A 'conservative believer' must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.

Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.

Death is a monster; death is horrible.

Heard in full sound, the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy, and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

Love is not just tolerance. It's not just distant appreciation. It's a warm sense of, 'I am enjoying the fact that you are you.'

The Bible is the book of my life. It's the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by.

To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply personal for every single Christian; nobody gets lost in the kingdom of God. But you can't play that off against the corporate dimension.

From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn't see things in this horribly oversimplified way.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

I work in a very tough area of Britain. There is not much hope sociologically where I live and work, they're all sorts of conditions of poverty and deprivation and so on, I really do believe that the message of the kingdom of God is for places like this.

I'm not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols - money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol - you become like what you worship. That's one of the basic spiritual laws.

It's very easy for a church just to slide along from week to week, taking it for granted that we do our services like this and that, and we celebrate the sacraments like this and that.

Most of the things that really matter require faith. 'How do I know that my wife loves me?' 'How do I know that Mozart's 'Jupiter Symphony' is sublime and beautiful?' There are all sorts of things which come at a more lowly level than that - 'How do I know that two plus two equals four?' There are different layers, different types of knowing.

Of course there are people who think of 'heaven' as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.

One of the things I find depressing about some of the upper echelons of Anglicanism on both sides of the Atlantic is that it's sort of taken for granted that we all basically know what's in the Bible, and so we just glance at a few verses for devotional purposes and then get on to the real business.

People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified - in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that.