What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, 'thick description' history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture.

Faith can't be forced, but unfaith can be challenged. That is how it has always been, from the very beginning, when people have borne witness to Jesus's resurrection.

It is of course only through imagery, through metaphor and symbol, that we can imagine the new world that God intends to make. That is right and proper. All our language about the future, as I have said, is like a set of signposts pointing into a bright mist. The signpost doesn't provide a photograph of what we will find when we arrive but offers instead a true indication of the direction we should be traveling in. What

Skepticism is no more "neutral" or "objective" than faith. It has thrived in the post-Enlightenment world, which didn't want God (or, in many cases, anyone else either) to be king. Saying this doesn't, of course, prove anything in itself. It just suggests that we keep an open mind and recognize that skepticism too comes with its own agenda.

the word the early Christians used for "faith" can also mean "loyalty" or "allegiance.

The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last.

We see through a glass darkly, says St. Paul as he peers toward what lies ahead. All our language about future states of the world and of ourselves consists of complex pictures that may or may not correspond very well to the ultimate reality. But that doesn't mean it's anybody's guess or that every opinion is as good as every other one.

obvious Greek term for "loyalty" is one of Paul's favorite words, pistis, regularly translated "faith," but often carrying the overtones of "faithfulness," "reliability," and, yes, "loyalty.

Christian faith isn't a general religious awareness. Nor is it the ability to believe several unlikely propositions. It is certainly not a kind of gullibility which would put us out of touch with any genuine reality. It is the faith which hears the story of Jesus, including the announcement that he is the world's true Lord, and responds from the heart with a surge of grateful love that says: "Yes. Jesus is Lord.

Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

Thus it won't do to say there is nothing that can be done to improve matters before Jesus returns. Yes, the second coming will accomplish all sorts of things of which at present we can only dream. I do not expect to see the wolf lying down with the lamb within the present state of creation, and if I were to meet a lion in the street (fortunately, an unlikely event in eastern Scotland), I would not rely on its having read Isaiah 11 and knowing that it should now be vegetarian.

Hope" in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.