Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 216 of 216 · 20 per page

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  See, feminists have made it okay for girls to explore what used to be an exclusively boy world. But true equality won’t come until boys learn to embrace girl stuff as well. So here’s the deal: If you want your boyfriend to treat you with respect, then tell him that you won’t sleep with him until he starts putting barrettes in his hair. And I’m not talking about secret bedroom kinky shit. Make him wear them to work! The next time he buys a pair of shoes, make sure they’re Mary Janes (and don’t forget the white lacy anklets to go with them). Because as soon as he realizes the pure bliss of wearing a frilly, pink, poofy party dress, maybe he’ll finally relax a bit and loosen up that uptight male swagger. And maybe once he lets his guard down, he’ll look around and realize that the world doesn’t revolve around him. You may think this is funny, but it’s no joke. “Girl stuff” is dangerous, so let’s use it to our advantage. We truly can change the world! Because if construction workers were man enough to wear skirts and heels, they wouldn’t whistle at women who walk by. And if misogynistic rockers and rappers were man enough to cry while watching tearjerkers, they wouldn’t need to masturbate all over the mic. And if presidents and generals were man enough to wear lip gloss and mascara, they wouldn’t have to prove their penis size by going to war all the time. Because male pride is not really about pride. It’s about fear—the fear of being seen as feminine. And that’s why “girl stuff” is so dangerous. And as long as most men remain deathly afraid of it, they’ll continue to take it out on the rest of us. 19 Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism I REMEMBER BACK IN COLLEGE—when I was admittedly rather naive with regard to gender politics—someone asked a friend of mine whether she considered herself a feminist. I was surprised to hear her answer “No.” After all, she certainly seemed like a feminist to me. She was independent, intelligent, career-minded, pro-women’s reproductive rights. She regularly stood up for herself and was keenly aware of the disparity between how certain professors treated her and how they treated her male counterparts. When she was asked why she didn’t identify as a feminist, her reply was, “I like being a girl.” She went on to explain that she enjoyed, and even felt empowered by, being feminine.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Having said all that, it is vital that we do not therefore miss the point that, in addition to referring back to Jesus himself, the gospels were telling his story in such a way as to say that this was indeed the moment when “our movement,” the early Christian “Way,” as it was sometimes called, was launched. Like Americans retelling the story of the brave pioneers who crossed the ocean and settled in a difficult and dangerous land, and doing so not merely for the sake of a good tale but in order to reinforce the sense of modern America as a country with a particular kind of risky, can-do attitude toward life, so the gospel writers told the story of Jesus in order to undergird and reinforce the Christian determination to follow him, to go on following him, to live as he lived and, if necessary, to die as he died, believing that God’s kingdom, established through his work, was becoming a reality in more and more of the world through their own lives, work, and costly witness. Once we adjust the volume on this speaker so that we can lose the distortion introduced by radical skepticism, on the one hand, and radical Lutheranism, on the other, we should be able to hear the more nuanced and distinctive notes of the early Christians celebrating the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the moment when, and the means by which, their own work took its flying instructions and got off the ground. The gospel writers were not, then, simply telling the story of Jesus in some “neutral,” “objective,” fly-on-the-wall kind of reportage. Actually, as I and others have often pointed out, there is no such thing as “neutral” reportage. All stories are told from a point of view; without that, you have no principle of selection and are left with an unsorted ragbag of information. No, the gospel writers were telling the story of Jesus, quite deliberately, in such a way as to put down markers for the life and witness of their own communities. The thing to bear in mind, though, as we adjust the volume on this third speaker, is this: just because the gospel writers were consciously telling the story of Jesus as the foundation story of the church, that doesn’t mean they weren’t telling the story of Jesus himself. Just because the sports reporter is a thoroughly biased supporter of one team rather than the other, that doesn’t mean he is allowed to get the score wrong. Another distorting pressure, however, must also be named. This is the tendency, which we have already observed, for people in our generation, both inside and outside the church, to assume that the gospels are basically about “moral teaching,” that Jesus was a moral teacher and that the gospels record his wise words. Any serious readers of the gospels will see the flaw—Jesus was not less than a “moral teacher,” but he was certainly much, much more.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  If you belong to Jesus the Messiah, if his Spirit dwells in you, if you are a worshipper of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth—then however you may feel at the moment, whether you are sick or healthy, handsome or jaded, you are simply a shadow of your future self. God intends to transform the “you” you are at the moment into a being—a full, glorious, physical being —who will be much more truly “you” than you’ve ever been before. Sin, by distorting and downgrading our specific God-given capacities and vocations, makes us more and more alike in our degradation. Jesus makes us more and more alive in our uniqueness, and the resurrection will complete that in a great act of new creation. Thomas à Kempis put it like this in his great hymn “Light’s Abode, Celestial Salem” (translated here by J. M. Neale): O how glorious and resplendent, Fragile body, shalt thou be; When endued with so much beauty, Full of health, and strong, and free; Full of vigor, full of pleasure That shall last eternally. And Jesus will do this, declares Paul (Phil. 3:20–21), by the power that enables him to submit everything to himself. Our resurrection, in other words, like the whole new creation, will come about because Jesus is king and Lord. Once you get the kingdom back in its place, everything else—Trinity, incarnation, atonement, resurrection itself—all gain in meaning. They stop trying to do jobs they were not supposed to do and can play the parts they were originally given. Conclusion: How to Read the Gospels My case throughout this book, then, is that we have all misunderstood the gospels. We have either followed the apparent implication of the great creeds and allowed ourselves to tell a pseudo-Christian story from which the story of Israel, on the one hand, and the story of God’s kingdom, on the other, have been quietly removed. Or we have formulated a concept of the kingdom that did in fact grasp God’s passion to put the world to rights, but we were then unable to integrate that with the incarnation and death of God’s own son. And to correct this misunderstanding it is not enough, not nearly enough, to affirm airily that we believe in the “canon” (many say that who, alas, continue to assume that the canon merely supports the “orthodoxy” they already know), still less that we are supporting something called “Nicene Christianity” and determining to read the Bible in that light.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Yet now even really nice women with hairpins often found their less orthodox sisters quite useful. It would be: ‘Miss Smith, do just start up my motor—the engine’s so cold I can’t get the thing going;’ or: ‘Miss Oliphant, do glance through these accounts, I’ve got such a rotten bad head for figures;’ or: ‘Miss Tring, may I borrow your British Warm? The office is simply arctic this morning!’ Not that those purely feminine women were less worthy of praise, perhaps they were more so, giving as they did of their best without stint—for they had no stigma to live down in the war, no need to defend their right to respect. They rallied to the call of their country superbly, and may it not be forgotten by England. But the others—since they too gave of their best, may they also not be forgotten. They might look a bit odd, indeed some of them did, and yet in the streets they were seldom stared at, though they strode a little, perhaps from shyness, or perhaps from a slightly self-conscious desire to show off, which is often the same thing as shyness. They were part of the universal convulsion and were being accepted as such, on their merits. And although their Sam Browne belts remained swordless, their hats and their caps without regimental badges, a battalion was formed in those terrible years that would never again be completely disbanded. War and death had given them a right to life, and life tasted sweet, very sweet to their palates. Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their holes and corners. They had found themselves—thus the whirligig of war brings in its abrupt revenges. 5Time passed; the first year of hostilities became the second while Stephen still hoped, though no nearer to her ambition. Try as she might she could not get to the front; no work at the actual front seemed to be forthcoming for women. Brockett wrote wonderfully cheerful letters. In every letter was a neat little list telling Stephen what he wished her to send him; but the sweets he loved were getting quite scarce, they were no longer always so easy to come by. And now he was asking for Houbigant soap to be included in his tuck-box. ‘Don’t let it get near the coffee fondants or it may make them taste like it smells,’ he cautioned, ‘and do try to send me two bottles of hair-wash, “Eau Athénienne,” I used to buy it at Truefitt’s.’ He was on a perfectly damnable front, they had sent him to Mesopotamia.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  In my country, the story of the Battle of Britain has become, in that sense, a “myth,” not because it didn’t happen (it did), but because the way it has been told is designed not only to remember things that happened in the early 1940s, but to celebrate something of the character of Britain as it understands itself, a little embattled offshore European island standing pluckily against tyranny and barbarism. The great debates about Darwinian evolution that have continued to be such a feature of American public life are not about the question of whether Darwinian evolution is a “myth”; there is no doubt about that. It is a powerful story told again and again in order to reinforce one particular view of the world and human life. The question is whether the “myth” corresponds to reality. Well, the question of the gospels is whether the “myth” that they convey corresponds to reality. Early Christians would have said that the test of this was the reality not simply of their historical memories, but of their community life. When they told the stories in the gospels, they told them not simply as a way of reminding one another of things that had happened, however interesting. They were reminding one another of things that had happened through which the new movement of which they were a part had come into being and through which it had gained its sense of direction. Their whole raison d’être depended on these stories. If, then, with the sound coming from the first speaker, we observed the church telling the story of Jesus as the story of how Israel’s story came to fulfillment, part of the reason for that was that this is the very foundation of the new movement that then sprang up. The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.” There was, and is, no such independent thing. The fulfillment of Israel’s story in the story of the Messiah is the foundational charter of the church. That is why I speak of the gospels as telling the story of the launching of God’s renewed people. It is wrong to imagine that the gospels (or Jesus, for that matter) were concerned with “founding the church,” which is the way some people have said it. There already was a “people of God.” We saw, with the first speaker, that the gospels were telling the story of Jesus as the climax of that people’s story. Jesus came, they indicate, to rescue and renew that people, not to destroy it and replace it with something else. Israel is to be fulfilled, not replaced. (There is of course a lot of sensitivity about this question just now, but it does no good to pretend that things are other than they are.) This phrase about “renewal” is therefore much more than a mere alternative way of saying “found the church.”

• From How God Became King (2012)

  They lord it over their subjects. The high and mighty ones boss the rest around. But that’s not how it’s going to be with you. Anyone who wants to be great among you must become your servant. Anyone who wants to be first must be everyone’s slave. Don’t you see? The son of man didn’t come to be waited on. He came to be the servant, to give his life ‘as a ransom for many.’” (Mark 10:35–45) Think, then, about the other challenges Jesus gave to his followers, not least in the Sermon on the Mount, and consider the process by which what started off as Jesus’s challenge to his contemporaries to live as the true Israel (“the light of the world,” “the salt of the earth,” “a city on top of a hill,” 5:13– 16) was transformed, by Jesus himself, into the agenda he would act out in person and then bequeath to his followers. Think, in particular, about the challenge of forgiveness and the way in which the little groups of Jesus followers that sprang up in the towns and villages he visited and that became the nucleus of the early Palestinian church had to wrestle in a new way with questions of corporate family life and discipline. Imagine how they would have read passages like this: “If another disciple sins against you,” Jesus continued, “go and have it out, just between the two of you alone. If they listen to you, you’ve won back a brother or sister. But if they won’t listen, you should take with you one or two others, so that ‘everything may be established from the mouth of two or three witnesses.’ If they won’t listen to them, tell it to the assembly. And if they won’t listen to the assembly, you should treat such a person like you would a Gentile or a tax-collector. I’m telling you the truth: whatever you tie up on earth will have been tied up in heaven; and whatever you untie on earth will have been untied in heaven. “Again, let me tell you the truth: if two of you come to an agreement on earth about any matter that you want to ask, it will be done for you by my father in heaven. Yes: where two or three come together in my name, I’ll be there in the midst of them.” (Matt. 18:15–20) If the little groups that were left behind in the towns and villages during Jesus’s public career needed that kind of assurance, how much more would the communities that grew up in the aftermath of Jesus’s death and resurrection? Here, again and again, the evangelists are telling the story of Jesus with an eye, rightly and properly, toward the communities they know will be reading these books as the foundational documents of their corporate life. The needs of the developing church were many and varied, and we can see the four gospels meeting those needs in different ways.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It is because of that perception of “scholarship” that many theologians in our own day have tried to make a virtue of ignoring “historical” scholarship and reading the New Testament in other ways. They have waited long enough, they say, and all the biblical scholars have given them is historical fragments. So they will put all that to one side and read the canon of scripture as a whole. What’s more—this is a fairly new move, but it’s gaining ground in some circles—they will read the New Testament in the light of the church’s ancient creeds. “Nicene Christianity”—that’s the criterion. Nicaea, after all, clearly taught the incarnation of Jesus (challenged by many biblical scholars), his atoning death (questioned by many), his resurrection (denied by many), and so on. It represents a historic landmark; this is how our forebears understood the faith! Give us the canon, give us the creeds, and we will drive the old car down the road in fine style rather than handing it over to those mechanics who only want to take it apart. In this brave new posthistorical or even antihistorical world, canon and creed are supposed to be made for one another. One eloquent writer puts it like this, opposing the view that the creeds are simply the record of ancient squabbles now resolved: “Creed is more than putting out theological brushfires. It is letting Scripture come to its natural, two-testament expression. Just as the Old Testament leaves its father and mother and cleaves to the new, so the Scriptures cleave to the creed, and the creed to them, and they become one flesh.”* I understand the sentiment, and in many ways I applaud it. The creeds were remarkable, a unique postbiblical innovation to meet a fresh need. They have functioned as the badge and symbol of the Christian family (not for nothing is the creed referred to in Latin as a symbolum) for a millennium and a half. They are more than merely a list of things we happen to believe. Saying we believe these things marks us out as standing in continuity with those who went before us as well as with those around the world who today, in other places very different from our own, share this common faith and life.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  We can see here both the specific and unrepeatable elements in the commission and the shape of a much longer-lasting missionary movement. The time-bound elements include the restriction on territory (not going to Gentiles, as in v. 5—a restriction specifically lifted in 28:19, for which see below) and the restriction on time (an urgent mission that won’t have been completed before “the son of man comes,” which seems to be a reference to the climactic events at the end of the gospel story). Equally, there are elements here that we would be right to assume relate to the period after Jesus’s public career is over. We have no reason to suppose that his followers were “dragged before governors and kings” because of him, and their witness before them “and to the nations” does seem to presuppose a time after the “no Gentile” rule of verse 5 has been lifted. So too the promise of “the spirit of your father” in verse 20 would seem to indicate a postresurrection time. Matthew seems to be saying, then, that Jesus launched a mission that continues, in changed circumstances, through into the ongoing life of the church, even though it was rooted in the very specific and particular situation of his own day. We then find the mission “translated” into the postresurrection setting: Jesus came toward them and addressed them. “All authority in heaven and on earth,” he said, “has been given to me! So you must go and make all the nations into disciples. Baptize them in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Teach them to observe everything I have commanded you. And look: I am with you, every single day, to the very end of the age.” (28:18–20) It isn’t just that Jesus has lifted a temporary ban on going to the Gentiles. The point is that now, with Jesus’s death and resurrection, the rule of the king of the Jews has been established over the nations, as in Isaiah 11 and Psalms 2, 72, and 89. His followers are therefore to go and put that rule into effect. This, like the closing of all the gospels, is obviously thought of by its author as a specific charter for the life and mission of the church. Yet the point we have made by the juxtaposition of this with chapter 10 (and there is of course plenty more that we could have added) is that the postresurrection commissionings are firmly rooted in the earlier ministry of Jesus and his commissioning, then and there, of the Twelve and their associates to be Jesus’s colleagues in his kingdom work.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Israel’s long servitude in Egypt is formative not only, as we have already seen, for Israel itself, but also, if one can put it this way, for God. God remembers the covenant with Abraham, passes sentence on the enslaving Egyptians, and rescues Israel from Egypt through the amazing events of Passover under the leadership of Moses. God then gives Israel the law, to be the way of life for this rescued people. But the astonishing thing about the book of Exodus, doubly astonishing as it turns out, is that God himself accompanies the people on their journey and then gives instructions for the “tabernacle,” the holy tent or “tent of meeting,” where he will be present in their midst and where he will meet, more particularly, with Moses himself. This then precipitates a near disaster because, while Moses is up the mountain receiving the detailed commands for the construction of the tabernacle, the people rebel. They persuade Aaron, Moses’s brother, to make an idol, an image, a golden statue of a calf, so they can pretend that this is the god who has brought them out of Egypt. This primal act of rebellion nearly ruins the whole plan, but—here is the second astonishing thing—God answers Moses’s urgent prayer for forgiveness and consents to go with his people, in their midst, despite their idolatry and rebellion. The book closes with a scene not only of pure grace, but of the completion of the long circle from Genesis 1: the tabernacle is constructed, and the glory of Israel’s God comes to fill it, to live among his people as they journey to their promised land. The people of Israel are, as it were, the new humanity, on their way to take possession of their new Eden. This pattern—God intending to live among his people, being unable to because of their rebellion, but coming back in grace to do so at last—is, in a measure, the story of the whole Old Testament. Magnify that exodus story, project it onto the screen of hundreds of years of history, and you have the larger story. Solomon builds the Temple, succeeding generations either corrupt it or try to reform it, but eventually, faced with overwhelming rebellion and idolatry, God abandons the Temple at last, leaving it to its fate when the Babylonians close in.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  Here, the suffering and death of Jesus’s people is not simply the dark path they must tread because of the world’s continuing hostility toward Jesus and his message. It somehow has the more positive effect of carrying forward the redemptive effect of Jesus’s own death, not by adding to it, but by sharing in it. When we speak of the “finished work of the Messiah,” as the evangelists intend us to (as far as they were concerned, the story of Jesus was the unique turning point of all history), we are not ruling out, but rather laying the groundwork for, a missiology of kingdom and cross. Jesus has constituted his followers as those who share his work of kingdom inauguration; that is the point of his sending out of the Twelve, and then others again, even during his lifetime and far more so after his death and resurrection. But if they are to bring his kingdom in his way, they will be people who share his suffering. Reading the gospels as the launching of God’s renewed people, then, is not merely a historical note: “This was where and how our story began.” It declares too: “This is the sort of people we are: suffering kingdom-bringers, suffering kingdom-sharers.” This comes to striking expression in Luke’s account of the Last Supper. Immediately after Jesus has warned the disciples, as in Mark 10, that, whereas pagan kings lord it over their subjects, he is instituting a different way of power altogether, the way of the servant, he adds this saying: “You are the ones who have stuck it out with me through the trials I’ve had to endure. This is my bequest to you: the kingdom my father bequeathed to me! What does this mean? You will eat and drink at my table, in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (22:28–30) Then, just in case the disciples might be puffed up by such a promise, Jesus turns to Peter. Addressing him by his old name, Simon, he warns him that he is going to be tested to the limit by “the satan,” and he warns them all that tough times are ahead (22:31–38). All this demands, of course, a strong theology of the Holy Spirit as the one who dwells in Jesus’s followers and enables them in turn to be kingdom-bringers. Without that, the vocation would encourage either arrogance or despair. And that theology of the Spirit is, of course, what the New Testament supplies, on page after page.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  All these flashbacks are important. They would have been much more readily apparent to Jesus’s first followers and to Matthew’s first readers than they are to us in the de-Judaized state of our secularized imagination. But far more important than flashbacks, than the picking up of detached themes and hints from long ago, is the towering sense of a single story now at last reaching its conclusion. For much of that time, as we said a moment ago, the story looked as if it was lost, many a mile from its destination, with night falling and enemies closing in. Suddenly, out of the blue, we discover that something is happening that will turn all that around. It isn’t (we need to be very clear at this point) that things have not been as bad as we’d thought. In fact, they’ve been worse. But the new event that is now happening is precisely an event we might call rescue. A fresh initiative. It hasn’t come from within the story as it was—though, strangely, those with eyes to see will recognize that it is where the story ought to have gone all along. That’s part of the complex task the gospel writers are accomplishing: describing something as both the fulfillment of the vocation of Israel and divine judgment on the mess and the muddle that Israel’s story had become. Matthew, then, is telling his story in such a way as to say: “This is it! This is what we’ve been waiting for—even though we would never have thought it would be like this! This is where the single story of Abraham’s family, of David’s offspring, of the restoration from exile was going all along. We didn’t think it would look like this. But now that it’s happened, we can see that this is where it was supposed to be heading all along.” It didn’t just emerge from the story the way it was. The story was indeed stalled, stagnant, running out of hope. It required a fresh act of divine mercy to do what was needed. As later preachers would say about individual sinners, the only thing that Israel contributed to the story of Jesus that Matthew is telling was the particular set of muddle and rebellion from which God was now coming to free it.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  As later preachers would say about individual sinners, the only thing that Israel contributed to the story of Jesus that Matthew is telling was the particular set of muddle and rebellion from which God was now coming to free it. I hope it is clear from this that, when we turn up this first speaker, the music is telling us much more than simply that all four gospels refer to the Old Testament and present Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy. To say that sort of thing is to have the speaker turned up just far enough so that you can tell something is going on, but not far enough to be able to understand what it is. This is a point of fundamental importance for the whole New Testament and indeed the whole early Christian movement. The gospel writers saw the events concerning Jesus, particularly his kingdom-inaugurating life, death, and resurrection, not just as isolated events to which remote prophets might have distantly pointed. They saw those events as bringing the long story of Israel to its proper goal, even though that long story had apparently become lost, stuck, and all but forgotten. But, you may say, what’s the point of telling the story of Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel? What relevance has that got to the rest of the human race and to the wider world? Here we touch on another point of foundational importance for the whole of early Christian thought and life. Understand this point, and you will understand almost everything. In Israel’s scriptures, the reason Israel’s story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world. The call of Abraham is the answer to the sin of Adam. * Israel’s story is thus the microcosm and beating heart of the world’s story, but also its ultimate saving energy. What God does for Israel is what God is doing in relation to the whole world. That is what it meant to be Israel, to be the people who, for better and worse, carried the destiny of the world on their shoulders. Grasp that, and you have a pathway into the heart of the New Testament. Mark: Jesus and the Breaking In of God’s New World The evangelists, each in his own way, tell the story of Jesus as the proper climax to Israel’s story. This is clear right from the start. We have already glanced at Matthew. Mark indicates that the arrival and baptism of Jesus are the moments at which the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi of the ultimate redemption, of God’s returning to rescue his people, were at last coming true: Isaiah the prophet put it like this (“Look! I am sending my messenger ahead of me; he will clear the way for you!”): “A shout goes up in the desert: Make way for the Lord!

• From How God Became King (2012)

  That was the verdict of Ezekiel, and it is echoed by other writers of the period. But that could not be the end of the story. God had promised to come back. He had promised one final great Passover. One day, when he returned, his people would be free forever. And John, more clearly than the others, insists from the start that this promise has been made good in Jesus. The Word became flesh and kai eskenosen en hemin, “set up among us his skene, ” his “tent” (it’s the word from which we get “scene”; a theatrical backdrop is a kind of “tent” in which the action takes place). In case there was any doubt, the Greek word skene is (coincidentally?) a close echo of the Hebrew shakan, which means “dwell” or “abide”; when we read of people “abiding” with Jesus or his “abiding” with them later in John, we should almost certainly catch this echo. In particular, in postbiblical Jewish writing the idea of the presence of God in the Temple was given the name Shekinah, the “tabernacling, abiding divine presence,” the personal presence of the glory of God. So, when John continues by saying, “We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14), we should get the point loud and clear. All this means that we should be able to read John with more sensitivity to the nature of his “high Christology.” Obviously he thinks Jesus was and is fully divine (as well as fully human, but he doesn’t need to make that point in the same way). But this doesn’t mean he is simply saying “Jesus is God” in the way of some rationalist apologists. John’s “high Christology” remains very, very Jewish, very much rooted in Israel’s scriptures. His chosen vehicle for his matchless opening statement, the logos, draws not so much on Platonic or Stoic ideas as on the living Word of the Old Testament, as, for instance, in Isaiah 55, where the word goes out like rain or snow and accomplishes God’s work (55:10–11). This work, God’s great act of rescue, rooted in the accomplishment of the “ servant of the L ORD ” in chapter 53 and the renewal of the covenant in 54, brings about the new creation in 55, with the thorns and thistles of Genesis 3 and Isaiah 5 replaced by wonderful trees and shrubs (55:12–13).

• From How God Became King (2012)

  and his throne endure before me like the sun. It shall be established forever like the moon, an enduring witness in the skies.” But now you have spurned and rejected him; you are full of wrath against your anointed. You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust. You have broken through all his walls; you have laid his strongholds in ruins. All who pass by plunder him; he has become the scorn of his neighbors. You have exalted the right hand of his foes; you have made all his enemies rejoice…. How long, O YHWH? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire?… Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David? Remember, O Lord, how your servant is taunted; how I bear in my bosom the insults of the peoples, with which your enemies taunt, O YHWH, with which they taunted the footsteps of your anointed. (89:1–4, 19–29, 36–42, 46–51) But the hope persists, and psalm after psalm brings it to expression. The gods of the nations are but idols, but Israel’s God made the heavens. God reigns over the nations, God sits on his holy seat; the princes of the people gather as the people of the God of Abraham, who has subdued peoples and nations. God has established his city, and the powers of wicked pagans will not prevail against it. Again and again it comes, shaping the hearts and imaginations of God’s people even in the many centuries when these songs of praise and triumph bore no relation to the sociopolitical reality in which they were living. This is the world in which we are to hear what the gospels are trying to tell us about the story of Jesus seen as the focal point of the story of God and Caesar. God and Caesar in the Gospels But, you say, surely Caesar is only mentioned once in the gospels, and there Jesus says that there’s a clear division between God and Caesar, a split of church and state, so that never the twain shall meet. Well, not so fast. We’ll get to that. It sounds suspiciously modern. Did Jesus really anticipate post-Enlightenment Western ideology so exactly? And the objection is forgetting, in any case, the wonderful passage in John 18–19 (to which also we shall return), in which Jesus, representing God’s kingdom, confronts Pilate, representing Caesar’s. They go at it together, arguing about kingdom, truth, and power until Pilate proves Jesus’s point by having him executed with the words “King of the Jews” above his head. And once we recognize that confrontation for what it is—part of the very climax of John’s astonishing gospel—there is more. Much more.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  While I was speaking, and was praying and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before YHWH my God on behalf of the holy mountain of my God—while I was speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice. He came and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come out to give you wisdom and understanding. At the beginning of your supplications a word went out, and I have come to declare it, for you are greatly beloved. So consider the word and understand the vision: Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city: to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.” (9:1–3, 20–24) That sounds like a devastatingly depressing answer, and in a way it is. That’s a long time to wait. But the idea of “seventy times seven” has a particular ring to it, more obvious to an ancient Jew than to us today. Every seven days, they had a sabbath. Every seven years, they had a sabbatical year. And every seven-times-seven years, they had—or at least they were supposed to have had, according to Leviticus—a jubilee. This was when slaves were freed, when land sold off by the family was restored to its original owner, when things got put back as they should be. The jubilee is a fascinating social innovation within the legislation of ancient Israel, a sign that relentless buying and selling of land, goods, and even people won’t be the last word. But seventy times seven? That sounds like a jubilee of jubilees! So, though four hundred and ninety years—nearly half a millennium—is indeed a long time, the point is this: when the time finally arrives, it will be the greatest “redemption” of all. This will be the time of real, utter, and lasting freedom. That is the hope that sustained the Israelites in the long years of the centuries before the time of Jesus. It is normally assumed that the book of Daniel reached its final form during the first half of the second century BC, around the time of the Maccabean crisis, when Judas Maccabeus and his family led a successful resistance against the Syrian invasion. And so, with Daniel 9 in mind, learned scribes were calculating and recalculating, asking when the seventy sevens would be fulfilled. When will the real return from exile happen?

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And—not least—about how we then might order our life and work in accordance with them. The problem of forgetting what the gospels are about is not confined to one segment of the church. Different branches—Catholic, Protestant, Reformed, charismatic, evangelical, liberal, social-gospel, and the many segments of church life that bear two or more of these rather misleading labels at the same time—come at things from different angles. Naturally. But it is my belief that all of them, over many centuries now, have backed off from facing the full challenge of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It would be fascinating to chart the ways in which different parts of the church have read (and, in my view, misread) the gospels. But that would require a different sort of book and is in any case way beyond my competence. Instead, I want to come at the question from the angle of the parts of the church I know best. After nearly twenty years in senior ministerial roles in the Church of England, seven of them as Bishop of Durham, and with fairly wide experience of traditions very different from my own, I think what I have to say reflects not a narrow or idiosyncratic viewpoint, but one at which many Christians from many traditions will nod with recognition. The question, then, is not only: Can we learn to read the gospels better, more in tune with what their original writers intended? It is also: Can we discover, by doing this, a new vision for God’s mission in the world, in and through Jesus, and then—now!—in and through his followers? And, in doing so, can we grow closer together in mission and life, in faith and hope, and even in love? Might a fresh reading of the gospels, in other words, clear the way for renewed efforts in mission and unity? Is that what it would look like if we really believed that the living God was king on earth as in heaven? That, after all, is the story all four gospels tell. I am aware, of course, that there are other documents that have been called “gospels,” and I shall say something about them in passing. But I am here dealing with the four that were recognized, from very early on, as part of the church’s “rule of life,” that is, part of the “canon”: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the story that the four evangelists tell is the story, as in my title, of “how God became king.” This, I discover, comes as a surprise to most people, and an unwelcome shock to some. It appears, as we say today, counterintuitive; that is, the claim that God has become king doesn’t seem to square with the world as we know it. “If God is really king, why is there still cancer?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Some of them are of a personal nature—for instance, I now identify as bisexual rather than lesbian, and have written about that change in my identity and activism in Excluded . 11 Transgender identity labels are always evolving: Certain ones that I mention here (e.g., “trannyboi”) have largely disappeared, whereas others not discussed in this text (e.g., “agender”) have since become more common. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—which is cited in several chapters, as its trans woman-exclusion policy had been a focus of my early activism—apparently just held their final festival; sadly, they never did welcome trans women. 12 I talk at great length here about two trans-specific diagnoses in the DSM (the so-called “psychiatric bible”): gender identity disorder and transvestic fetishism . Recently, a new DSM (the fifth revision) has been published, and these diagnoses have morphed into gender dysphoria and transvestic disorder , respectively—I discuss this revision process and the resulting diagnoses at great length in my third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism . 13 On a more positive front, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA) is now the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and they recently elected their first transgender president (Jamison Green); they still publish the Standards of Care, which are now far more flexible and trans-friendly than the archaic versions that I describe in Chapter 7 . I also discuss Ray Blanchard’s theory of “autogynephilia” at several points in this book—I went on to write several additional critical reviews of the theory, and numerous research papers have since been published by others, which together demonstrate that the theory is incorrect (although unfortunately and unsurprisingly, some people still cite the concept in order to invalidate trans women’s identities). 14 Perhaps the biggest change since Whipping Girl was published in 2007 has been media coverage and depictions of trans people. Back then, such considerations were not only few and far between, but they were almost exclusively the creations of cisgender people, and rarely included actual transgender perspectives. While trans-related media representations are still far from perfect, to day’s trans characters are more likely to have some basis in reality, and they are increasingly portrayed by trans actors. 15 News stories in mainstream publications about serious issues faced by trans people are not only far more frequent, they are often penned by trans writers. In recent years, mainstream audiences have heard celebrity trans people such as Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Laura Jane Grace, Chaz Bono, and most recently Caitlyn Jenner, share their first-hand experiences and discuss issues that impact trans communities.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  And we must never forget, though many today do, that in the ancient scriptural picture of the messiah he is king not only of Israel but, like David and Solomon (at least in principle and in rose-tinted memory), of the whole world. Here again the Psalms are central; Psalms 2, 72, and other similar ones made sure the vision remained fresh in a liturgically oriented worshipping people. But, in the texts that first-century Jews read, prayed, sang, and pondered, there were various visions of how God’s “theocracy,” his worldwide kingdom, would come into reality and (not least) what it might look like when it did. Some people, it seems, really did want a “theocracy” not too far removed from what we see in some parts of the world today. Simeon ben Kosiba (a.k.a. bar-Kochba), the great would-be messiah of the 130s AD, seems to have tried to establish that kind of divine rule. Others were not so sure. But because the Jews believed that (as we find in books such as Daniel and Jeremiah) God’s will for his people in exile was that they live wisely within the pagan world where they found themselves, and because they believed that God was ultimately sovereign (in ways that are normally invisible) over those nations, they were able to develop a theological account of the comings and goings of pagan nations and their rulers as well as a subversive literature and lifestyle designed to critique the pagan rulers, to encourage the faithful, and to warn of God’s ultimate judgment. (That literature included what may be called “apocalyptic,” coded and symbolic writing about the powers of the world and the powers of God, intending to “reveal” or “unveil” the hidden divine truth behind the outward realities of power and empire.) But within Israel itself there were problems too. The corrupt pseudoaristocracy of the high-priestly family, the fake monarchs of the Hasmonean and then Herodian families, and different movements of reform and revolution and various stages in between—none of this offered a real sense of completion, of God’s best will for the world coming into view at last. That sense of incompleteness, of an unfinished story, was not simply a matter of texts. It was a matter of a whole society struggling to see its way forward, clinging to the institutions of Temple and Torah and the festivals that embraced both, hoping that somehow the sovereign creator God would take his power and reign in the way he had always promised. Hoping, in fact, for a new exodus.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And indeed it did, when my new agent, Felicity Bryan, managed at about this time to find a publisher for A History of God. Helen Fraser of Heinemann, who had been at St. Anne’s with me and had even made a brief appearance in Through the Narrow Gate, offered a modest advance, and we agreed that I would submit the manuscript sometime in 1992. We decided to wait until after the book was finished before trying to find an American publisher, when Felicity felt that we would have a better chance. I was delighted. With the money that I was beginning to earn from reviewing and writing the occasional article, I could just keep afloat financially. But most important, I felt that I now had a future. I settled down to work with a greater sense of purpose and direction, looking forward to two years of uninterrupted research. But in February 1990, this tidy program was interrupted by a new confrontation with the Islamic world. Fresh from my study of the Crusades, I found myself preoccupied by one news story in particular. Everybody in literary London was talking about the plight of Salman Rushdie, who was now approaching the end of his first year in hiding. His novel The Satanic Verses, which included a portrait of the prophet Muhammad that many Muslims found blasphemous, had caused riots in Pakistan, and Muslims in Bradford, in northern England, had ceremonially burned the novel, raising the fearful specter of the Inquisition and the book burnings of the Nazis. On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa, condemning Rushdie and his publishers to death. In hiding, Rushdie had become a martyr for the sacred principle of free speech, and the fatwa was a prime example of the cruel religious certainty that I had come to loathe. Of course, I believed that Rushdie had the right to publish what he chose. But I was also shocked by the raw pain experienced by the more thoughtful Muslims, who condemned the fatwa and the book burning but tried to explain to us why the novel had occasioned such outrage. They spoke of this insult to their Prophet in startling imagery—as a violation, a rape, or as a knife through the heart. Even though this reaction initially seemed excessive, it struck a chord with me. I myself had felt violated and undermined when people had preferred their own fictitious interpretations to my own version of events that were central to my life and identity. And I remembered the Golden Rule. If I had felt this type of pain, I should not inflict it on others. How would we in the West like our traditions misrepresented in this manner? The Satanic Verses itself was a brilliant and sympathetic study of the way this kind of prejudice turned people into monsters. And I felt a pang of fear for the future.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  First, they recognized that gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation were all separate traits, and that gender and sexual minorities arise as a result of natural variation in these traits rather than from pathology. Second, they realized that past gatekeeping efforts to sort out who is “really trans” from those who supposedly are not had failed miserably. Since there is no test (medical, psychological, or otherwise) to determine whether any given person is indeed trans, it’s vital to listen to a person’s own self-account of who they are and what they require. The efficacy of this approach is supported by the third conclusion: Study after study has shown that gender-affirming medical interventions (such as hormones and surgery) have a very low rate of regret, typically around 1 or 2 percent; in contrast, a systematic review of seventy-three studies examining regret in a variety of non-trans-related surgeries found a regret rate of 14.4 percent. 6 In other words, gatekeepers’ fears that cisgender people might mistakenly or recklessly seek out trans-related procedures remain unfounded. Fourth, recent studies have shown that gender-disaffirming approaches are not only ineffective, but harmful. Trans youth whose genders are disaffirmed by family, peers, and in school settings experience a host of short-term and long-term negative outcomes, including low self-esteem and life satisfaction, increased depression, self-harm, isolation, homelessness, posttraumatic stress, and an attempted suicide rate up to fourteen times higher than those whose identities are affirmed. 7 Gender conversion efforts have also been shown to be associated with increased psychological distress and suicidality, which is why most professional health organizations now oppose them. 8 Taken together, these conclusions led trans health practitioners away from paternalistic “doctor knows best” attitudes, and toward listening to their trans clients to figure out what they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. For adults, this has meant a shift away from strict gatekeeping and toward informed consent. For children, it has led to the development of the gender affirmative model, which typically takes the following form: If a child is gender-diverse in some way, rather than being shamed by their families and coerced into gender conformity, they are instead given the space to explore their gender. If they persistently, insistently, and consistently identify as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, then their identity will be respected and they may socially transition (e.g., adopt their preferred name, pronouns, and gender presentation, and live as a member of that gender).