Quotes from Douglas J. Moo

... if we are serious about helping nature, we need to be willing to forego material benefits.

James condemns any form of Christianity that drifts into a sterile, actionless "orthodoxy." Faith, not what we do, is fundamental in establishing a relationship with God. But faith, James insists, must be given content. Genuine faith, he insists, always and inevitably produces evidence of its existence in a life of righteous living.

Our human vocation is to work and take care of the place where God has planted us, to serve him in our rule in creation as priests in his temple. Caring for the earth is not, in this light, a peripheral biblical theme; it is central to our identity as God's image bearers.

In obedience to their king, Jesus, Christian are to build among themselves a genuine counterculture, in which the values of the kingdom of God rather than the values of this world are lived out.

Christ who is your life,' (Col 3:4): This identification reflects the relentless Christological focus of Colossians.

Paul's evangelism, his letters suggest, has two great motivations: a sense of obligation derived from what God has done for him and commissioned him to do for others, and a desire that God will be glorified by as great a number of people as possible. We are to imitate Paul by extending God's grace in the gospel just as he did.

Our God is not a God who discards what he has made, who is defeated by sin and evil. Our God is a redeeming God, a God who is determined to reclaim his fallen world, setting it free from its enslavement to corruption and bringing it to a final state of glory.

Justificación por la fe y santificación por medio de la lucha

baptism puts us in contact with the death of Christ (vv. 3–4); (2) because we share in Christ's death, we also will share in his resurrection (vv. 5, 8–10); (3) sharing in Christ's death means freedom from sin (vv. 6–7).

When people believe in Christ, they become identified with one another in an intimate association and incur both the benefits and responsibilities of that communion. Philemon is fundamentally all about those responsibilities, as Paul, Onesimus, and Philemon, bound together in faith, are forced by circumstances to think through the radical implications of their koinnia.

La meta final de la teología es la gloria de Dios, y cualquier verdadera expresión teológica llevará siempre a este propósito.

La teología, el «estudio de Dios», no es un mero pasatiempo intelectual. Tampoco

was in Jerusalem again for a conference with the apostles; but far from their teaching me the gospel, they agreed with me about the basic elements of the gospel (2:1–10). D. True, as you may have heard, at Antioch Peter took a different view of the matter, but I did not concede his point; instead I opposed him to his face (2:11–14).

But more important here is the rhetorical point that they make: Philemon is to respond to Paul because he, Paul, and Onesimus are all "in the Lord/Christ."1365 The fellowship that is created among those who have faith in Christ (v. 6) brings with it obligations to one another.

We today lack a theology of growth. And so we need to learn how we "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ" (2 Peter 3:18). In particular, we need to learn to cooperate with "the means of grace" that God has ordained for the transformation of the human personality. Our participation in these God-ordained "means" will enable us increasingly to take into ourselves Christ's character and manner of life.

And, at the risk of generalizing unduly, we might suggest that here as well is the point of contact for the application of the message of Colossians to a wide variety of historical and contemporary teachings. Any teaching that questions the sufficiency of Christ — not only for "initial" salvation but also for spiritual growth and ultimate salvation from judgment — falls under the massive christological critique of Colossians.

But we should not view the public nature of the letter as simply a lawyer 's tactic to win his case; it rather reflects the corporate nature of early Christianity, in which no matter was "private" but inevitably affected, and was affected by, one's brothers and sisters in the new family of God.1163

If our belief in the authority of the Bible means anything, it means that we must submit to what the Bible teaches and bring our own perceptions and ideas into line with Scripture.