Quotes from N. T. Wright

True worship is open to God, adoring God, waiting for God, trusting God even in the dark.

The closer you get to the truth, the clearer becomes the beauty, and the more you will find worship welling up within you. That's why theology and worship belong together.

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.'

I have met many Roman Catholic theologians who will emphasize as much as any good Protestant preacher that everything comes from the love and grace of God.

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

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.

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

As we are set free by that love from our own pride and fear, our own greed and arrogance, so we are free in our turn to be agents of reconciliation and hope, or healing and love.

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

I feel about John's gospel like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn't claim to understand her.

A 'conservative believer' must be someone who believes that Jesus was truly human as well as truly divine.

It's very easy for a church just to slide along from week to week, taking it for granted that we do our services like this and that, and we celebrate the sacraments like this and that.

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 resurrection gives you a sense of what God wants to do for the whole world.

If you don't have properly constituted civic authorities you will encourage vigilantism and solo efforts at retributive justice - which is anarchy, and God doesn't want his world to be anarchic.

Death is a monster; death is horrible.

Most of the things that really matter require faith. 'How do I know that my wife loves me?' 'How do I know that Mozart's 'Jupiter Symphony' is sublime and beautiful?' There are all sorts of things which come at a more lowly level than that - 'How do I know that two plus two equals four?' There are different layers, different types of knowing.

Of course there are people who think of 'heaven' as a kind of pie-in-the-sky dream of an afterlife to make the thought of dying less awful. No doubt that's a problem as old as the human race.

The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.

One of the things I find depressing about some of the upper echelons of Anglicanism on both sides of the Atlantic is that it's sort of taken for granted that we all basically know what's in the Bible, and so we just glance at a few verses for devotional purposes and then get on to the real business.

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.

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

But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

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.