In The Meaning of Jesus, N.T. Wright defines the twin poles of Christian living as Worship and Mission. Within these two poles, he sees at least four characteristics of the Christian faith: spirituality, theology, politics, and healing. Here is what he has to say about them from the book:
~ Spirituality ~
"Contemporary use of the word spirituality [has signaled that] the presence of the true God can be known and experienced in the midst of, and mediated through, all sorts of ordinary and extraordinary happenings and environments. The use of the word accompanies a shift in belief about, and experience of, God. No longer remote or detached, the true God is strangely present, knowable, and lovable. The word spirituality itself has acquired not just descriptive meaning, but a sense of invitation, of welcoming mystery, of meanings just out of sight but perhaps within reach, of worlds unimagined by the increasingly barren secularism of the Western Enlightenment but now accessible, beckoning and perhaps challenging." (208)
"[Many] Christians engage in other activities of Christian life, such as theology, politics, or healing, but if they lose [the] home base--of personal relationship with the personal God--I believe they are in danger of ending up like the prodigal son, spending half the Father's property in a far country, away from the Father's face." (209)
"By [Christian] spirituality, then, I wish to include the various practices of prayer, meditation, contemplation, spiritual reading, and the like that have characterized Christians from the very beginning. Christian spirituality is rooted in Judaism, is focused on Jesus, is shaped by the God known in Jesus and the Spirit. It embraces the whole person, and looks outward in love at the world... [This is] 'creator spirituality': devotion to the creator. And creator spirituality includes not only looking away from creation to the God who made it, but also, simultaneously, celebrating the goodness and god givenness of creation and grieving over its twistedness and brokenness. Creator spirituality is thus sacramental while firmly rejecting the magical; creation can be the bearer of God's presence, holiness, love, and grace, but this remains God's gift and can never be manipulated."
"Christian spirituality is [shaped by] the God we know in Jesus and by the Spirit of Jesus. It is never a matter of shouting across a void. Insofar as God and humans inhabit different spheres, Jesus inhabits both, and by the Spirit enables and invites us to do the same. Christian prayer is not a matter of petitioning a distant bureaucrat but of coming in trust before a deeply loving parent. Nor is Christian prayer conceived of in terms of humans coming in their own strength, ability, or cleverness to address their maker; it is always a matter of the Spirit being secretly and subtly at work." (211)
"There is no separate 'spiritual' sphere, which leaves out of consideration what one does with one's mind or one's body. Indeed, some of the earliest Christian restatements of the Shema include the command to love God with heart, mind, soul, and strength; and one of Paul's great summary statements of Christian obligation focuses on presenting one's body as a living sacrifice. Spiritualtiy does not, therefore, imply the splitting or disintegration of the personality, leaving people so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly use. It points, rather, toward integration, enabling exactly that rehumanization to take place that one would expect if one is indeed worshiping, and coming to resemble, the God in whose image human beings are made. (One of the great spiritual laws is that one comes to resemble what one worships.) A Christian spirituality, therefore, that makes no demands on the mind, to think through the implications of its faith, or on the body (body in the New Testament usually means something like what we mean by person), to obedience and holiness, has forgotten what it is about."
"[Christian spirituality] is not self-centered, regarding its own spiritual progress or development as the be-all and end-all. Precisely because it is rooted in Judaism (where Israel was called for the sake of the world), is focused on Jesus (who gave himself for the world), is shaped by the true God (who made the world)--and because it embraces the whole person, who is constituted not least by her or his vocation to serve the world--Christian spirituality must, like a well-pruned rosebush, encourage those shoots that move outward and discouraged those that become intertwined with one another. Thus, though Christian spirituality generates and sustains a self-awareness in God's presence, it can never be content with navel gazing. The self of which one is aware, if it stands in the presence of the God we know in Jesus, must always be turned outward toward God's world. When this happens, the result is love..." (212)
"[The] Christian is called to love the world as God loves the world, joyfully celebrating its beauty, its majesty, its curious details, its flashes of divine glory--and bitterly grieving over its wounds, its horror, its tragedy, its crucifixions. Christian spirituality, focused on and shaped by Jesus, looks at the glory and the shame of it all and brings both, in prayer and liturgy, before the presence of God. It thus holds together worship and mission, looking at God in adoration and, precisely because it is this God it looks at, looking out at the world in joyful and grieving prayer."
~ Theology ~
"Christian theology from the first was oriented toward both worship and mission: the true God was to be worshiped truly (to avoid idolatry and its accompanying dehumanization), and the news of what this God had just accomplished was to be communicated accurately and precisely to the whole world." (213)
"Christian theology is called to walk the tightrope: to claim to be speaking the truth while making it clear in the manner of the claim that this is not after all a covert power play."
"The mainstream Christian answer [to how we can know about God] has always been that, though the one true God is in various ways beyond our imagination, let alone our knowledge, and though such knowledge as we may have is beyond our own unaided power to attain, this God has not left us to speculate, imagine, or project our own fantasies onto the screen of transcendence; this God instead, through self-revelation, has given us such knowledge as is possible and appropriate for us. And the same mainstream Christian answer has gone on to say that this self-revelation has taken place supremely in Jesus, the crucified and risen messiah of Israel." (214)
~ Politics ~
"[Within] Jesus' world, and his message and ministry, God's sphere and the human sphere belong inseparably together. Thy kingdom come, he taught us to pray, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Not 'in heaven, when we eventually get there' or 'in heaven, where we enjoy our private spiritualities,' but on earth, in the here-and-now. And that kingdom, that will of God, concerned--for a first-century Jew speaking to first-century Jews--God's becoming king, and Caesar, Herod, and all other claimants being demoted. That language, both then and now, enters the arena known as politics, and any attempt to remove it from that arena falsifies and belittles it." (218-219)
"The persecution suffered by the early church, at the hands of pagans and Jews alike, did not take place because the Christians carried strange ideas around in their heads; people seldom get persecuted for thinking strange thoughts. Persecution happens when people find their symbolic and political universe challenged by other people whose belief commit them to a different set of symbols, to a different political allegiance. The worship and mission of the early church were both inescapably 'political': to worship the God revealed in Jesus meant giving him an allegiance that was then denied to all others. To announce the lordship of this Jesus, and to summon people to trust and obey him, was to command them to leave the worship of all other gods. And the god whose stock was on the increase most dramatically in the early Roman Empire was Caesar himself." (219)
"A Christianity that looks back to Jesus himself, then, seen as the messiah of Israel and the Lord of the world, will not shrink from bringing together (a) the spirituality that acknowledges him as lord of one's life, taking precedence over all other claimants, worshiped and adored in prayer, sacrament, meditation, and contemplation, (b) the theology that articulates his lordship and divinity and seeks to express these as truly and clearly as possible for today's world, and (c) the politics that acknowledges him as Lord of the world and seeks to implement that lordship by all appropriate means." (221)
"Political action is often costly. It is not known as widely as it should be that, despite the collapse of communism (which many Western Christians had supposed to be the main persecutor of Christians in the contemporary world), Christians even today are being persecuted for their faith. Violence, torture, rape, murder, and major discrimination are daily realities in at least sixty countries around the world. Because we in the West assume that religion and politics belong in different spheres, we forget that there are many today for whom naming the name of Jesus Christ brings direct conflict with the powers that be. Christians in the West, one fears, would turn back and compromise under these circumstances. Many elsewhere do not, and they suffer the consequences. The early Christians, including those who wrote the gospels, would have recognized them as brothers and sisters." (221-222)
"Just as spirituality and theology need politics, so politics needs spirituality and theology. The resulting mixture has not been seen often in Western churches, where the disastrous legacy of the Enlightenment has meant that the two are usually thought of as antithetical. But it is well known in most other parts of the world, not least the places where the churches, supposedly in decline in the West, are at their strongest. Most African Christians have no difficulty in putting together what many Westerners insist on keeping in separate compartments."
~ Healing ~
"By healing I mean a wide range of phenomena. Physical healing, certainly; but also psychological healing, inner healing, healing of memories, and the like; and also the healing of societies and institutions." (222)
"I cannot doubt that the God I worship heals people physically: I have friends, and at least one close relative, who owe their very lives to healings that came swiftly and directly in answer to widespread prayer after the medical profession had given up. I cannot doubt that God also heals people emotionally, dealing with bruised memories, hidden angers, psychological scars. These things are difficult to demonstrate and easy to explain away; but they are real, lasting, and lifegiving to those who have experienced them." (223)
"I know that there are charlatans who manipulate people in private and public, on television and stage, claiming healings that are no such thing, urging people to greater 'faith' when the only appropriate stance is silence before the mystery of God. I know also that there are many people for whom confident, believing prayers were said who did not get better. I know that there are appalling tragedies in our world, from the Holocaust to the wasting of little children through famine, that all the prayer in the world seems to have been powerless to combat. I refuse to allow my awareness of these things to bully or browbeat me into denying other things I also know: that the God who healed through Jesus in his lifetime heals through the Spirit of Jesus today."
"Paul writes in several of his letters about his own suffering, and that of other Christians, being used in the economy of God to bring about life and healing for others. 2 Corinthians as a whole reflects this belief: there, Paul's suffering as an apostle (directly caused by his challenging the principalities and powers with the news that the crucified Jesus is the Lord of the world) is seen as itself part of the healing process whereby [the] Corinthian church is built up in faith, renewed in Christ."
"[In Romans 8.18-27], within the context of the hope for the renewal (healing?) of the whole creation, Paul sketches a picture of the church's task. The church is not called to stand on the sidelines, watching the world from a distance as it groans in travail, longing for redemption. The church finds itself caught up in the same groaning, suffering at the heart of a world in pain. But within the church's groaning Paul detects the groaning of the Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the living God. God does not stand aloof from the pain of the church and hence from the pain of the world. Rather, God is present in the church, calling forth prayer, even inarticulate prayer, precisely at the place of the world's pain. Thus the church is called to be for the world what Jesus was for Israel: not just a moral lecturer, not even a moral example, but the people who, in obedience to God's strange vocation, learn to suffer and pray at the place where the world is in pain, so that the world may be healed. And this healing takes place both in the future, when God remakes heaven and earth, and here and now, in those strange moments of healing that, though unpredictable and sometimes open to challenge, catch us by surprise as moments of true revelation." (224)
"The church's ministry of healing, at this deep level, is carried on in the midst of the suffering that comes from engaging with the powers; it is the very embodiment of characteristic and authentic Christianity spirituality; and it is explained by the richest Christian theology--the doctrine of the Trinity, set within an eschatological framework in which the creator God designs to heal and renew the whole creation... It is as we worship the God revealed in Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, that this power is unleashed, always strange and sovereign, never at our disposal, in the mission of healing to and for the world." (224-225)
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