Just wrapping up NT Wright's very helpful book, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. This is the final book in his trilogy on basic Christian theology and living (others were Simply Christian and Surprised by Hope). In After You Believe he is wrestling with the public conversation around virtue and ethics, and the Christian conversation around discipline and character development. His primary argument is that it is Christian character, lived and demonstrated in Christian community, that is a challenge to the everyday neighbourhoods in which we live. If we don't get this right, we don't have anything to say to the world.
The fundamental habits of this new, strange, upside-down "kingdom life" are therefore becoming clear -- and they are the very things which Jesus and Paul were urging. They are the virtues, hard initially but second nature after long practice, which generate communities in whose life the lordship of Jesus is apparent. A life which by its very nature doesn't stay as a hidden property within those communities but of necessity spills out into the world around as people see human life lived in a radically different, and often compellingly attractive, way. (p230)
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