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Everyone wants to be happy. They may not always agree on what happiness is, and they certainly do not always agree on how to experience it. But whatever it is, they want it. So do you. “All men seek happiness,” wrote Blaise Pascal. “This is without exception. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal … This is the end of every act of every man, including those who go and hang themselves.”So it is not surprising that an awful lot of books have been written on the subject. There are books on happy habits, brains, diets and chemicals; books on happy families, philosophies and religions; books on the science of happiness, the sociology of happiness, the theology of happiness and the history of happiness; books on how you can be happy if you really want to be, and books on how you will actually be happier if you stop trying to be. In such a flooded landscape of ideas, anyone releasing a new book on the subject - which I will be next year, with the title Happiness: What It Is, Where To Find It, And How To Make It Last Forever - had better explain themselves. The book is an attempt to bring together three types of writing on happiness. All three types have influenced me in important ways, but they are almost always kept separate from one another. The first type is biblical and pastoral, in which the case is made from Scripture that God is happy and wants us to find our highest joy in him. The second type is theological and philosophical, and mounts an argument for considering happiness as the result of living a virtuous, loving and good life, in dialogue with Christian theologians and ancient and modern philosophers. The third type is psychological and sociological, full of studies and charts and all kinds of practical recommendations on how to live a happier life. The second and especially the third types often have bright yellow covers. The first type never does.  Some writers combine two of these three genres. C. S. Lewis, who wrote about joy in most of his books, bridges the first and the second. Jonathan Haidt is an influential example of someone who blends the second and the third. But I am seeking to integrate all three. I am convinced we can learn from pastors, theologians, philosophers and psychologists on the subject of joy—and that some of our greatest thinkers, from Paul to Augustine to Pascal to Lewis, were comfortable wearing any of these various hats if the situation required it. I have also found it both intriguing and encouraging to discover how often the best thinkers in each category are saying very similar things. Structurally, the book is organized around six questions: why, what, who, when, where and how. I start by considering why enjoyment is possible, rooted in what Scripture says about the character and purposes of God (chapter one). Then I explore what happiness actually is, and how the wide range of words we use for it overlap and differ from one another (chapter two), before looking at who we are, and how our bodies, souls, natures, minds, emotions and brains collaborate—or not—in our desire to rejoice (chapter three). In the next two chapters I think about the when and the where of enjoyment, drawing from Ecclesiastes and the Psalms in particular to reflect on how happiness relates first to time (chapter four), and then to space (chapter five). I finish in chapter six with the very practical question that most people are asking: how we can actually rejoice in the Lord, live the good life, and experience joy. It will be out next summer, published by Crossway. Enjoy.

Quoting from The West Wing in 2025 is a sure sign of one’s advancing age. Indulge me. About the only conservative character portrayed sympathetically in the show is Ainsley Hayes, a young Republican lawyer (and she only appears in twelve of the 154 episodes). Here she is debating her boss over that touchstone of left-right disagreement: gun control. Sam Seaborn: It’s not about personal freedom, and it certainly has nothing to do with public safety. It’s just that some people like guns. Ainsley Hayes: Yes, they do. But you know what’s more insidious than that? Your gun control position doesn’t have anything to do with public safety, and it’s certainly not about personal freedom. It’s about you don’t like people who do like guns. You don’t like the people. Think about that, the next time you make a joke about the South. You don’t like the people. How often is that the underlying reason for the political (or theological) positions we hold? Last week Andrew posed the question, “What does the flag say?” Another way to phrase that question is, “Do you like the people who fly those flags?” And that feels the deeper question as it gets closer to the root of our responses to the flags. If I don’t like a particular flag being flown what about the person who put it up – how do I feel about them? A friend who ministers in an area of Birmingham close to the origin point of the campaign to fly the St George’s flag, raises helpful points around this. His perspective: that as well as affirming the concerns and fears many may have at the flags going up, we also need to do better at affirming the legitimate concerns and fears of those putting them up. This probably isn’t easy to do for those of us who live in areas where there are few flags flying. The reality is that we don’t often have to mingle with those in areas where flags are abundant. And we probably don’t often have to deal with the issues these people are concerned about. Here are the concerns my friend observes in his community – some of which are specifically related to Birmingham: Freedom of speech/expression, arrests for online comments, grooming gangs, unlawfulness, radical Islam/Islamists, desire for sharia law, potential islamophobia laws, the currently predicted demographic flip, illegal and mass immigration, rising living costs, bankruptcy of the council, lack of bin collection, LGBTQ+ agenda/ideology, and the difference between how the council seems to have reacted to the raising of Palestinian and English/British flags. Any of these issues can make for uncomfortable conversations – the kinds of discussions that polite middle-class society would rather avoid. It is far easier to dismiss the people who have these concerns as racist, or irredeemably right-wing, or ‘deplorables’. Which brings us back to Ainsley Hayes’ argument with Sam Seaborn: not liking guns is one thing, but not liking the people who like them is quite another. So, do you like the people? If we don’t, it might not be the flags that are the real issue.   Photo by balesstudio on Unsplash      

Are all the large numbers in the Bible meant to be taken literally? Did two million people leave Egypt for Sinai? Were there really more Judahites fighting for King Jehoshaphat than Russians in the Battle of Kursk? Or do some of these large numbers - or even all of them - communicate something besides what the Office of National Statistics would say if they were recording events afterwards? If so, what? And how can we know? This is one of my favourite Mere Fidelity episodes, in which I talk these things through with Matt Anderson and Alastair Roberts:Mere Fidelity · Fishy Numbers in the Bible

Flags speak. All symbols do. They communicate instantly, boldly, viscerally, and often—which is my reason for mentioning it—ambiguously. Consider a few examples.In March 2022, Ukrainian flags appeared all over my neighbourhood. Some of them may have been raised by Ukrainian refugees arriving in the area, as many did in the opening months of the war. But most were raised by British people wanting to express solidarity with Ukraine. They were unfurled on flagpoles, hung out of windows and on lamp posts, and stuck in car windows. The ambiguity was minimal. The flags said “We stand with Ukraine,” and “Putin must be stopped,” and “Bullies cannot annex other people’s countries,” and “Ukrainian refugees welcome here.” During the England-Ukraine match at Wembley Stadium in early 2023, they even said, “We don’t really mind if we lose this one, because we stand with you (and will probably qualify anyway).” Three years later I was in Birmingham, driving down a long street in which every single lamppost was flying a Palestinian flag. What did those flags say? A range of things, I imagine. For many they were exact equivalents of the Ukrainian flag: “We stand with Gaza.” “Palestinians welcome here.” “We grieve the deaths of innocent children.” But reading the posters and graffiti in the area alongside the flags, it was clear that for some people—and it is hard to say how many—they said more than that, from “Stop the genocide” to “Britain should not support Zionism” or even “Israel should not exist.” Flags speak, but they speak ambiguously. Needless to say, the message that a Jewish person would hear on driving down that street is different to the message that I heard, which may well be different again from the message that many of the residents intended. Two months after that, I went for lunch with my wife in a local café that was festooned with Pride flags. I don’t mean that there was one in the window, or a notice about Pride month; I mean that there was rainbow bunting across the entrance, a large rainbow flag on the way in, and rainbow coloured streamers on every table. What did those flags say? To the proprietor, they may well have said no more than “LGBTQ people welcome here,” or “Pride month gives us a chance to make this place more colourful.” But they communicated more than that to me. They also said, “We support unlimited sexual freedom,” and “Bigots (including evangelical pastors like you) are not welcome here,” and “If you believe in traditional marriage, you might want to have lunch somewhere else.” And it said those things to me whether the proprietor—or interior decorator—intended anything of the sort. So what does a St George’s Cross say? It depends. During the World Cup there is no ambiguity: it means, “I am cheering for England rather than Germany / Argentina / Brazil.” During a coronation or royal jubilee it means, “I love my country and am grateful to live here” (and possibly also “I am hazy on the difference between England and Britain”). But what about when it appears on flagpoles and bridges all over the country one August, as if from nowhere? Does it mean something different if it appears at the same time as a major protest against migrant hotels? Or when hung alongside banners saying “Stop the boats”? Or when waved on a march at which Tommy Robinson is speaking? Would my decision to hang a St George’s Cross in my front window today say something different to my neighbours than it would have during the last World Cup? Even if my convictions are exactly the same now as they were then? Of course it would. Flags speak. And they do so in a context that is much broader than the intention of the person who flies them. I cannot possibly know the motivations of all the people who have flown St George’s Crosses in the last few weeks—I suspect they range from the respectfully patriotic (“I love living in England”) to the politically pointed (“uncontrolled migration is a major problem”) to the downright racist (“reclaim England for white people”)—or the proportion of people characterised by each. But to many in this country, especially people of colour, they will be heard to carry an insidious message of chauvinism and white supremacy, even if the person flying it has no such agenda. And I think that is worth considering carefully. I love England. People who know me at all will have heard me go on about it: castles and pubs, cricket and football, Sussex and London and Yorkshire, rhododendrons and village greens, the industrial revolution and the Royal Navy and the West End and the final scene of Dunkirk. But at this point in time, that flag means more than that to a lot of people, and not in a good way. Many of my brothers and sisters respond to it with apprehension, or fear, and I can see why. It’s worth thinking about.

Two interesting comments on preference falsification, apparent consensus, and the difference between explicit and implicit beliefs. First, here's George Orwell:At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. And here is Musa al-Gharbi riffing on Orwell in his excellent We Have Never Been Woke: The behaviours of those who profess that ‘trans women are women’ suggest strongly that most do not literally believe that trans women are the same as cisgender women. Proponents who are romantically interested in women typically do not treat these two populations equally as women with respect to their own dating and marriage decisions - not even remotely. Yet these same people, who overwhelmingly fail to behave as though trans and cisgender are equivalent or indistinguishable (that is, who implicitly disagree with the idea that ‘trans women are women’), may nevertheless pillory others who explicitly disagree with the proposition that there is no meaningful difference.

If we could only take one book of the Bible to a desert island with us, many of us would choose the Gospel of Luke.It is the longest and fullest Gospel we have. The two most celebrated of Jesus’s parables are found here and nowhere else. Luke fills his nativity, crucifixion and resurrection accounts with details that are unique to him—Mary and Elizabeth, Pilate and Herod, the road to Emmaus—and his interest in prayer, women, the poor and the Gentiles give even the most familiar passages a distinctive angle. It is theologically rich, narratively compelling, rhetorically masterful and evangelically joyful, as well as being filled with interesting questions and challenging stories. So from 7th to 9th July 2026, we are going to devote some time to reading, understanding and rejoicing in it. We are delighted to be joined by Dr Peter Williams, the Principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, as our guest speaker. Peter is both a brilliant biblical scholar and a sparkling and engaging communicator, and I can honestly think of nobody in the world I would rather have teaching on the Gospel of Luke. He is also the author of The Surprising Genius of Jesus (2023), a superb study of the teaching of Jesus in particular, and the outstanding Can We Trust the Gospels? (2018), which has been translated into fourteen languages. The conference will comprise plenary sessions, breakout discussions, meals together, rich times of corporate worship, and time for Q&A. Practically speaking, we will be hosting it at King’s Church London, SE3 9DU, starting at 3.30pm on Tuesday 7th and finishing at lunchtime on Thursday 9th; the cost for the event is £170, which includes lunch and dinner on both days. What’s not to like? One of the greatest books ever written, taught by a world-class scholar and surrounded by brothers and sisters who want to know, apply and delight in God’s word. So come. Take time. Be refreshed. Think. You can book in here.

Christopher Harding is an expert on the modern history of East Asia, a lecturer on Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of last year's The Light of Asia and this year's A Short History of Japan. Here he is with a fascinating assessment of what he calls "the battle for China's soul," or the ongoing tussle between Communism, Confucianism and Christianity in China:Christianity in China grew under the Jesuits and then again in the 19th and 20th centuries when missionaries from Europe, the United States and elsewhere began to travel there to spread the gospel. Fortunes changed, however, with the Chinese Revolution in 1949. For China’s early Communist leaders, Christianity was associated with the ravages of European imperialism and was seen as a clear ideological competitor. Its transnational connections, from the Vatican — where a number of modern popes have condemned Communism — across to America’s West Coast meant that it might readily become a tool of foreign subversion. Rather than seek to ban Christianity outright, the strategy from the Fifties onwards has been to build ideologically safe, state-sponsored Christian organisations. Protestant Christians were shepherded into a state-sponsored “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (TSPM) — the three selves being self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Catholics were asked to join a Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). In both cases, links with foreign organisations were banned in favour of a state-directed fusion of Christian with Communist and patriotic ideals. Most foreign missionaries operating in China at the time of the Revolution were thrown out ... Given these unpromising beginnings for Christianity under Communism, China-watchers were astounded by its rapid growth across the final three decades of the 20th century. In 1949, Protestant Christians accounted for less than 0.2% of the Chinese population — a million people at most. By the mid-Nineties, that figure had risen to 14 million. And that was only registered Protestants. Underground “house churches” were doing spectacular business, raising the overall number of Protestants to somewhere between 60 million and 90 million people. Breathless commentators began to predict big things for Christianity in China. Some claimed that by 2050, Christians might even be in the majority. That now seems unlikely — and for two reasons. First, Xi Jinping is a keen student of why the Soviet Union collapsed and some scholars in China regard religion as a factor. It served, they say, as a “sacred banner” under which anti-government elements could unite. It’s no surprise, then, that during Xi’s term in office the regulation of religion in China has tightened. Patriotic religious associations are now overseen by the United Front Work Department, which in turn reports directly to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. New measures, in 2018, on “Internet Religious Information Services” linked religion to national security and required churches to apply for licenses before sharing religious content online, from live-streaming to micro-blogging. Most registered churches in China are thought to be under some form of electronic surveillance. Christian organisations have meanwhile been required to re-evaluate their teachings in light of Xi’s push for “Sinicisation”: a fusion of traditional Chinese values and ideas with the CCP’s vision for China’s future. Christmas hasn’t been cancelled, but local governments increasingly seek to steer local businesses away from erecting Christmas displays or selling Christmas-themed commodities. A second reason why this might not, after all, be a “Christian century” in China is that statistics suggest a slowing-down of the growth rate of Chinese Christianity since the 2000s. Some urban churches are growing, but at the expense of rural Christianity: a consequence of large-scale urban migration in China. Once a rich, inter-generational weave of miracle healings, exorcisms and Spirit-infused worship, many village churches are now said to resemble old people’s homes, that are more sober, full of people in search of meaning through a combination of community and a rational, textual faith. The reality for Chinese Christianity is that over the next few decades, almost anything might happen. Even if Christian numbers begin to decline, match or run ahead of an overall fall in the country’s population, the lesson from countries like South Korea is that the cultural influence of Christianity can end up mattering more than raw numbers. “Sinicisation” may backfire on the CCP if potent combinations emerge of Christianity and Chinese philosophy: Jesus, Confucius and Mencius forming an ethical dream-team, focused on love, self-sacrifice and prophetic critique of spiritually empty, narrowly growth-focused governance — of the sort with which the CCP’s critics within China charge it. At the same time, those same two traditions, Christian and Confucian, provide the basis for regarding government as God-given and thus profoundly legitimate. Western culture may play its own modest role in what comes next, serving as it does as a vehicle for Christian values. Christian creations, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Passion of the Christ, are the focus of discussion, where internet restrictions allow or where the use of a VPN permits. China is even home to a number of high-profile “cultural Christian” intellectuals like Liu Xiaofeng, who are capable of taking varying degrees of critical distance from the CCP. Meanwhile, academics and journalists who study underground Christianity in China — with heavy use of pseudonyms for the people they interview and even the cities where they conduct their research — reveal grassroots churches in rude health. Branches of McDonalds have been used for sessions of the Timothy Training Course, a grassroots discipleship and leadership programme. A different lesson from the course is taught at each plastic table-top, and when the police arrive to round everyone up, they cheerfully sign pledges not to do it again — or, at least, in that particular branch of McDonalds. The bigger picture is of a country that has upended many of the predictions confidently made about it by Western commentators. It was once expected that market forces would drive political liberalisation in China. Perhaps Xi Jinping enjoys a quiet chuckle about that one, now and again. In a similar way, secularisation theorists once claimed that modernity brings a two-fold decline: first, in the social significance of religion, and then later in its salience for the individual. This hasn’t been borne out in South Korea or in China, where Christianity has grown in tandem with the economy and with urbanisation. Xi no doubt finds this departure from expectations rather less amusing. The battle for China’s soul goes on.

Why are we seeing such a sharp rise in mental health issues? Is this mainly due to raised awareness – that a new appreciation for the reality of mental health conditions means we diagnose them more readily? Or is it that mental health is in real decline – that, for whatever reason, we have a greater propensity to these maladies than previous generations?Whatever the causes, it is complicated, and can be a difficult subject to address. As Kathleen Stock observes, Talking honestly about the explosion of mental health conditions is intimidating, not least because of the numbers of outraged people steaming in to protest about imagined accusations of hypochondria or malingering. Yet, the observation that psychological conditions can ripple across populations like wind through wheat, being especially susceptible to social influences, is compatible with debilitating dysfunction and awful suffering happening at the individual level. There’s no split between “real” mental health disorders and culturally porous ones. The latter — which includes the vast majority of them — are as real as any other. And the suffering they bring feels the same from the inside, no matter what the source. The suffering is real but the paradox has often been pointed out: objectively we live safer, healthier, wealthier lives than has been the case for the vast majority of people throughout the long history of the human race. Yet we are in the grip of unprecedented emotional anguish. What explains this? While much attention has been paid recently to the role of the smart phone, there are, surely, larger considerations in play. The past two centuries of industrialisation have witnessed us engaging in a mass experiment in reorganising human patterns of living. It is not impossible that these changes have had a profound psychological impact, which could help explain the current surge in mental health issues. If we are living in ways that humanity has not yet had time to adapt to it would be unsurprising if our mental health were negatively impacted. Here are four key transitions in the shift from traditional to technological society which I think help explain our emotional discombobulation. Too much of our own faces Two hundred years ago no one really knew what they looked like. It is only 190 years since silvered glass mirrors were invented. Prior to that mirrors were rare, and imperfect. Most people would have gone through life without ever seeing an accurate image of their own face. Today, mirrors are ubiquitous. The old saying that you are never more than six feet from a rat is less true than that we are now never more than six feet from a mirror. This constant referencing of our own faces has only been accelerated, first by the invention of the camera, and then by the reversible camera on our phones and the cameras on our computers. Whether taking selfies or participating in online meetings, we look at ourselves constantly. Unlike anyone born before 1850 the face we are most familiar with is our own. What has this done to us? Too much, too fast It was not until the 1830s that steam locomotives were capable of travelling faster than the horse. Prior to that no one had travelled faster than horse-pace. Life was slow. Now life is fast – both in terms of the actual speed at which trains, planes and automobiles enable us to move, and even more, at the rate that information is expanding. Technology writer Kevin Kelly says that information is expanding at the rate of a nuclear explosion. That’s too much, too fast. The diminishment of male-female distinction The move from traditional to technological patterns of living has permitted (and at times forced) a reduction in the distinctions between men and women. Despite the ‘patriarchy paradox’ which sees the sexes grouping around stereotypically defined work preferences in societies with high levels of sexual equality (engineering in Sweden being dominated by men, nursing by women), there no longer exist defined areas of male and female occupation. In a technological society everyone is just a cog in the machine. Ability is considered more significant than given social position rooted in gender.  Alongside this we see the shrinking of the domestic sphere. The economy no longer centres around the household but is outsourced to the state, business and industry. In economies centred around the household men and women have clear social position and roles. There is a division of labour, grounded in sex, which is not the case in technological societies. This is also witnessed in the feminization of education. In traditional societies women are primarily involved in the raising and training of girls, men in the raising and training of boys. In modern technological societies education is largely performed by women – certainly in primary education where it is not unusual for a boy to progress though several years of schooling with no male teaching. The diminishment of physical labour In traditional societies most people are engaged in physical labour. Technological society ‘saves’ us from that. While this makes life easier it does not necessarily make us happier. We might be safer and healthier than our labouring forebears but we are all too familiar with the dangers of sedentary living. So we engage in what are essentially pointless physical activities – lifting weights in a gym is all very well but it doesn’t accomplish anything in the way that lifting stones to build a wall would. Going for a run is all very well but participants simply end up where they started with nothing to actually show for it. Or, most pointless of all, running on a treadmill. In technological societies we use our heads rather than our bodies, but our bodies are still with us. If our bodies are unhappy then our heads tend to be as well. Almost all human history and experience has been in a world where we didn’t know our own faces, things moved slowly, men and women had clear social roles and most people were involved in hours of physical daily labour. All that has changed, very quickly. Is it any wonder there is so much emotional whiplash? Unless we choose to go the route of the Amish (a choice that is in reality an impossibility for most of us) how are we to live so as to minimise the whiplash of these changes? As in all things, the gospel shows us a way. Focus on another face God has given us the light of the knowledge of His glory displayed in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). Whether we seek enlightenment (the Jewish worldview), knowledge (the Greek worldview) or glory (the Roman worldview), the fulfilment of our search can only be met in Christ. We need to spend less time looking at our own faces and more time searching after His. Only in turning out from ourselves and towards Him can we find what the human heart most longs for. Truly, our souls are restless until they find their rest in Him. Our restless, self-focused, age finds its antidote in the face of Christ. Move at the pace of family In our accelerating world having children slows us down. As anyone who has ever wrestled a toddler into a car seat or needed to get a teenager out of the door knows, being in a family means slowing down. This can cause great frustration. It is probably part of the reason why so many are remaining childless. But it is good for us. God created us as social beings, not cogs in a machine. If you go for a walk with grannie, you are going to have to slow down. We are made for family and Christians are adopted into the Lord’s. This is meant to be worked out in full participation in a local church and that means not going at our own pace, or the pace of the world. In the church everyone needs to move together, from little babies to wizened old saints. Very often that means going slower. Celebrate God-given distinctives In technological, meretricious, societies it is skill that determines our position, at least in theory. We all know that ‘who you know’ still counts for a lot, and there are reasons that candidates in the current contest to be deputy leader of the Labour Party have to be female. But we have come a very long way from the sexual division of labour evident in traditional societies. Throughout scripture the principle of male headship, in the church and in the home, is demonstrated, taught and expected. This creates tensions in the church in a technological society and is why such a significant portion of the church has abandoned this aspect of the Bible’s teaching. (Although saying that reveals something of a blind spot towards Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic church.) As Stephen Clark observes in his definitive Man and Woman In Christ, A pressure is exerted against all social roles in technological society, with the result that many traditional social roles begin to look more like functional roles. The father-son relationship is one example. Another example can be found in the role of the Christian pastor. One reason that modern Christians have a difficulty in understanding the meaning of “elder” or “pastor” in the New Testament is their tendency to see the position as a set of functions to be performed in a social institution rather than as a role of leadership and care in a communal relationship. When a role is about function, it doesn’t matter whether the person doing it is male or female - but that isn’t actually how God created us, and it is not how human society has ever operated until just yesterday. We need to learn to think in biblical, social categories, more than in technological, functional, ones. That is hard to do. That the Lord may have created men for certain roles and women for others outrages the modern mind but ignoring that reality is not a recipe for long term human flourishing. Be body conscious Every follower of Jesus is included in His body, and that body is meant to work (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Our physical bodies are included in this as through them we are to know and glorify God. As we read scripture we see a great deal of bodily exertion in God’s service and worship. There is dancing, bowing, kneeling and the raising of hands. There is training like an athlete or boxer. There is walking incredible distances in pursuit of the mission. There is washing of others’ feet. There is feeding of the hungry and care of the sick.  We need to use our bodies. Works of service, prayer walking, getting out into nature and using it as fuel for worship – all these and other activities are ways in which we can find a greater connection and integrity between the spiritual and physical. Appropriate bodily exertions is a means of pulling our emotions into line. It is through the ageless gospel and in the eternal church that we can find the tools and context to withstand the emotional whiplash created by the technological society. It is by obedience to Jesus that we can be helped through our suffering.  

Twenty years ago, it seemed you couldn't read a theological blog - or even a work of New Testament studies - without encountering protracted debate about the meaning of dikaiosune theou, or "the righteousness of God." It was a major target of the New Perspective on Paul, and the pushback against Reformation theology in the academy. It was at the heart of the meaning of Romans, especially chapters 1-3. Tom Wright wrote books explaining why it means "covenant faithfulness"; John Piper wrote books arguing that it means "God's commitment to uphold the glory of his name"; lots of people wrote articles on why "becoming the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5:21) is completely different from "having a righteousness from God" (Phil 3:9), although without quite settling the discussion. Then we moved on: to pistis Christou, the apocalyptic Paul, sexuality, the Trinity debate, and everything that has happened since 2016.Then, a few weeks ago, I had to preach on it. I came to God’s righteousness having just spent a lot of time in Isaiah 40-66 (for the THINK conference), and Deuteronomy (for a book on it), both of which shaped the way I approached the subject. So what does it mean to speak of God’s righteousness, or to say that God is righteous? Here’s what I said. Imagine a Venn diagram with three major circles, arranged in a triangle so that all three overlap in the middle. The word righteousness is in the centre, where three other Bible words overlap together: uprightness, justice, and salvation. Each of those three words are frequently paired with righteousness in the Old Testament, as if their meanings “rhyme” with it. Start with uprightness. “Shout for joy in the LORD, O you righteous! Praise befits the upright” (Ps 33:1). So righteousness overlaps closely with the idea that God is upright, and so should his people be. Righteousness in this sense is to be correctly positioned relative to reality. It involves being right as opposed to wrong - theologians would call it conformity to an external norm - but it also means standing straight rather than wonky. If you have an upright glass, that means a glass that doesn’t spill. If you have an upright building, that means a building that doesn’t subside, give way, or crumble. The righteous, the upright, are those who stand properly and correctly in proportion to reality, and they don’t crumble, and they don’t give way. They are in the right. That’s one element. Another word that overlaps with righteousness in the Bible is justice. We would probably naturally realize that justice and righteousness are paired together: “Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son!” (Ps 72:1). In Scripture, the concept of justice has to do with giving people their due: giving people that which they are entitled to, and making judgments on the basis of the merits of their case, not on our prejudices, preferences or incentives. If you are just in the Bible, it means you’re not judging for a bribe, or because you don’t like the person, or because you’ve pre-decided the outcome, but because they merit or warrant this particular judgment. That closely overlaps with the biblical category of righteousness too. The third category that overlaps with righteousness, especially in Isaiah, is salvation: “He has clothed me with garments of salvation; he has covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Is 61:10). This is the most surprising of the three. You don’t normally think of righteousness in terms of rescue. So why is the righteousness of God connected with his salvation of his people? Because God has made a covenant with his people, in which he has promised to deliver them. Which means that for God to be righteous means for him to follow through on his promises to save, in faithfulness to his covenant. God’s righteousness means that he must save his people because he said he would. If he didn’t, he would break his covenant and dishonour his name. When you get those three ideas together - uprightness, justice and salvation - and they all overlap in the middle of the Venn diagram, that’s what righteousness is. To say that God is righteous is to say that he is upright and correct in all of his ways, just and impartial in all of his judgments, and committed to save his people in accordance with the covenant he’s made with them. That’s what we mean when we say God is righteous.

One of the most important articles I've ever shared here got lost in the recent clear-out. Here's Keith Drury's brilliant 2005 piece on the doctrines that are written in pencil, ink and blood:When I was a child faith matters were all wrapped up in one huge bundle with all of equal value. I learned, “Christians don’t smoke and drink” and “Christians believe in the virgin birth and resurrection” and “Christians go to Sunday school and Sunday evening service.” I was too young to make any distinction between smoking, the resurrection and Sunday school attendance—they all were in the “Christian bundle” and of equal value for judging who was a Christian or not.  I assumed people who drank beer or denied the resurrection or didn’t have a Sunday evening service weren’t Christians—at least not “real” Christians (later termed “born again Christians”). As a child I made no distinction between levels of faith and practice and simply lumped them all together in one huge bundle. It is simply how a child views things ... You may also remember that as a child you simply lumped all these things together into one big bundle with church doctrine and everything else and you held them all with equal value as I did. Then I discovered some things are written in pencil. My first hint of this came in the sixth grade.  I had won a mural contest and gotten a pile of tickets for Kennywood Park.  This was before all-day-one-price entry fees so a pile of tickets meant I could ride all day at our school’s annual Spring outing. I gave the tickets back.  I knew Christians didn’t attend a carn-evil or cir-cuss or amusement parks (which were “just a carnival in a permanent location”). I quietly told my teacher after class, “Christians don’t go to amusement parks” and he reluctantly took the tickets back. (I discovered 30 years later that mister Krome, a Presbyterian, had called my parents that evening to ask, ‘What sort of strange religion is this?”)  Not going to Grandview schools’ annual outing wasn’t all that bad—I got the day off to play at home. Yet on that morning in May, 1957 my father woke me early to announce “we’re taking a trip.”  And we did—driving almost 100 miles to….(you guessed it) an amusement park (at first I thought my dad had backslidden). He announced I could ride all day and he’d foot the bill.  Late that afternoon he took me to an old stump that was designed as a sort of bench and we sat together—just the two of us.  He said something pretty much exactly like the following (a son can’t forget his father’s words like this): “Keith, I brought you here to teach you a lesson. There are two fences in life: God’s fence and the church’s fence.  The church’s fence is always smaller than God’s fence.  God doesn’t care if you go to amusement parks or not, but a lot of church folk do and they think it is wrong.  That’s why we drove this far—so we won’t be seen by the people in the church who would spiritually stumble by it.  But there are a lot of Christians who do go to amusement parks, and there are even Christians in other countries who drink a bit.  As you grow older you might push against the church’s fence.  You might even break down the fence other Christians put around you—even the fence your mother and I have built. But be careful as you do this that you do not run so fast and far from being fenced in that you smash through God’s fence—for His fence is at the very edge of a precipice.  And that’s why I brought you here today—to teach you this important lesson-remember it as you grow as a teenager.” This is how I learned that some things are written in pencil.  Going to an amusement park wasn’t as important as the virgin birth in the bag of beliefs.  It was a pencil-belief (actually a pencil-practice).  It was one generation’s attempt to resist worldliness and they wrote it down.  But they wrote it with pencil and I had an eraser.  Indeed every generation has its own eraser and can erase their parent’s pencil work.  Did I abandon the faith when I went to an amusement park or started going bowling? No.  I simply erased some of the previous generations’ pencil work.  I learned that all the stuff I had in one belief bag really had a second category—some things are written in pencil and can be erased without damaging my soul. In college I discovered some things are written in ink. By my college days I was erasing lots of stuff.  I attended several movies (they would be “G” movies if they had ratings back then) and I went bowling with reckless abandon.  While I never danced, I do admit that I went on a lot of hayrides that essentially accomplished the same purpose.  I wore shorts in the summer and even went once to a beach during college where the girls wore “yellow polka-dot bikinis.” I tried a pipe and took communion in a Lutheran church where I got a taste of alcohol. In fact, one other time, when I attended a bar mitzvah I swiped a whole bottle of wine and drank it all one evening to see what would happen. (Nothing much).  Yet other than this experimentation I kept a lot of my parent’s pencil work in college. It was a college where I found that some things are written in ink. In high school I had worked with lifestyle matters that were mostly pencil written.  In college I encountered doctrinal things that were written in ink.  In a student Bible study I became convinced that my denomination was completely wrong on doctrine.  My denomination was Arminian-Wesleyan and after a freshman year of Bible study I concluded they were completely wrong.  I became a Calvinist.  I discovered that doctrinal matters aren’t written in pencil—they use ink for doctrine.  I was disheartened that my professors and my denomination refused to capitulate to my faultless logic. The Bible was so clear and my denomination so deluded and I tried to set them straight.  I once gave my whole spring break over to trying to convert my mother to Calvinism, but she stubbornly refused to fall before the scythe of my superior intellect.  I could not imagine how any honest reader of Scripture would refuse to believe in eternal security.  I could accept that there were folk with such small minds they could not fathom the notion of predestination, but eternal security—well any honest person must accept this obvious teaching of Scripture! I became a Calvinist evangelist.  Actually there was a Calvinist trinity at my college:  Moses Yang, my upper class mentor, Ray Berrian and I together dazzled the dimwitted Arminians with our brilliance and slew them by the thousands.  Well at least we slew a dozen.  By the end of that year we had about twelve Calvinist converts who met secretly as if we were in the catacombs   (All this eventually brought to me the distinction of being the only student ever to be grounded to the campus for a full month due “questionable theology”—a badge I wore with great pride!)  I had bumped into an ink-written doctrine.  Inked doctrines are not as easily erased as behavioral pencil writing.  Indeed ink writing cannot be erased at all but must be blotted out and we much write something else beside it.  So, I used Calvin’s darker ink to blot out Arminian theology and I wrote down in large ink letters all five points of Calvin as my doctrine. I was a theological rebel in The Wesleyan Church and I intended to correct the denomination’s dimwitted doctrine. If I failed I would simply leave the denomination and join one with the right and true doctrine—a doctrine like mine. At seminary I discovered some things are written in blood. Then I went to Princeton Seminary.  I met professors and students there that rattled the bones of my belief system all the way down to my toes. I went to Bible classes and heard that the Bible wasn’t a single unified book written in seamless continuity but had various points of view.  I heard political, theological and biblical teachings that made “bobbed hair” and movies vanish from my mind.  One precious doctrine and interpretation after another vanished when placed under the microscope of the original language or the original meaning of Scripture.  Even my sturdy Calvinism was shaken so much that that the issues had changed from believing eternal security or not to believing in the resurrection or not.  Was Jesus truly divine?  Did he actually rise from the dead? Was he born of a virgin?  Is there a coming judgment?  Is there a heaven to gain?  These are the questions that occupied my mind. This is how I found the creeds. Really.  I did not even know they existed until I was in seminary. I suppose I had heard of them but I had never heard them.  They were never said in my church—they were “too high church.”  I never even encountered them in college—we had revival meetings and testimonies in college.  The first time I met the creeds was when several faithful professors at Princeton tossed them my way as a rope to a drowning student.  I had erased most of the pencil work I was raised with.  I had inked out much of my denomination’s doctrine.  And now I was faced with reading people who didn’t even believe the core issues of the Christian faith.  What could I believe?  I took hold of the creeds—the Nicene but especially the Apostle’s creed—and hung on.  Credo. I believe.  The creed for me was not pencil work of earlier generations—their preferences, or lifestyle convictions.  Neither were the creeds written in ink—merely the doctrinal positions of one particular denomination. The creeds were written in blood—they are life and death issues for the Christian church.  I would not die for the doctrine of eternal security or entire sanctification.  Hold a knife to my throat and demand I say, “I could backslide” or “I’m eternally secure” and you’ll get whatever answer you want to save my life.  Hold that same knife to my throat and demand I say, “Christ was not divine” and I will refuse.  At Princeton, under the mentorship of several godly professors I melted down to the core—to the Apostle’s creed.  Everything else burned away like wood, hay and stubble.  All I had left were 18 phrases ... I know the difference between what is written in pencil, written in ink and written in blood. You can be a Christian in my book if we disagree on the pencil and ink stuff.  But neither you nor I can say we are Christians if we reject those things written in blood.  Examine the blood-writ truths if you must, I did. But do so very carefully for you are dealing with the essence of what makes a Christian a Christian. And remember that picture of the knife at your throat.  For some Christians today that is not an imaginary exercise.