“Part of the genius of genuine Christianity is that each generation has to think it through afresh. Precisely because (so Christians believe) God wants every single Christian to grow up in understanding as well as trust, the Christian faith has never been something that one generation can sort out in such a way as to leave their successors with no work to do. Like a young man inheriting a vast fortune, such a legacy could just make you lazy. All you’d have to do would be to look things up in a book, or to remember how it was when your favorite pastor used to do it, and that would be it. No room for character. No room for full human maturity – never mind full Christian maturity.
Some versions of Christianity are constantly trying to build up that sort of accumulated capital, but it can’t be done. The Christian faith is a kaleidoscopic, and most of us are color-blind. It is multidimensional, and most of us manage to hold at most two dimensions in our heads at any one time. It is symphonic, and we can just about whistle one of the tunes. So we shouldn’t be surprised if someone comes along and draws our attention to other colors and patterns we hadn’t noticed. We shouldn’t be alarmed if someone sketches a third, a forth, or even fifth dimension that we had overlooked. We ought to welcome it if a musician plays new parts of the harmony to the tune we thought we knew…”
NT Wright, in foreword to The King Jesus Gospel, by Scot McKnight
