N. T. Wright quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by N. T. Wright

N. T. Wright Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from N. T. Wright on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

True worship doesn't keep looking at its watch.

Justice and beauty are central to God's new world and should be central to our work. Together they frame the good news of Jesus.

(When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.)

To pray 'your kingdom come' at Jesus' bidding meant to align oneself with his kingdom movement.

Death is the ultimate weapon of the tyrant; resurrection does not make a covenant with death, it overthrows it.

The cross is the surest, truest and deepest window on the very heart and character of the living and loving God.

Hope comes as a surprise, at several levels at once.

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

To get overprotective about particular readings of the Bible is always in danger of idolatry.

There were no other groups in the ancient world going around claiming to be the human race.

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

Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.

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

First-hand acquaintance with the actual texts is always the best way.

But the point about spiritual fruit is that, however healthy the tree, it has to be looked after.

Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.

How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom!

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.

The day the church can no longer say, "We must obey God rather than human beings" (Acts 5:29), it ceases to be the church.

I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.

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

Within orthodoxy, there is always a danger of faith collapsing into fear.

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

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

Resurrection, by contrast, has always gone with a strong view of God's justice and of God as the good creator.

Love is not just tolerance. It's not just distant appreciation. It's a warm sense of, 'I am enjoying the fact that you are you.'

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

All human governments are intended by God to do justice and mercy - to look after, in particular, the needs of the poor and disadvantaged.

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

If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.

When we sing, the sound made even by small-scale earthbound creatures such as us rings around the rafters that we cannot otherwise reach.

everyone who wants to live a godly life in King Jesus will be persecuted,

God's creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.

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.

The kingdom that Jesus preached and lived was all about a glorious, uproarious, absurd generosity.

All Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.

I received mercy, because in my unbelief I didn't know what I was doing.

The future goal is the thing which produces character in the present.

We applaud patience, but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.

We've had enough of pragmatists and self-seeking risk-takers. We need people of character.

[Arguments about God are] like pointing a flashlight toward the sky to see if the sun is shining.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

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.

Instead of "thinking God's thoughts after him," science was now studying the world as though God didn't exist.

You can't reconcile being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on the death penalty.

Someone who is determinedly trying to show God how good he or she is is likely to become an insufferable prig.

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

How would you describe a mature person?

Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.

When Jesus's followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn't tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.

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

But the demonstration of the power of Jesus' name took place, not in the Temple, but outside the gate. God is on the move, not confined

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

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

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

... spirituality is a private hobby, an upmarket version of daydreaming for those who like that kind of thing.

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.

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

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

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

Tolerance is a cheap, low-grade parody of love. Tolerance is not a great virtue to aspire to. Love is much tougher and harder.

Without God's Spirit, there is nothing we can do that will count for God's kingdom. Without God's Spirit, the church simply can't be the church.

So instead of suggesting that we could escape the earth to go to heaven, Jesus's good news was about heaven coming to earth.

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

The Biblical vision is not so much concerned with life after death but about life after life after death.

Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God's saving, sovereign kingdom ...

The crucifixion was the shocking answer to the prayer that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

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.

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.

By all means write new songs. Each generation must do that. But to neglect the church's original hymnbook is, to put it bluntly, crazy

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

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.

The point [of the gospels] is not whether Jesus is God, but what God is doing in and through Jesus. What is this embodied God up to?

Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

People often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.

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

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.

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.

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.

Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God's new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.

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

The church's task in the world is to model genuine humanness as a sign and an invitation to those around.

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

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.

The wrong questions have been asked, by "liberals" and "radicals," by "conservatives" and "orthodox" alike.

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

Heard in full sound, the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy, and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.

If the Bible is not simply "revelation," neither is it simply a devotional aid, even the primary devotional aid.

The more oppressed a group perceives itself to be, the more it will want to calculate when liberation will dawn.

Heaven is important, but its not the end of the world

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

14And the Word became flesh, and lived among us. We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father's only son, full of grace and truth.

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

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

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.

The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.

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