How God Became King - 1d The Plot Thickens: Twentieth-Century Scholarly Trends
How God Became King - 1d The Plot Thickens: Twentieth-Century Scholarly Trends
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Plot Thickens: Twentieth-Century Scholarly Trends So far I have confined myself to personal observations. But I believe the problem I have highlighted resonates across the whole field of Bible reading, scholarly and popular, in all the different traditions…
How God Became King - 2c The Hidden Underlying Challenge: Theocracy
How God Became King - 2c The Hidden Underlying Challenge: Theocracy
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Hidden Underlying Challenge: Theocracy When we examine the wider movements of thought and culture in the eighteenth century, we find something of enormous significance for understanding why the gospels were being read in the way they were…
How God Became King - 3 The Inadequate Answers
How God Became King - 3 The Inadequate Answers
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Inadequate Answers So what have the churches normally done with the ‘middle bits’, with the ‘body’ inside the ‘cloak’? I have on occasion challenged groups of clergy and laity to tell me what they or their congregations might say if asked what ‘all that stuff in the middle’ w…
How God Became King - 3c Jesus the Perfect Sacrifice
How God Became King - 3c Jesus the Perfect Sacrifice
by SPCK - N T Wright
Jesus the Perfect Sacrifice A fourth inadequate answer has tried to tie the first and the third together. The aim is still to get us to heaven, but Jesus is not just the moral exemplar – his perfect life means that he can be the perfect sacrifice…
How God Became King - 4 The Story of Israel
How God Became King - 4 The Story of Israel
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Story of Israel Imagine, if you will, that you have set up a new sound system in your living room. You have installed a quadraphonic set of speakers, one in each corner. But you haven’t yet worked out how to adjust them individually, and the sound is strange and distorted. Ea…
How God Became King - 4b Prequel and Sequel
How God Became King - 4b Prequel and Sequel
by SPCK - N T Wright
Prequel and Sequel Getting to the Heart of the Gospels In the year 1900, a book was published that changed the imagination of America. Its creator, L.Frank Baum, had stumbled into writing fantasy fiction some years before, mostly to while away time spent on the road as a travelli…
How God Became King - 4c Matthew: The Story Reaches Its Goal
How God Became King - 4c Matthew: The Story Reaches Its Goal
by SPCK - N T Wright
Matthew: The Story Reaches Its Goal The most obvious place to begin is right at the beginning – with the genealogy with which Matthew opens his book. Most of us, I suspect, probably skip this when we decide to read the New Testament right through for ourselves…
How God Became King - 5c Looking for the Right Thing
How God Became King - 5c Looking for the Right Thing
by SPCK - N T Wright
Looking for the Right Thing At this point we have to be careful and once more get some critical distance from the main streams of our own recent traditions. It all depends on looking for the right thing. It has been popular for well over a hundred years to see the explicitly high…
How God Became King - 5b The Biblical Story of God
How God Became King - 5b The Biblical Story of God
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Biblical Story of God The story the Bible tells about Israel’s God is quite different from the stories many, including many Christians, have told. In the biblical story, the creator God calls Abraham, who lived in present-day Iraq, and bids him go wandering off as a nomad in …
How God Became King - 4d Mark: Jesus and the Breaking In of God’s New World
How God Became King - 4d Mark: Jesus and the Breaking In of God’s New World
by SPCK - N T Wright
Mark: Jesus and the Breaking In of God’s New World The evangelists, each in his own way, tell the story of Jesus as the proper climax to Israel’s story. This is clear right from the start. We have already glanced at Matthew…
How God Became King - 6 The Launching of God’s Renewed People