Quotes about Renewal

For the death of Jesus to be an expression—the ultimate expression—of the divine love, that covenant love that as we saw lay at the heart of so many ancient Israelite expressions of hope for covenant rescue and renewal, we would need to say, and Paul does say, that in the sending of the son the creator and covenant God is sending his own very self.

He was a Jew who believed in the goodness of the original creation and the intention of the Creator to renew his world. His gospel of "salvation" was about Israel's Messiah "inheriting the world," as had been promised in the Psalms. What God had done in and through Jesus was, from Paul's perspective, the launching of a heaven-and-earth movement, not the offer of a new "otherworldly" hope.

In his appearing we find neither a dualist rejection of the present world nor simply his arrival like a spaceman into the present world but rather the transformation of the present world, and ourselves within it, so that it will at last be put to rights and we with it. Death and decay will be overcome, and God will be all in all. This

the principle that God's kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings.

Maybe what we are faced with in our own day is a similar challenge: to focus not on the question of which human beings God is going to take to heaven and how he is going to do it but on the question of how God is going to redeem and renew his creation through human beings and how he is going to rescue those humans themselves as part of the process but not as the point of it all.

Conservatives have said that Jesus was bodily raised, while liberals have denied it, but neither group has seen the bodily resurrection as the launching of God's new creation within the present world order.

The tabernacle, and then the Temple in Jerusalem, are designed as a microcosmos, a little creation, a small working-model of creation as a whole which functions as a signpost to YHWH's intention to renew the whole world. The New Testament declares in a hundred different ways that this is precisely what's happened in and through Jesus:

Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

Cornelius didn't want God (or Peter) to tolerate him. He wanted to be welcomed, forgiven, healed, transformed. And he was.

Thus it won't do to say there is nothing that can be done to improve matters before Jesus returns. Yes, the second coming will accomplish all sorts of things of which at present we can only dream. I do not expect to see the wolf lying down with the lamb within the present state of creation, and if I were to meet a lion in the street (fortunately, an unlikely event in eastern Scotland), I would not rely on its having read Isaiah 11 and knowing that it should now be vegetarian.

To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one.

Jesus was not offering a teaching that could be compared with that of other teachers—though his teaching, as it stands, is truly remarkable. He was not offering a moral example, though if we want such a thing he remains outstanding. He was claiming to do things through which the world would be healed, transformed, rescued, and renewed. He was, in short, announcing good news, for Israel and the whole world.