Quotes from Christopher Wright

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.

To dwell in love with saints above— Oh that will be glory! But to dwell below with saints we know— Ah! That's a different story!

It is well known that great art, great music and great literature can emerge out of great pain. This does not lessen the reality of the suffering of the artist, composer or writer, but it points to something creative and redemptive in the human person, made in the image of God, which can bring forth a thing of beauty in the midst of surrounding ugliness, brutality and evil. Nowhere is this more true than in the book of Lamentations.

If our mission is to share good news, we need to be good news people. If we preach transformation, we need to show some evidence of what transformation looks like.

The power imbalance between male and female, the fear between God and humans and the enmity between humans and nature, are all described in Genesis 2 and 3 as originating not in the nature of things as God intended them to be, but rather in the collusion of Adam, Eve and the serpent, who together deny the goodness and sufficiency of the garden and distrust the good intentions of the creator.

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.

the dangerous result is that theology proceeds without missional input or output, while mission proceeds without theological guidance or evaluation.

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.

Since the primary manifestation of Yahweh is Israel itself, any misconstruction of Israel entails a misconstruction of Yahweh.

The Ten Commandments can be seen as given in order to preserve the rights and freedoms gained by the exodus, by translating them into responsibilities.

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.

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'.