Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Paul: A Biography > Status Update

Theology is the backbone for a healthy church. The body still needs limbs and organs, joints & tissues, but without a backbone the church body will not survive.

and, if not, where we can find such a store, amassed by someone else on our behalf. It is about the vocational framework in which humans are called to reflect God's image in the world and about the rescue operation whereby God has, through Jesus, set humans free to do exactly that.

What’s Paul's "justification" really all about. It isn't about a moralistic framework in which the only question that matters is whether we humans have behaved ourselves and so amassed a store of merit ("righteousness")

those who are grasped by grace in the gospel and who bear witness to that in their loyal belief in the One God, focused on Jesus, are not merely beneficiaries, recipients of God's mercy; they are also agents. They are poems in which God is addressing his world, and, as poems are designed to do, they break open existing ways of looking at things and spark the mind to imagine a different way to be human.

Humans were therefore made to stand at the threshold of heaven and earth—like an "image" in a temple, no less—and to be the conduit through which God's life would come to earth and earth's praises would rise to God. Here, then, is the point of Paul's vision of human rescue and renewal ("salva-tion," in traditional language):

The point of being human, after all, was never simply to be a passive inhabitant of God’s world. As far as Paul was concerned, the point of being human was to be an image bearer, to reflect God’s wisdom and order into the world, and to reflect the praises of creation back to God.

The irony of this position (“ they expected the end of the world, a generation after Jesus and they were wrong, so perhaps they were wrong about a lot of other things too.”)
The irony of this position is that the idea of the “end of the world” is neither biblical nor Jewish nor early Christian. It comes from the secular world of 19th century Europe, fueled by dreams of revolutions past and still to come.

God's plan had always been to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Jesus, which meant, from the Jewish point of view, that Jesus was the ultimate Temple, the heaven-and-earth place. This, already accomplished in his per-son, was now being implemented through his spirit.

Jesus would come from heaven to earth not—as in much popular fantasy—in order to scoop up his people and take them back to "heaven," but in order to complete the already inaugurated task of colonizing "earth," the human sphere, with the life of "heaven," God's sphere.

Jesus was and is the starting point. And the goal!