N. T. Wright Quotes

#1. In God's kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be. That is how God becomes king.

N. T. Wright

#2. How would you describe a mature person?

N. T. Wright

#3. The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.

N. T. Wright

#4. What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

N. T. Wright

#5. The imminent demise of the church has been predicted since the middle of the 18th century. This is the regular secular mantra if churchgoing declines. I could take you to plenty of churches that are full to bursting and new churches being built.

N. T. Wright

#6. When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves
that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.

N. T. Wright

#7. Worship is love on its knees before the beloved; just as mission is love on its feet to serve the beloved

N. T. Wright

#8. The word "salvation" denotes rescue. Rescue? What from? Well, of course, ultimately death. And since it is sin that colludes with the forces of evil and decay, sin leads to death. So we are rescued from sin and death.

N. T. Wright

#9. The gospel, in the New Testament, is the good news that God (the world's creator) is at last becoming king and that Jesus, whom this God raised from the dead, is the world's true lord.

N. T. Wright

#10. 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

#11. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold - and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed.

N. T. Wright

#12. In the same way many Christians
whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations
have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it to sustain only three or four things they already do.

N. T. Wright

#13. Fortunately, Paul is much more interesting than most of his interpreters, myself included.

N. T. Wright

#14. The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

N. T. Wright

#15. We can be, and we are called to be, good-news people - people who themselves are being renewed by the good news, people through whom the good news is bringing healing and hope to the world at whatever level.

N. T. Wright

#16. A piety that sees death as the moment of "going home at last," the time when we are "called to God's eternal peace," has no quarrel with power-mongers who want to carve up the world to suit their own ends.

N. T. Wright

#17. If you ask people in England where does Tom Wright sit on the theological spectrum, they say, "Well he's an evangelical of course," as though, come on, get used to it.

N. T. Wright

#18. The minute you think you're good enough for God, God says, 'I'm not interested in people who are good enough for me.' And the minute you think you're too bad for God, God says, 'It's you I've come for.

N. T. Wright

#19. While some who downplay Christ's divinity have imagined Jesus as a great social worker 'being kind to old ladies, small dogs and little children,' orthodox Christianity has not wanted Jesus to have a political message.

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#20. Scripture is, at its heart, the great story that we sing in order not just to learn it with our heads but to become part of it through and through, the story that in turn becomes part of us.

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#21. Justice never means "treating everybody the same way", but "treating people appropriately".

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#22. don't believe everything you read about the Rapture. In fact, don't believe most of what you read about the Rapture.

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#23. Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple, he is also the walking, celebrating, victorious sabbath.

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#24. I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

N. T. Wright

#25. Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or notice him it will be a sign that he has forgotten, after all, who his father is.

N. T. Wright

#26. Often people see doctrines as a checklist. Here are the following nineteen truths which you've got to believe to be a good sound Christian.

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#27. The Bible is the story so far in the true novel that God is still writing.

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#28. 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.

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#29. Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.

N. T. Wright

#30. The disciples wanted a kingdom without a cross. Many would-be "orthodox" or "conservative" Christians in our world have wanted a cross without a kingdom, an abstract "atonement" that would have nothing to do with this world except to provide the means of escaping it.

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#31. Death is the last weapon of the tyrant; the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated.

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#32. The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.

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#33. We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire.

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#34. When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

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#35. I remember one particular moment (I don't actually know how old I was, but I guess around 7 or something like that) when I remember actually weeping. I was by myself in a room in the house, and I was just crying because I realized how much Jesus loved me.

N. T. Wright

#36. God's kingdom" in the preaching of Jesus refers not to postmortem destiny, not to our escape from this world into another one, but to God's sovereign rule coming "on earth as it is in heaven.

N. T. Wright

#37. Since the Bible has quite a lot to say about truth - and since it also has plenty to say about how particular individuals relate to that truth - it has become easy to imagine that its claims can and should be reduced to particular, and highly relative and situational, angles of vision.

N. T. Wright

#38. Faith involves believing that certain things are true, of course. But (here's another caricature we have to put firmly to bed) this isn't about odd, detached dogmas. It's about certain things in the light of which everything else at last comes into focus.

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#39. If you believe in the Bible, you've got to do business with it and not just screen it out.

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#40. We have to train ourselves to use words accurately. And there's so much loose Christian talk, for which I've no doubt been as guilty as any.

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#41. A tectonic plate's got to do what a tectonic plate's got to do.

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#42. 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

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#43. Jesus was announcing that a whole new world was being born and he was "teaching" people how to live within that whole new world.

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#44. Swords don't glorify the creator-God. Love does. Self-giving love, best of all.

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#45. 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.)

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#46. Part of Christian belief is to find out what's true about Jesus and let that challenge our culture.

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#47. One Corinthians 15, one of Paul's longest sustained discussions and the climax of the whole letter, is about the creator God remaking the creation - not abandoning it, as Platonists of all sorts, including the gnostics, would have wanted.

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#48. It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to "fix" the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn't a mistake there's no way back.

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#49. Put like that, of course, it seems absurd; and yet the absurdity lies in the attempt to picture God as just like us only a bit bigger and more all-seeing.

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#50. God's plan is not to abandon this world, the world which he said was "very good." Rather, he intends to remake it. And when he does he will raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it. That is the promise of the Christian gospel.

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#51. Resurrection, we must never cease to remind ourselves, did not mean going to heaven or escaping death or having a glorious and noble postmortem existence but rather coming to bodily life again after bodily death.

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#52. 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.

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#53. God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.

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#54. For me, actually, being a bishop in a bishopric where there's an academic tradition gives me this fascinating, challenging, but open invitation to say, "We want you to be a scholar. We want you to go on doing this. But do it as a bishop!"

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#55. When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong. (on atonement theories)

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#56. Beauty, like justice, slips through our fingers. We photograph the sunset, but all we get is the memory of the moment, not the moment itself. We buy the recording, but the symphony says something different when we listen to it at home.

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#57. It is time, and long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political theology - not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are.

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#58. since humans are made for the life that comes from God and God alone, to worship that which is not God is to fall in love with death. Here

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#59. There are five language-sets in particular which they employed for this purpose. Briefly, they are as follows: Wisdom, Torah, Spirit, Word and Shekinah

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#60. I'm very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.

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#61. Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.

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#62. I really don't care too much what the different later Christian traditions say. My aim is to be faithful to Scripture.

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#63. For Christians it's always a love game ... that He is love itself ... Indeed, some have suggested that one way of understanding the Spirit is to see the Spirit as the personal love which the Father has for the Son and the Son for the Father.

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#64. The church is not supposed to be a society of perfect people doing great work. It's a society of forgiven sinners repaying their unpayable debt of love by working for Jesus's kingdom in every way they can, knowing themselves to be unworthy of the task.

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#65. Those twin beliefs give rise not to a meek acquiescence to injustice in the world but to a robust determination to oppose it. English

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#66. Your calling may be to find new ways to tell the story of redemption, to create fresh symbols tat will speak of a home for the homeless, the end of exile, the replanting of the garden, the rebuilding of the house.

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#67. All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

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#68. Indian leaders are saying, "You don't understand our caste system. It's really a lovely thing. People are very happy about it and so on." I don't think that's quite fair.

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#69. I grew up in a church-going family, a very sort of ordinary, middle-of-the-road Anglican family where nobody really talked about personal Christian experience. It was just sort of assumed like an awful lot of things in the 1950's were just sort of taken for granted.

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#70. We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

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#71. Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place

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#72. The gospels are, and were written to be, fresh tellings of the story of Jesus designed to be the charter of the community of Jesus's first followers and those who, through their witness, then and subsequently, have joined in and have learned to hear, see, and know Jesus in word and sacrament.

N. T. Wright

#73. Jesus, to be sure, often spent long times alone in prayer. But he was also deeply at home where there was a party, a kingdom party, a celebration of the fact that God was at last taking charge.

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#74. 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.

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#75. truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God's wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed.

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#76. We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

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#77. 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.

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#78. The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost.

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#79. But, granted that learning without love is sterile and dry, enthusiasm without learning can easily become blind arrogance.

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#80. Human is a kind of midway creature, reflecting God into the world, and reflecting the world back to God.

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#81. our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

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#82. Genesis 1 ... was designed to reflect God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship.

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#83. Life after death, it seems, can be a serious distraction not only from the ultimate life after life after death, but also from life before death.

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#84. 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.

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#85. Worship is humble and glad, worship forgets itself in remembering God; worship celebrates the truth as God's truth, not its own.

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#86. 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.

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#87. As Bob Dylan once said, "'I am the Lord thy God' is a fine saying, as long as it's the right person who's saying it.

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#88. This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers - and Jesus himself - understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

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#89. The Christian is prepared to say, 'I don't like the sound of this, ... but if this is what it really means, I'm going to have to pray for grace and strength to get that into my heart and be shaped by it.'

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#90. People who believe that Jesus is already Lord and that he will appear again as judge of the world are called and equipped (to put it mildly) to think and act quite differently in the world from those who don't.

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#91. The point is that the resurrection, if it had occurred, would undermine not only the Enlightenment's vision of a split world but also the Enlightenment's self-congratulatory dream of world history reaching its destiny in our own day and our own systems.

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#92. Part of John's meaning of the cross, then, is that it is not only what happens, purely pragmatically, when God's kingdom challenges Caesar's kingdom. It is also what has to happen if God's kingdom, which makes its way (as Jesus insists) by nonviolence rather than by violence, is to win the day.

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#93. Never before have so many people tripped over one another in their eagerness to get rich and thereby impaled themselves on the consequences of their own greed. The greatest irony of it all is that it's done in the name of contentment

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#94. The Psalter forms the great epic poem of the creator and covenant God who will at the last visit and redeem his people and, with them, his whole creation.

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#95. Whatever else the ancient Israelites believed about their God, he was not a tame God.

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#96. The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.

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#97. The Gospel is not meant to make people odd or less than fully human; it is mean to renew them in their genuine, image-bearing humanness.

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#98. 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,

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#99. The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise. "I will sing praise to my God while I have being." The glory of God, said the theologian Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive.

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#100. God's kingdom is coming in and through the work of Jesus, not by taking people away from this world but by transforming things within this world, bringing the sphere of earth into the presence, and under the rule, of heaven itself.

N. T. Wright