These Books Explain The Cosmic Meaning of "Salvation"

Excerpts from NT Wright's "The New Testament and the People of God" 

Why You Should Read This Book

• "The works of Torah [the law] were not a legalist's ladder, up which one climbed to earn the divine favour, but were the badges that one wore as the marks of identity, of belonging to the chosen people in the present, and hence the all-important signs, to oneself and one's neighbors, that one belonged to the company who would be vindicated when the covenant God acted to redeem His people...."

• "Abraham's people are to be the means of undoing primeval sin and its consequences. This belief is a basic assumption throughout Jewish literature of [the 2nd Temple] period...."

• "The creator God has found a way of restoring His world: he has chosen a people through whom He will act...."

• "The most natural meaning of the phrase 'forgiveness of sins' to a first century Jew is not in the first instance a remission of individual sins, but the putting away of the whole nations's sins..."

• "Romans 8:18-27 speaks of the whole creation experiencing a great exodus of which the biblical exodus will be simply a foretaste. 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 speaks of the messianic kingdom of Jesus which, already inaugurated, will finally be consummated with the abolition of death itself, and the subjection of everything that exists to Jesus, and finally to the true God."

• Read what men and women from all over the world are discussing on the NT Wright chat group on Yahoo.
  
  Join the group by clicking this button:

Excerpts from "Salvation" by Joel B. Green 

• "From the standpoint of a theological reading of the Bible as a whole, however, it is pivotal that we not underestimate the witness of Genesis 1... Creation for humanity thus entails gift and vocation, identity, and call... One might say on this basis that christology is first anthropology, that we have in Christ the measure of authentic personhood."

• "Humanity is given the divine mandate to reflect God's own covenant love in relation with God, within the covenant community, and with all that God has created."
  

• "Throughout [the Bible] application of the concept of salvation presumes a vision of life in its fullness from which human beings have departed and to which we can be restored... So significant is the portrait of humanity found here that, in the end, I will insist that salvation means nothing less, but nothing more, than our becoming fully and genuinely human."

• "According to the synoptic gospels, some who recognized Jesus' status as a healer did not see in his work divine credentials. Instead, they attributed his ministry of exorceism to his association with Satan. In dialogue with those persons, Jesus interprets his exorcisms as a sign of the work of the Spirit in his mission, and as a demonstration of God's kingdom at work among them (Mt 12:24-33; Mk 2:22-30; Lk 11:14-26). Here, as elsewhere, the healing ministry of Jesus is portrayed as a sign of the in-breaking kingdom of God, as the divine blessings of salvation come near in the ministry of Jesus."

• "Exodus is alive in the memory of God's people, not only as historic event but also as the lens through which to make sense of present experience and as motif within which to shape future hopes... [sic] weshould observe the degree to which exodus from Egypt has been cast in terms borrowed from creation... Liberation appears as new creation."

• "Even more important than these hints of Jesus' status as the new Moses (cf Deut 18:15-18), however, is the evidence Matthew provides that Jesus embraces the role of true Israel, together with the many echoes to Israel's scriptures urging the view that, with Jesus' advent, the hoped-for new exodus has begun. For example, with regard to Jesus' exile in Egypt, Matthew declares that the child is thus replicating the historic journey of Israel. Citing Hosea 11:1, a text that speaks of Israel's escape from its oppressors in the ancient past, Matthew writes, 'This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, Out of Egypt have I called my son' (Mt. 2:15)".

• Use this link to find this and other important Christian books.

Excerpts from "Jesus and the Gospel of Judas" 

by NT Wright

• "John's Jesus stands before Pilate, Caesar's representative, and declares that he is indeed a king, though not of the same type as Caesar. His kingship is not from this world; that is its origin is elsewhere; but it certainly is for this world. And John's gospel ends, as they all do only more so, not with an escapist spirituality embodied by Jesus and now to be imitatted by his followers, but with the note of creation renewed and of Jesus as its Lord and God".
• "Let's be clear, then. The Christians who died in Gaul in 177, and the thousands who died around the whole Roman Empire in that century, were not reading "Thomas" or "Peter" or the "Gospel of Judas". They were reading, quoting, praying and signing Matthew, Mark, Luke and John- the texts which nurtured their vivid faith in Jesus, not as a revealer of secret truths to help them escape the wicked world, but as the Lord they knew and loved (Iranaeus writes vividly and movingly about this), the one whose death and resurrection had unleashed a new power into the world, into people's lives, giving them hope not for a disembodied spiritual bliss in a non-spatio-temporal world but for the resurrection of the body in the renewal of the created order, a renewal which had already begun and was already making inroads into the real world."
• "It is a shame that the churches have been so muzzled, so often self-blind to the full dimensions of the gospel they profess, the gospel of Jesus himself. In that gospel, we discover a Jewish message intended for the whole world: a message about a creator God who loved the world so much he called the Jewish people to be the bearer of its salvation, and at the fullness of the times sent the Jewish Messiah to carry out that saving purpose; a message about this Messiah inaugurating the sovereign, wise, healing kingship of this creator God, in his actions and teaching and supremely and decisively in his death and resurrection; a message about the future copmpletion of the new creation which began in the events concerning Jesus, a message guaranteed by those events, and to be put into operation by the power of the life-giving Spirit of this same creator God...".

Excerpts from "Dispensationalism: Rightly Dividing the People of God"New Text List 

Put an End to Rapture Thinking

"Dispensationalism: Rightly Dividing the People of God?"

• "It can not legitimately be argued that this age is a 'parenthesis'. God has not 'suspended' his purpose for national Israel. He has fulfilled it and is fulfilling it in the true Israel, the Church. The kingdom of God was taken from Israel as a nation and given to the true Israel (Matthew 21:43; cf Luke 12:32)."

• "No text in the entire Bible tells us that God will rapture the Church out of the world seven years before the second coming of Christ."

• "True Christians are thus faced with a choice. The decision is whether to submit to the compelling witness of scripture or to continue believing in a doctrinal system void of biblical basis simply because that system is what one has always been taught."

• "The New Covenant is perhaps the clearest example of a promise made to national Israel that is now being fulfilled in and by the Church...."