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Some words to savour from N.T. Wright on Romans 5:12-21

The overwhelming impression left by these verses is the superabundance of grace. However much theologians and preachers know this with their heads, and explain it as a theory, it remains strange and surprising that it should actually be true, that it should be the central characteristic of the world in which we – even theologians and preachers! – are called to live. Surrounded as we are day by day with so many signs and symbols of sin and death, and living in a culture that has invented a secularized version of the doctrine of Original Sin under the guise of the hermeneutic of suspicion, all our instincts tell us that life is hard, cruel and unfair. If there are signs of life and hope, they tend to be those we make for ourselves. Our culture thus oscillates between despair and self-salvation.

Into this world the news of grace, of the undeserved gift of abundant life, bursts again and again, in the message of Jesus, offering a radical alternative, an entirely different way of construing reality, a new way of conceiving our whole experience of the world and indeed of God. At every point where the seeds of wickedness have been planted, bearing deadly fruits of all kinds, there the grace of God has been planted alongside, a vibrant plant that will take over the soil and produce a life-giving harvest. Of course, it takes faith to believe this and act on it; precisely the faith that believes God raised Jesus from the dead, and that therefore his cross was indeed “the free gift following many trespasses”, “the one man’s obedience”. But once the world has been glimpsed in this light, everything is different, not least Christian mission and the prayer that accompanies it.

Wright, N.T. 2002 Romans. Abingdon.

Dogmatics is the system of the knowledge of God as he has revealed himself in Christ; it is the system of the Christian religion. And the essence of the Christian religion consists in the reality that the creation of the Father, ruined by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God and re-created by the grace of the Holy Spirit into a kingdom of God. Dogmatics shows us how God, who is all sufficient in himself, nevertheless glorifies himself in his creation, which even when it is torn apart by sin, is gathered up again in Christ (Eph. 1:10). It describes for us God, always God, from beginning to end – God in his being, God in his creation, God against sin, God in Christ, God breaking down all resistance through the Holy Spirit and guiding the whole of creation back to the objective he decreed for it: the glory of his name. Dogmatics, therefore, is not a dull and arid science. It is a theodicy, a doxology to all God’s virtues and perfections, a hymn of adoration and thanksgiving, a “glory to God in the highest” (Luke 2:14).

Bavinck, H. 2003 Reformed Dogmatics Volume One: Prologemena. Baker Academic.

The earth goes round the sun. Jesus is the hero of the play, and we are the bit-part players, the Fifth servant and Seventh Footman who come on for a moment, say one word, and disappear again, proud to have shared his stage, and, for a moment, been a tiny part in his action.

Wright, T. 2009 Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision. SPCK.