent out’, they now return and report back to the…
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - proper 10 year B
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - proper 10 year B
by SPCK - N T Wright
Proper 10 Year B Two kings, a thousand years apart, and both in trouble at home. David brings God’s ark into Jerusalem, and is so carried away with dancing and leaping before the Lord that his wife despises him, remembering no doubt the dignity of the former king, her father. Per…
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - Proper 9 - Year B
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - Proper 9 - Year B
by SPCK - N T Wright
Proper 9 Year B The paradoxes of power. David bided his time, refused to lift up his hand against God’s anointed (though he knew himself to be anointed also), and then at last became king in a further anointing. The move to Jerusalem was politically shrewd (though obscured by the…
Simply Good News - What the Resurrection Reveals
Simply Good News - What the Resurrection Reveals
by SPCK - N T Wright
What the Resurrection Reveals If that had been the end, however, it wouldn’t have been good news at all. It would only have meant one more failed messiah. The only reason the death of Jesus was ever thought of as good news was because of what happened next…
Simply Good News - The Power of Love
Simply Good News - The Power of Love
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Power of Love The clash between Jesus and the powers of the world – between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of humans – was never about God simply having a bit more power than humans, so that he could manage to beat them at their own game. It isn’t that God has stronger ta…
Simply Good News - A Different Kind of King
Simply Good News - A Different Kind of King
by SPCK - N T Wright
A Different Kind of King That is why, throughout Jesus’s public career, he talked about the good news of God’s kingdom, redefining the idea of God’s kingdom as he went along. God was coming back to take charge, he said. But it didn’t look like what people had imagined…
Simply Good News - Surprised by King Jesus