Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: From N.T. Wright's Surprised By Hope, which I find to be in all ways a remarkable book. It's somewhere, so far as I can tell, between his short, non-technical books and his very technical ones. His hermeneutic is rich: philology, philosophy, history, a strong reading of the text, the relevant context. What I like most about him is his ability to turn from very analytic discussion (his philology on 1 Corinthians 15 dismantles a lot of bad thinking about the passage) to the real, this-worldly implications of that more abstract discussion. Thus, on the too-well-known 1 Corinthians 13:

It is this future emphasis, the stress that what we are at the moment is incomplete, that turns Paul's poem on love away from being mere moralism ("please try harder to behave like this!") and into something altogether stronger and more powerful. We all know that it's no good simply telling people to love one another. One more exhortation to love, to patience, to forgiveness, may remind us of our duty. But as long as we think of it as duty we aren't very likely to do it.

[two excised paragraphs on the interrelation between forgiveness of sins and forgiving others]

Of course, in our incomplete world God's gentle offer and demand press upon us as fearful things, almost threatening. But God's offer and demand are neither fearful nor threatening. God in his gentle love longs to set us free from the prison we have stumbled into--the loveless prison where we refuse both the offer and the demand of forgiveness. We are like a frightened bird before him, shrinking away lest this demand crush us completely. But when we eventually yield--when he corners us and finally takes us in his hand--we find to our astonishment that he is infinitely gentle and that his only aim is to release us from our prison, to set us free to be the people he made us to be. But when we fly out into the sunshine, how can we not then offer the same gentle gift of freedom, of forgiveness, to those around us? That is the truth of the resurrection, turned into prayer, turned into forgiveness and remission of debts, turned into love. It is constantly surprising, constantly full of hope, constantly coming to us from God's future to shape us into the people through whom God can carry out his work in the world.