The cause of truth will always excite conflict. Our world, our race, natural religion in all its forms, is at implacable enmity with God. The word of God is militant toward evil and arouses an angry backlash. The meddling and mischief of the archenemy of the Lord, whose malice and violence, physical, mental, and spiritual is great, unrelenting, and furious, rendered the 16th and 17th centuries a time of turmoil and tempest.

You don't expect statues to sway your emotions (unless sculpted by Bernini), but I was deeply moved by the statue of William Wilberforce, at the entrance to St John's College Chapel. The figures of Francis Bacon, father of the scientific method, who believed that God had revealed himself through two books -- nature and Scripture -- surrounded by Isaac Barrow and Isaac Newton at the entrance to Trinity College Chapel, remain forever etched on my memory.

Few will subscribe in a hearty and full-blooded way to John Wycliffe's definition of the church, namely, "the whole number of the predestined". That is the truest description of the church and the elect of God mingle with and circulate among the vast crowd that considers itself to constitute the dubious phenomenon identified as Christendom for all sorts of reasons apart from the Gospel (historical, ethnic, political, cultural).

In the evangelical world since World War II, Jesus has been the focus of most thinking and worship. There were good reasons for this. Liberal theology in the 20th century had reduced the gospel to the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and social ethics. Salvation, liberals implied, was the reward for being a nice person.

Evangelicals were right to say, No, the gospel is about Jesus and the cross. They were partly right.