Quotes from Christopher Wright

The church was made for mission-God's mission

Legalism at one extreme (keep all the rules) and license at the other (reject any rules) are both completely wrong answers to the question of how Christians should live.

It is important to understand that Paul is not just using Abraham as an illustration of the gospel or of his teaching about justification by grace through faith. No, Abraham is the beginning of the gospel.

The tragedy of polytheism and idolatry is not the arithmetic (many gods instead of one), but that they exchange the only true source of salvation for lifeless and powerless substitutes, and in doing so, introduce injustice, bondage, and cruelty into human life (cf. Rom. 1:21—32).

It does appear, then, that what you find in the landscape of the Old Testament when you 'get there' very much depends on whom you take with you and through whose eyes you view it.

Evil and sin weave their way into every aspect of God's creation and every dimension of human personhood and life on earth.

There is one voice we never hear. God does not speak in the whole book of Lamentations.11 Heaven is silent. Which does not necessarily mean that heaven is deaf or blind. We shall consider later what Kathleen O'Connor calls 'the power of the missing voice'.

To argue that because Old Testament law does not prescribe explicit penalties related to infringement of its economic legislation, therefore modern civil authorities are excluded from any form of intervention in the economic marketplace betrays both the inadequacy of theonomism's preoccupation with penalties and also, in my view, its ideological bias towards unfettered, free-market economic capitalism.

The God who walks the paths of history through the pages of the Bible pins a mission statement to every signpost on the way.

This feature of Israelite law stands in sharp contrast to many ancient law codes where certain thefts by certain people were punishable by death. Indeed, it contrasts with British law until fairly recent times (people were hanged for sheep-stealing in Britain until the nineteenth century). On the other hand, as mentioned above, theft of a person for gain (kidnapping) was a capital offence in Israel (21:16; Deut. 24:7). Stealing a human life was different from stealing property.

Mission arises from the heart of God himself, and is communicated from his heart to ours. Mission is the global outreach of the global people of a global God.

Our mission is nothing less (or more) than participating with God in this grand story until he brings it to its guaranteed climax.