N T Wright Quotes

If you have never felt or known the sheer power and strength of God's love, take another look at Jesus dying on the cross. ~ N. T. Wright

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex. But ~ N. T. Wright

so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology, ~ N. T. Wright

9'So this is how you should pray: Our father in heaven, May your name be honoured 10May your kingdom come May your will be done As in heaven, so on earth. 11Give us today the bread we need now; 12And forgive us the things we owe, As we too have forgiven what was owed to us. 13Don't bring us into the great Trial, But rescue us from evil. ~ N. T. Wright

Art is love creating the new world and justice is love rolling up its sleeves to heal the old one. ~ N. T. Wright

In part, this will happen simply because people who pray the Psalms will be worshiping the God who made them, and one of the basic spiritual laws is that you become like what you worship. More particularly, however, it will happen because people who pray the Psalms will be learning (whether they necessarily think it out like this or not) to live in God's time as well as in their own, in God's space as well as in their own, and even in and as God's "matter" - the stuff of which we're made - as well as in and as our own. The ~ N. T. Wright

What I am suggesting is that faith in Jesus risen from the dead transcends but includes what we call history and what we call science. Faith of this sort is not blind belief that rejects all history and science. Nor is it simply - which would be much safer! - a belief that inhabits a totally different sphere, discontinuous from either, in a separate watertight compartment. Rather, this kind of faith, which is like all modes of knowledge defined by the nature of its object, is faith in the creator God, the God who has promised to put all things to rights at the end, the God who (as the sharp point where those two come together) has raised Jesus from the dead within history, leaving as I said evidence that demands an explanation from the scientist as well as anybody else. ~ N. T. Wright

Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him. ~ N. T. Wright

Paul's vision, though, is starting small, with actual communities in which reconciliation and justice has to be practiced - like the rich/poor distinction in the Corinthian church, for instance, or the projected reconciliation between Philemon and Onesimus. But he clearly believes (Ephesians 3) that communities like this send a signal to the wider world that Jesus is Lord - which is aimed at then the whole world coming into line. ~ N. T. Wright

The point we desperately need to grasp is that forgiveness is not the same thing as tolerance. We are told again and again today that we must be "inclusive"; that Jesus welcomed all kinds of people just as they were; that the church believes in forgiveness and therefore we should remarry divorcees without question, reinstate employees who were sacked for dishonesty, allow convicted pedophiles back into children's work-actually, we don't normally say the last of these, which shows that we have retained at least some vestiges of common sense. But forgiveness is not the same as tolerance. It is not the same as inclusivity. It is not the same as indifference, whether personal or moral. Forgiveness doesn't mean that we don't take evil seriously after all; it means that we do. ~ N. T. Wright

sovereignty let loose through Jesus and the Spirit and aimed at the healing and renewal of all creation. ~ N. T. Wright

Paul's strong, clear teaching at exactly this point both on the new status of the believer as having died and risen with Jesus Christ and on the new gift of God to the believer, the gift which Paul calls the holy spirit. It is astonishing to see how much of the debate has been conducted without the help of these two categories, as though the 'doctrine of justification' had to proceed with minimalist theological tools in order to be pure. You might as well try to play Wagner on a tin whistle. ~ N. T. Wright

One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas. ~ N. T. Wright

Blessings on the poor in spirit! The kingdom of heaven is yours" (Matt. 5:3) doesn't mean, "You will go to heaven when you die." It means you will be one of those through whom God's kingdom, heaven's rule, begins to appear on earth as in heaven. The Beatitudes are the agenda for kingdom people. They are not simply about how to behave, so that God will do something nice to you. They are about the way in which Jesus wants to rule the world. ~ N. T. Wright

People even talk of being "on the wrong side of history," as though they knew not only what the last twenty years had produced, but what the next twenty years were going to produce as well. The idolization of "progress," of "moving with the times," is part of the same movement. "Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . ." people begin, as though it were obvious that one's ethics or theology ought to change with the calendar. All this is a form of creeping pantheism, of looking at certain trends in the wider world and deducing that they are what "God" is doing. (It's also very selective; it cheerfully screens out all the inventions of modernism, such as guillotines and gas chambers, which do not exactly fit the picture of an upward journey into light.) ~ N. T. Wright

Human was simultaneously the bearer of God's wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience. ~ N. T. Wright

He has done it. With Jesus, God's rescue operation has been put into effect once and for all. A great door has swung open in the cosmos which can never again be shut. It's the door to the prison where we've been kept chained up. We are offered freedom: freedom to experience God's rescue for ourselves, to go through the open door and explore the new world to which we now have access.
In listening to Jesus, we discover whose voice it is that has echoed around the hearts and minds of the human race all along. ~ N. T. Wright

It has forgotten that the gospels are replete with atonement theology, through and through - only they give it to us not as a neat little system, but as a powerful, sprawling, many-sided, richly revelatory narrative in which we are invited to find ourselves, or rather to lose ourselves and to be found again the other side. ~ N. T. Wright

We have developed a corollary that is neither love nor forgiveness - namely, tolerance. The problem with this is clear: I can "tolerate" you without it costing me anything very much. I can shrug my shoulders, walk away, and leave you to do your own thing. That, admittedly, is preferable to my taking you by the throat and shaking you until you agree with me. But it is certainly not love. ~ N. T. Wright

The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights. ~ N. T. Wright

though the Western tradition and particularly the Protestant and evangelical traditions have claimed to be based on the Bible and rooted in scripture, they have by and large developed long-lasting and subtle strategies for not listening to what the Bible is in fact saying. We must stop giving nineteenth-century answers to sixteenth-century questions and try to give twenty-first-century answers to first-century questions. ~ N. T. Wright

The Bible is the book of my life. It's the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by. ~ N. T. Wright

The good news was, and is, that all this has happened in and through Jesus; that one day it will happen, completely and utterly, to all creation; and that we humans, every single one of us, whoever we are, can be caught up in that transformation here and now. ~ N. T. Wright

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality. ~ N. T. Wright

To pray 'your kingdom come' at Jesus' bidding meant to align oneself with his kingdom movement. ~ N. T. Wright

I need the wisdom, reasoning, and apologetics of C. S. Lewis, though some of his theological beliefs are different from mine. I need the preaching and charisma of Charles Spurgeon, though his view of baptism is different from mine. I need the resurrection vision of N. T. Wright and the theology of Jonathan Edwards, though their views on church government are different from mine. I need the passion and prophetic courage of Martin Luther King Jr., the cultural intelligence of Soong-Chan Rah, and the Confessions of St. Augustine, though their ethnicities are different from mine. I need the justice impulse and communal passion of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though his nationality is different from mine. I need the spiritual thirst and love drive of Brennan Manning and the prophetic wit of G. K. Chesterton, though both are Roman Catholics and I am a Protestant. I need the hymns and personal holiness of John and Charles Wesley, though some of their doctrinal distinctives are different from mine. I need the glorious weakness of Joni Eareckson Tada, the spirituality of Marva Dawn, the trusting perseverance of Elisabeth Elliot, the long-suffering spirit of Amy Carmichael, the transparency of Rebekah Lyons, the thankfulness of Ann Voskamp, the Kingdom vision of Amy Sherman, and the integrity of Patti Sauls, though their gender is different from mine. As St. Augustine reputedly said, "In nonessentials, liberty." To this we might add, "In nonessentials, open-minded receptivity." We Christians m ~ Scott Sauls

Matthew's story of the resurrection emphasizes typically Matthean themes, and so on. But this is like what you get when different artists paint portraits of the same person. This painting is certainly a Rembrandt; that is indubitably a Holbein. The touch of the individual artist is unmistakable. And yet the sitter is fully recognizable. The artists have not changed the color of her hair, the shape of his nose, the particular half smile. And when we ask why such stories, so different in many ways and yet so interestingly consistent in these and other features, could have come into existence so early, all the early Christians give the obvious answer: something like this is what happened, even though it was hard to describe at the time and remains mind-boggling thereafter. ~ N. T. Wright

God has committed himself, ever since creation, to working through his creatures
in particular, through his image-bearing human beings
but they have all let Him down. ~ N. T. Wright

The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent nonpsalmic "worship" based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy. ~ N. T. Wright

The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of 'supernatural' with 'superstition', are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice. ~ N. T. Wright

I have argued that the God of the Bible, and especially of the Gospels, can be understood only as God-in-public, and that methods of criticism designed to keep this rumor quiet need to be challenged by appropriate historical, theological, and political critique and replaced by methods that do justice to the reality of the texts and hence do justice - in the much fuller sense - in the public world that the Gospels demand to address. ~ N. T. Wright

One might even state it as an axiom: when the church leaves out bits of its core teaching, heretics will pick them up, turn them into something new, and use them to spread doubt and unbelief. ~ N. T. Wright

Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religious possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation. ~ N. T. Wright

genuine faith is always seeking the Word hidden in the flesh, not using the Word simply as a way of getting at the flesh. ~ N. T. Wright

People who believe in the resurrection, in God making a whole new world in which everything will be set right at last, are unstoppably motivated to work for that new world in the present. ~ N. T. Wright

God creates "that which is not God" out of generous love in order that he may then, in the end, fill it, flood it, drench it, with his love and his glory. ~ N. T. Wright

The power of the gospel lies[ ... ] in the powerful announcement that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the powers of evil have been defeated, that God's new world has begun. ~ N. T. Wright

When the women went to the tomb they met someone else and in the half light they thought it was Jesus himself. Answer: they would have noticed soon enough. ~ N. T. Wright

Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the mode of knowing that is necessary if we are to live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't. ~ N. T. Wright

One of the great virtues of Christianity, according to (John)Wesley, is the way it fills up our every waking hour. Both (N.T.) Wright and Wesley write that Christianity is not just about what God does for us but what God does in us. ~ John Meunier

Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement. We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended. ~ N. T. Wright

To see evangelism in terms of the announcement of God's kingdom, of Jesus's lordship and of the consequent new creation, avoids from the start any suggestion that the main or central thing that has happened is that the new Christian has entered into a private relationship with God or with Jesus and that this relationship is the main or only thing that matters. ~ N. T. Wright

Only those who have tried to understand and expound the Bible, and especially Paul as a man of his own day, only those who have happily escaped the dangers which threaten us on these two sides (exposition and application), are entitled to cast the first stone. ~ N. T. Wright

It is not about "life after death" as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: "life after 'life after death. ~ N. T. Wright

Certainly Paul shares the view of the Old Testament prophets that God will one day flood the world with justice and joy - and that this has begun to be fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus. ~ N. T. Wright

Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence. ~ N. T. Wright

I have never been to India and I am not a specialist on Indian culture, and I would not wish to be heard to be taking swipes at a culture which I've never experienced and where I've never lived. ~ N. T. Wright

As we shall see, it is only when we take fully into account the gospel writers' belief that Jesus was involved in the ultimate battle against the ultimate forces of evil that we can begin to see how their combination of kingdom and cross - and, looking wider, of incarnation, kingdom, cross, and resurrection - makes sense. ~ N. T. Wright

Now love doesn't stop at death - or if it does, it's a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of nothingness. But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved in prayer before God. ~ N. T. Wright

The church isn't simply a collection of isolated individuals ... we need to learn again the lesson that a hand is no less a hand for being part of a larger whole, an entire body. The foot is not diminished in its freedom to be a foot by being part of a body which also contains eyes and ears. In fact, hands and feet are most free to be themselves when they coordinate properly with eyes, ears, and everything else. Cutting them off in an effort to make them truly free, truly themselves, would be truly disastrous. ~ N. T. Wright

Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God. ~ N. T. Wright

When Jesus wanted to explain to his disciples what his death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal. ~ N. T. Wright

Jesus wasn't just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news - something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong. ~ N. T. Wright

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future. ~ N. T. Wright

It's partly that I'm an extrovert and that I like being with people. If you shut me up in a library with nothing else around for weeks on end, I'd go mad! I have to sort of go out ... ~ N. T. Wright

Hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once. ~ N. T. Wright

First, Paul is anxious that everyone who professes Christian faith should allow the gospel to transform the whole of their lives, so that the outward signs of the faith express a living reality that comes from the deepest parts of the personality. Second, he is also anxious that each Christian, and especially every teacher of the faith, should know how to build up the community in mutual love and support, rather than, by the wrong sort of teaching or behaviour, tearing it apart. ~ N. T. Wright

What is needed is history, genuine history, multi-faceted history, 'thick description' history that takes seriously the full range of human life and culture. ~ N. T. Wright

When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven't yet really understood who he is or what he's done. ~ N. T. Wright

What Jesus did and said was designed to give a decisive answer, in deeds as well as words, to the question, What would it look like if God was running things? ~ N. T. Wright

[Albert] Schweitzer thus carved out his own path through the first half of this century, a lonely and learned giant amidst the hordes of noisy and shallow theological pygmies. ~ N. T. Wright

My aim has been to expound Scripture and to expound Scripture in such a way that I do not set one Scripture over against another. ~ N. T. Wright

Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place ~ N. T. Wright

We British say "to put the world to rights." I've discovered that that's not the way Americans say it and people scratch their heads and say, "Funny ... what does he mean by that?" It means to fix the thing, to make it all better again. ~ N. T. Wright

History, I believe, brings us to the point where we are bound to say: there really was an empty tomb, and there really were sightings of Jesus, the same and yet transformed. History then says: so how do you explain that? It offers us no easy escapes at that point, no quick side-exits to the question. ~ N. T. Wright

When you see the dawn breaking, you think back to the darkness in a new way. "Sin" is not simply the breaking of a law. It is the missing of an opportunity. Having heard the echoes of a voice, we are called to come and meet the speaker. We are invited to be transformed by the voice itself, the word of the gospel- the word which declares that evil has been judged, that the world has been put to rights, that heaven and earth are joined forever, and that new creation has begun. We are called to become people who can speak and live and paint and sing that word so that those who have heard it's echoes can come and lend a hand in the larger project. That is the opportunity that stands before us, as a gift and a possibility. Christian holiness is not (as people often imagine) a matter of denying something good. It is about growing up and grasping something even better. ~ N. T. Wright

Sanders argued, basically, that the normal Christian, and especially Protestant, readings of Paul were seriously flawed, because they attributed to first-century Judaism theological views which belonged rather to medieval Catholicism. Once we described Judaism accurately, Sanders argued, we were forced to rethink Paul's critique of it, and his whole positive theology in its turn. ~ N. T. Wright

You are called to be truly human, but it is nothing short of the life of God within you that enables you to be so, to be remade in God's image. As C.S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present. ~ N. T. Wright

Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet. ~ N. T. Wright

the reason Israel's story matters is that the creator of the world has chosen and called Israel to be the people through whom he will redeem the world. ~ N. T. Wright

In many churches, the good news has subtly changed into good advice: Here's how to live, they say. Here's how to pray. Here are techniques for helping you become a better Christian, a better person, a better wife or husband. And in particular, here's how to make sure you're on the right track for what happens after death. Take this advice: say this prayer and you'll be saved. You won't go to hell; you'll go to heaven. Here's how to do it. This is advice, not news. ~ N. T. Wright

It is faith alone that justifies, but faith that justifies can never be alone, though one is justified by faith alone, the faith which justifies is never in fact alone. ~ N. T. Wright

As our world shudders like a plane suddenly hitting a flock of geese, we badly need people who will learn that sense, and learn it quickly, not simply or even primarily for their own benefit but because our world, God's world, needs people at the helm in whom courage, good judgment, a cool head, and a proper care for people - and, if possible, faith, hope, and love as well - have become second nature. ~ N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright explains, "What [Jesus] was promising for that future, and doing in that present, was not saving souls for a disembodied eternity, but rescuing people from the corruption and decay of the way the world presently is so they could enjoy, already in the present, that renewal of creation which is God's ultimate purpose - and so they could thus become colleagues and partners in that larger project."1 A promise of a new creation and an invitation to a new vocation stretches beyond "me and Jesus" to God's worldwide purposes. The mission of the church must be informed and shaped by how the New Testament presents the future hope. ~ Peter L. Steinke

Perhaps art can help us to look beyond the immediate beauty with all its puzzles, and to glimpse that new creation which makes sense not only of beauty but of the world as a whole, and ourselves within it ... The artist can then join forces with those who work for justice and those who struggle for redemptive relationships, and together encourage and sustain those who are reaching out for a genuine, redemptive spirituality. ~ N. T. Wright

Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. ~ N. T. Wright

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says - especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection - but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here. ~ N. T. Wright

Not only was the theory of evolution not invented by Darwin himself; it wasn't invented by his Enlightenment predecessors either. It was invented by Epicurus (looking back to Democritus and others) and popularized by Lucretius. It wasn't and isn't a new, modern discovery. It is simply one part of one ancient worldview. ~ N. T. Wright

Old soldiers sometimes say, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (A foxhole, in military slang, is a shallow pit in a dangerous place on the battlefield.) ~ N. T. Wright

As C. S. Lewis said in a famous lecture, next to the sacrament itself your Christian neighbor is the holiest object ever presented to your sight, because in him or her the living Christ is truly present.3 ~ N. T. Wright

Who had the biggest army in the ancient world? Caesar Augustus in Rome, and that is precisely how he was able to dominate that world. Nevertheless, his army is nothing compared to this angelic stratias that has lined up behind the new emperor. Remember Isaiah's prophesy that Yahweh would one day bare his mighty arm before all the nations. N.T. Wright has magnificently observed that the prophecy finds its fulfillment in the tiny arm of the baby Jesus coming out of his manger-crib. ~ Robert E. Barron

To this day, whenever people take it upon themselves to explore the divinity of Jesus, there is at the very least a tendency for the theme of God's kingdom, coming on earth as in heaven, to be quietly lost from view. It is as though a young man spent all his time proving that he really was his father's son and left no time or energy for working with his father in the family business - which would, actually, be one of the better ways of demonstrating the family likeness. The gospels don't make that mistake. It is by his inaugurating of God's kingdom, in his public career and on the cross, that Jesus reveals the father's glory. ~ N. T. Wright

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply personal for every single Christian; nobody gets lost in the kingdom of God. But you can't play that off against the corporate dimension. ~ N. T. Wright

The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death. ~ N. T. Wright

problematic within post-Reformation dogmatics. Is faith something I `do' to earn God's favour, and, if not, what role does it play? Once we release Paul's justification-language from the burden of having to describe `how someone becomes a Christian', however, this is simply no longer a problem. There is no danger of imagining that Christian faith is after all a surrogate `work', let alone a substitute form of moral righteousness. Faith is the badge of covenant membership, not something someone `performs' as a kind of initiation test. ~ N. T. Wright

Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present. ~ N. T. Wright

Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God's saving, sovereign kingdom ... ~ N. T. Wright

As St. Paul says, what matters isn't so much our knowledge of God as God's knowledge of us; not, as it were, the god we want but the God who wants us. God help us, we don't understand ourselves; how can we expect to understand that Self which stands beside our selves like Niagara beside a trickling tap? ~ N.T. Wright

Many in the church have turned their back on serious study, and have embraced an anti-intellectualism which refuses to learn anything from scholarship at all lest it corrupt their pure faith. It is time to end this standoff, and to reestablish a hermeneutic of trust (itself a sign of the gospel!) in place of the hermeneutic of suspicion which the church has so disastrously borrowed from the postmodern world. ~ N. T. Wright

Once again, just because I prefer Guinness to lemonade that doesn't mean I am not particular about the temperature at which the Guinness is served; and I believe Paul would have told Calvin to take his dark Irish beer out of the fridge, to let it come up to room temperature and taste its full flavour. ~ N. T. Wright

Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death," let alone, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die." Nor even, in a more authentic first-century Christian way, do they say, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised from the dead after the sleep of death." No. Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world's true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God's new creation has begun - and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven! To be sure, as early as Paul the resurrection of Jesus is firmly linked to the final resurrection of all God's people. ~ N. T. Wright

Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn't. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him - but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction. ~ N. T. Wright

A famous preacher had a friend who was well known for his short temper. One day, at a party, he asked this friend to help him serve some drinks. The preacher himself poured the drinks, deliberately filling several of the glasses a bit too full. He then passed the tray to his friend. As they walked into the room to distribute the drinks, he accidentally-on-purpose bumped into the friend, causing the tray to jiggle and some of the drinks to slosh over the brim and spill. "There you are, you see," said the preacher. "When you're jolted, what spills out is whatever is filling you." When you're suddenly put to the test and don't have time to think about how you're coming across, your real nature will come out. That's why character needs to go all the way through: whatever fills you will spill out. And it's up to you to do something about it. ~ N. T. Wright

But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive. We're like moths trying to fly to the moon. We all know there's something called justice, but we can't quite get to it. ~ N. T. Wright

I do not imagine for a minute that in the coming age we shall arrive at a point where we shall have experienced everything the new world has to offer and will become bored. In contrast, I believe that the God we know in Jesus is the God of utterly generous, outflowing love, I believe that there will be no end to the new creation of this God, and that within the new age itself there will always be more to hope for, more to work for, more to celebrate. Learning to hope in the present time is learning not just to hope for a better place than we currently find ourselves in, but learning to trust the God who is and will remain the God of the future. ~ N.T. Wright

The church is not simply a religious body looking for a safe place to do its own thing within a wider political or social world. The church is neither more nor less than people who bear witness, by their very existence and in particular their holiness and their unity (Colossians 3), that Jesus is the world's true lord, ridiculous or even scandalous though this may seem. ~ N. T. Wright

We have lived for too long with the arts as the pretty bit around the edge with the reality as a non-artistic thing in the middle. But the world is charged with the grandeur of God. Why should we not celebrate and rejoice in that? And the answer sometimes is because the world is also a messy and nasty and horrible place. And, of course, some artists make a living out of representing the world as a very ugly and wicked and horrible place. And our culture has slid in both directions so that we have got sentimental art on the one hand and brutalist art in the other. And if you want to find sentimental art then, tragically, the church is often a good place to look, as people when they want to paint religious pictures screen out the nasty bits. But genuine art, I believe, takes seriously the fact that the world is full of the glory of God, and that it will be full as the waters cover the sea, and, at present (Rom 8), it is groaning in travail. Genuine art responds to that triple awareness: of what is true (the beauty that is there), of what will be true (the ultimate beauty), and of the pain of the present, and holds them together as the psalms do, and asks why and what and where are we. You can do that in music, and you can do that in painting. And our generation needs us to do that not simply to decorate the gospel but to announce the gospel. ~ N.T. Wright

The resurrection gives you a sense of what God wants to do for the whole world ... ~ N. T. Wright

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more. It is the moment when the story of Israel reaches its climax; the moment when, at last, the watchmen on Jerusalem's walls see their God coming in his kingdom; the moment when the people of God are renewed so as to be, at last, the royal priesthood who will take over the world not with the love of power but with the power of love; the ~ N. T. Wright

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice and of God as the good creator. ~ N. T. Wright