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 Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 4:13 am Post subject: Jesus [13] 'Simply Christian' (Bishop Tom Wright) - 1 |
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Bishop Tom Wright's recent (2006) book 'Simply Christian' (SPCK) is aimed at
thoughtful readers who want to know the fundamentals of the Christian
faith - the sort of people who a generation ago read C S Lewis' 'Mere
Christianity'.
I'll summarize the gist of the book in the next couple of articles, but
here's a sample paragraph to whet your appetite:
'The whole point of the Christian story, at the climax of the Jewish story,
is that the curtain has been pulled back, the door has been opened from the
other side, and like Jacob we have glimpsed a ladder between heaven and
earth with messengers going to and fro upon it. "The kingdom of heaven is at
hand," says Jesus in Matthew's gospel: not that he is offering a new way of
getting to heaven hereafter, but that he is announcing that the rule of
heaven, the very *life* of heaven, is now overlapping with earth in a new
way, a way which sweeps together all the moments from Jacob's ladder to
Isaiah's vision, all the patriarchical insights and prophetic dreams, and
turns them into a human form, a human voice, a human life, a human death.
[With] Jesus... prayer has come of age. Heaven and earth have overlapped
permanently where he stands, where he hung, where he rises, wherever the
fresh wind of the Spirit now blows. Living as a Christian means living in
the world as it has been reshaped by and around Jesus and his Spirit. And
that means that Christian prayer is a different king of thing, different
both from the pantheist, getting in touch with the inwardness of nature, and
from the Deist, sending out messages across a lonely emptiness.' [p. 140]
[More... http://jmm.aaa.net.au/catalog/section/jc1.htm ]
--
Shalom! Rowland Croucher
"If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere
insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy
a piece of his own heart?" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/ - 17,000 articles; 4000 jokes/funnies |
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