N. T. Wright is the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England.  He is a leading theologian that I am reading and learning to appreciate more and more.  In the above interview he offers the following piece of advice:

I want you to know your bibles, inside-out, upside-down, in the original languages, as thoroughly as you possibly can.

I want you to get on your knees and learn how to prayer, and not just five minutes here and there, but serious prayer for a lost world, for lost people…

I want you to learn how to love people…

If you are going to be a Christian leader …… The Bible, Prayer, and Loving people

 

So there you have it, wise words from a wise man.  Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.

The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God; the more we learn about the cross, in all its historical and theological dimensions, the more we discover about the one in whose image we are made, and hence about our own vocation to be the cross-bearing people, the people in whose lives and service the living God is made known. When therefore we speak... of shaping our world, we do not - we dare not - simply treat the cross as the thing which saves us 'personally', but which can be left behind when we get on with the job. The task of shaping our world is best understood as the redemptive task of bringing the achievement of the cross to bear on the world; and in that task the methods, as well as the message, must be cross-shaped through and through.

Hailed as a modern version of C.S.Lewis' "Mere Christianity", NT  Wright's work strikes me, not so much as an apologetic of the Christian faith (although it could indeed be that) but as a gift to the Church to help her be the Church.  The central theme of the book is that there are four fundamental longings of the human heart, which Wright describes as "echoes of a voice":  a longing of justice, a quest for spirituality, a need for relationship, and a delight in beauty.  These four echoes resonate hauntingly within human hearts and are "strange signposts pointing beyond the landscape of our contemporary culture and into the unknown" we hear these echoes, but not the voice.... we seem to grasp them... but alas they slip away! - At the end of this road we find that those signposts point us to this one speaker whose voice we heard only as faint haunting echoes.....Jesus.  In Jesus we find our longing for justice fulfilled, our quest for spirituality satisfied, our need for relationship completed and our delight in beauty realized. If these four "echoes" are its central theme, Wright addresses these within a framework of different views of Heaven (he calls them "options"). Option 1 is the pantheistic image of everything on earth carrying the divine. Option 2 is the root of the deist and gnostic image of heaven being a very beautiful place very far away and separated from this cruel and dark world - with the divine sometimes intervening in human affairs. Option 3 is the Judeo-Christian view of Heaven being different to Earth but near, indeed overlapping and intersecting it at specific times and in specific places. It is amazing how much of the first two options have inadvertently crept into Christian thought and theology, providing for very unhelpful attitudes, thoughts and positions. This Option-3 framework sets the tone and tempo for much of Wright's ensuing work. It is critical for the reader to grasp this if the book is going to make a lasting impact on him or her. It is this big vision of Heaven being a real place that intersects and overlaps Earth, and God's ultimate purpose of joining these two together to be one, that in my opinion makes for a great work by this theological heavyweight. It is within this framework, in my opinion, that the tenets of the Christian message and mission start to make remarkable sense: God is indeed intending to put the world to rights (justice) and remarkably has already begun to do this, firstly in the resurrection of Jesus (an advance signpost and prototype of the general "Resurrection" at the end of the age), and secondly in the ongoing work and mission of the Church. In Part-2 of this blog post we shall cover the specific instances where Heaven meets Earth in the life of the Church!

The line between justice and injustice, between things being right and things not being right, can't be drawn between "us" and "them". It runs right down the middle of each one of us.

Simply Christian by N. T. (Tom) Wright.