All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that any language or predictions about the future are inherently unclear and uncertain.
N. T. Wright's quote highlights the limitations of human language when it comes to describing the future, particularly in a Christian context. It implies that while we may attempt to articulate our hopes or beliefs about what lies ahead, those expressions are ultimately mere signposts guiding us through the uncertainty and ambiguity of what is to come, much like navigating through a mist where visibility is poor.
In practice
In a sermon discussing faith, this quote could be used to illustrate the mystery of divine plans.
The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating thet God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven." "The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.
True worship doesn't put on a show or make a fuss; true worship isn't forced, isn't half-hearted, doesn't keep looking at its watch, doesn't worry what the person in the next pew is doing. True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.
Most of the things that really matter require faith. How do I know that my wife loves me? How do I know that Mozarts 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.
To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.
Without God's Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit, the church simply can't be the church.
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.
War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics.
Once thing goes wrong, then the whole house of cards collapses. And there's no way you can extricate yourself. Until someone comes along to drag you out.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
If ye despise the human race, and mortal arms, yet remember that there is a God who is mindful of right and wrong.
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