Quotes from Christopher J.H. Wright

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

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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