“Redemption is not simply making creation a bit better, as the optimistic evolutionist would try to suggest. Nor is it rescuing spirits and souls from an evil material world, as the Gnostic would want to say. It is the remaking of creation, having dealt with the evil that is defacing and distorting it. And it is accomplished by the same God, now known in Jesus Christ, through whom it was made in the first place.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“resurrection doesn’t mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus’s lordship over the world.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“people who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“God’s kingdom” in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming “on earth as it is in heaven.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
“We can glimpse it in the book of Acts: the method of the kingdom will match the message of the kingdom. The kingdom…goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misunderstood, misjudged, vindicated, celebrating: always – as Paul puts it in one of his letters – bearing in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed.”
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
― Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church
Evan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Evan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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