Anyway, I wanted to share a great quotation from Tom Wright. I spend a lot of my time picking at stuff he's done that I'm sure is wrong but he also deserves a lot of credit for the many insightful things he does right. His Bible for Everyone series commentary on Galatians is the best thing I've ever read on Galatians (except for his infuriating decision to use lower-case 's's for both the Spirit and Satan, because he's convinced that the latter isn't a person and he doesn't think that Paul thought that the former was at this point. Grrr). See? Even when I try and praise him...!
But he's interviewed in the Jan. 2007 issue of Christianity Today, and bits of it are wonderful. He's thought further than I have but along the same lines on the Gospel of Judas. I'd written in my blog that the Gnostics were not radicals but people who liked Christianity but thought it was too radical and watered it down. His paragraph on this is so much better than mine it's amazing.
The pull-quote on page 41 really caught my eye and brain:
If you simply address the God-shaped blank that people think they've got, the God that you end up with is the God shaped by the blank.
There are bits of the interview I don't like, including some bad decisions of Greek exegesis. That sentence about God-shaped blanks is a gem, however -- not just insightful and incisive, but a brilliantly crafted sentence.
