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Prayer and politics
Praying is no substitute for politics. When we abandon living in the world, when we no longer love the earth, when we ignore the neighbour on the road, prayer is left empty, make-believe piety. We no longer walk with Jesus, Word made flesh, whatever our orthodox profession. Politics, even when it has not collapsed into…
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Does Jesus call us to political discipleship?
With a group from our church I listened to Edward Norman giving the Reith Lectures, and was increasingly disturbed. It was a time when many of us had been stirred by books like John V. Taylor’s Enough is enough, by Martin Luther King, and whispers of Liberation Theology, and we were children of the post-1945…
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Love Your Enemies
“You have heard, you shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”. (Matt 5:43) These words sound like a call, even a command. But we fear the risk. So the miserable-go-round of the world continues – we have enemies, and we hate them,…
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Forgiveness as Permission to Live
Originally published in Wounds that Heal: Theology, Imagination and Health, ed Jonathan Baxter, SPCK, 2007, pp79-98. The Framework Words in the forgiveness family are used in many different ways. That needs sorting out. One reason why it does not get sorted out is that many assume they know instinctively what forgiveness is. So our talk…
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Transforming society – or merely making it
a theological discussion with the Bible in one hand and a very particular newspaper in the other Society for the Study of Theology 1995 What is this paper about? I have been asked to write a paper about theology and the transformation of society or transformation in society. I can only make this a manageable…
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The Politics of Forgiveness
Published in The Third Way, c.1979 There is, at present, a great and growing interest amongst Christians in this country in political matters. They feel responsible and concerned. This is a good development – a waking up to reality. But all that we do is not well: the man struggling out of deep sleep goes…
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Sin drops us in it at the threshold of forgiveness
1 Introduction: This sketch is significant for me, since it is the first time I have got near to defining sin as what brings us to the threshold of forgiveness. That may not be a new idea altogether, but I can’t remember finding it plainly anywhere. Luther and Barth give me some encouragement in that direction, but…
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Forgiving Constitutes the Person
This paper is a meandering comment on a part of James E. Loder’s The Logic of the Spirit, which caught my fancy. I have thought much about human development, having lived through a lot of it myself, seen and messed about with it in other people, but I have no competence in the science of…
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‘Vertical’ and ‘Horizontal’ in Paul’s Theology of Reconciliation in the Letter to the Romans
This paper was written to honour Vinay Samuel, the first director of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. I worked there for a dozen years after I retired from Leeds. I liked its vision and the students it brought me. Corneliu Constantineanu was the first person I supervised at OCMS and he became a dear friend. He…
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Politics and forgiveness
POLITICS AND FORGIVENESS is an unlikely combination. One senior Baptist world leader said to me, “There isn’t much forgiveness in politics”. That gives us no excuse for rejecting it as our task and responsibility as Christian human beings. After all, the combination of God and Humanity is unlikely, and seems implausible in the world as…
While it is yet day
Haddon Willmer