The Gospel has been much talked about but practically sidelined under Christendom, says Jonathan Bartley. Rediscovering the radicalism of Jesus' message is vital to the recovery of a proper public role for Christian faith.

The current media-propelled debates about God are mostly hopelessly out of touch with their own intense fallibility, says Simon Barrow. He tries to explain why God-talk will always be helpfully elusive if it is faithful to what it seeks to point to.

The modern temptation is to dismiss resurrection as fantasy or reduce it to spiritualised sophistry, says Simon Barrow. The shape of the core Christian hope is both more substantial and more subtle than that.

Forget Maria. How do you solve a problem like Jesus? After all, everyone has a view: well-meaning Jewish guru, dangerous heretic, son of God, charlatan. The list is endless. Mel Gibson gave us the fundamentalist's Jesus of gruesome realism: a tortured body offset by expensive LA orthodontistry (bad teeth would have been a realism too far). This year's Easter offering from the BBC - boldly scheduled for primetime on BBC1 - reaches for the other extreme and presents the inoffensive Liberal Democrat Jesus: Nick Clegg with a beard.

In Christian and biblical terms, good citizenship is not about flag-waving, says Simon Barrow. It is about the good practices and ways of organising our public lives which enable people to belong to one another across nation state boundaries.

Christian activists will make symbolic acts of commitment at the Ministry of Defence in London and at other venues in Scotland and the north of England tomorrow, urging a shift from waging war to waging peace in a divided world.