Megan is a bit surprised, and I think embarassed, but when I saw the Homing Beacon Newsletter in my inbox this evening, I gasped with eager anticipation. See, it announced “The most requested films for the DVD format will finally become a reality this September“! “Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and Episode VI: Return of the Jedi will be available in a four-disc set that includes a bonus disc filled with all-new special features — including the most comprehensive feature-length documentary ever produced about the Star Wars saga and never-before-seen footage from the making of all three films.”

A quote from NT Wright’s lectures on Romans, given at calvin seminary in January 2003:

Romans has traditionally been used, and I have used it myself this way pastorally and evangelistically, as a book about how we are basically all sinners, how Christ died for us so that we can now be justified by faith and find salvation. Now, that message or something like it is there in Romans, it just isn’t anything like the whole of Romans, it isn’t even the framework of Romans. And in order to understand the message that’s there, we have to understand the framework as well. That’s one of the points I’m making. The second point I’m making is that the word ‘justification’ has been used again and again – for a long time, since Augustine, I think – as virtually a synonym for conversion, and so that then the debates about justification have tended to be debates about whether conversion is instantaneous or progressive, and so on, and the debates between protestants and Catholics have often been debates like that. Whereas, in fact, Paul uses it, I’ve argued, in a much more specific way. That Paul does believe in conversion, and he has a very strongly built up theology of how someone who is in a state of sin as yet unreached by grace, comes to be reached by grace, impacted by the Spirit, comes to faith. Paul does not use the term ‘new birth’, but I think he’d have been perfectly happy with it at that point. And then, the point is, that process or that miracle is not what Paul means by justification. What Paul means by justification is ‘how do you know who now is a member of the family’. You can see this most clearly in Galatians 2, where the issue – the presenting issue in Galatians 2:15-21, is not ‘how do you become a Christian?’, but ‘who are you allowed as a Christian to sit down and eat with?’. If you’re a Jewish Christian, are you or are you not allowed to eat with pagan Christians; with Gentile Christians. And Paul says the answer is yes you are, because the badge of membership is faith and only faith. And, of course, because faith is like the first cry of the new born child, um, faith comes to be associated with the moment of Christian birth. The fact that somebody believes, we say ‘this person is now a Christian’. But, and it seems to me that this is one of the places post-reformation theology can get itself into awful tangles, sometimes people have implied that God is looking for faith, and then rewards faith with a new status. As though faith is a sort of surrogate work. It’s a good thing to do, to believe. God likes people who believe. And there are some passages, for instance Hebrews 11, which can be taken sounding rather like that. Whereas, in fact, I am saying the initial thing is all of grace. It is the grace of God active in and through the gospel proclamation. And what results from that, by the power of the Spirit, is faith. Justification does not denote that first moment, it denotes the fact that-that God’s declaration that somebody now is a member of the family.